What Is ‘Nobel Prize Disease’ That Can Affect The Brightest Minds

It is often called “Nobel disease”, “Nobel effect”, “Nobel syndrome” and even “Nobelitis”.

Winning the prestigious award is not a prerequisite for suffering from the condition, but the long list of Swedish Academy winners who have succumbed to it is nothing short of impressive.

From Pierre Curie (Physics, 1903) to Santiago Ramón y Cajal (Medicine, 1906), including Richard Smalley (Chemistry, 1996) and Luc Montagnier (Medicine, 2008), to name just a few.

Far from being an official diagnosis, the term is used ironically to express the fact that someone highly intelligent and capable in one area of ​​knowledge will not necessarily perform as well in another.

“You wouldn’t expect very smart people to do stupid things. But the fact that there are Nobel Prize-winning scientists who are also known for endorsing strange ideas and harboring erroneous beliefs makes it clear that there is a disconnect between science or scientific success and rationality,” argues Sebastian Dieguez, researcher in neuroscience at the Laboratory of Cognitive and Neurological Sciences at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, to BBC News Mundo, the BBC’s Spanish-language news service.

The surprising number of Nobel Prize winners who embrace theories that border on the absurd, adds Shauna Bowes, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Emory University, in the United States, shows that “critical thinking is linked to a specific area of ​​knowledge, and not to the knowledge in general”.

That is, someone (not necessarily a Nobel laureate) can have a great knowledge of biology, history, psychology or whatever, but that does not mean that he will apply critical thinking when it comes to astrophysics or other topics outside his reach. .

When it comes to subjects outside our domain, we tend to resort to prejudices or mental shortcuts to make decisions or make sense of the world, and we don’t subject these concepts to rigorous evaluation (as we would with topics that are familiar to us).

“Actually, applying the critical thinking engine takes a lot more effort and awareness than we’re probably comfortable admitting,” says Bowes.

In short: intelligence does not immunize us against crazy ideas.

Furthermore, adds Bowes, “a lot of research shows that critical thinking is quite apart from intelligence.”

“While intelligence is a skill that helps us solve problems and acquire information, critical thinking is about what we do with that information and the meaning we attach to it.”

“Intelligence makes it more likely that we can think critically, but it certainly doesn’t guarantee that we will be good critical thinkers, especially when emotions and intuition come into play.”

The ‘Immortals’ Award

Although we can all fall into the trap of trying to casually discuss topics that are beyond our understanding, Eleftherios Diamandis, professor and head of clinical biochemistry at the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes that the Nobel case is special, and limits the “nobelite” exclusively to the award.

“The Nobel is very different from any other prize a scientist can win. It is a unique distinction that makes its winner ‘immortal’. Nobody will remember you if you won a grand prize elsewhere, but the whole world will remember of you if you are a Nobel Prize winner,” he points out.

“This recognition means that laureates are treated differently, as if they were celebrities, and the danger is that some, but not all, believe that the medal gives them the opportunity to carry out projects and activities with which they are not familiar. .”

“A classic example is Frederick Banting, who discovered insulin in the early 1900s. As soon as he cured some patients with diabetes, he thought he could cure cancer.”

“He tried, but since he knew so little about the subject, of course he couldn’t,” he says.

For Diamandis, nobelitis is a narcissistic behavior (similar to hubris or hubris syndrome, a concept that describes extreme pride, arrogance and excessive confidence associated with power) assumed by some of the winners, who believe they have superhuman powers and the ability to solve any problem that comes your way.

Some of the Nobel laureates with absurd ideas

Linus Pauling (1901-1994)

An American scientist who won two Nobel Prizes (Chemistry, in 1954; Paz, in 1962), he was a pioneer of modern chemistry with his discoveries about the nature of chemical bonds and the molecular structure of matter, applying quantum mechanics.

In parallel, Pauling even advocated that high doses of vitamin C could be effective in curing diseases such as cancer and the common flu. His studies contained multiple errors, and the effectiveness of vitamin C in treating these diseases has never been proven.

James Watson (1928-present)

An American scientist, he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962 (which he shared with Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick) for his discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, considered a watershed in modern science.

Watson endorses racist pseudoscientific ideas, which argue, for example, that blacks are less intelligent than whites — and that differences in IQ are due to genetic factors.

The biologist has also stated that exposure to sunlight in regions close to the Equator increases sexual desire, and that fat people are less ambitious.

Luc Montagnier (1932-2022)

French virologist Luc Montagnier received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 for his successful isolation of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) for the first time.

A year after being awarded the prize, he maintained, without any proof, that the water kept the memory of electromagnetic waves supposedly emitted by the DNA of viruses and bacteria.

He also recommended the ingestion of fermented papaya against Parkinson’s disease and criticized vaccines against Covid-19, which he unfoundedly accused of being the cause of the emergence of new variants of the virus.

Ivar Giaever (1929-present)

An American physicist of Norwegian origin, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson in 1973, for “their discoveries concerning tunneling phenomena in solids”.

On several occasions, the researcher expressed his skepticism about global warming, which he said did not pose a problem – and described it as a “new religion”.

On the other hand, Diamandis points out that the Nobel is usually awarded several decades after the researcher has made his discovery, which is not exactly when his cognitive abilities are at their peak, an observation with which Dieguez agrees.

“The average age of Nobel Prize winners is around 70 years old. The brightest years of these people have already passed”, says the neuroscientist, who also questions the view of the award as a sign of intelligence or genius.

“You might discover something because you were lucky, because you were the right person in the right place.”

“There has also been a growing number of criticisms of the Nobel, at least in the scientific field, because it rewards the individual, and we know that science is generally a social process”, says Dieguez.

The biggest problem, he argues, is that some of these people with deep knowledge in a particular area that most of us don’t understand have become an important voice in the public debate.

“But the fact that you have made an important discovery in a very specific topic does not give you the right to think that you have better ideas than others in other areas”, concludes Dieguez.

Humility, even now, remains one of the best medicines.

This text was originally published here.