The Right Chemistry: There are skeletons in the Nobel Prize closet

Montreal Gazette

21 hours ago

Carleton Gajdusek was only five years old in 1928 when he and his entomologist aunt wandered through the woods overturning rocks, looking for insects. Then, they observed in petri dishes how some insects succumbed to insecticides while others were unaffected. That's all it took for Carleton to be bitten by the science bug.
As a boy, he read voraciously and was so taken by Paul de Kruif's 1926 Microbe Hunters that he stencilled the names of the scientists in the book on the steps leading to the chemistry lab he had set up in the family's attic. Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Élie Metchnikoff and Paul Ehrlich got steps, but the last step was left blank for himself. Like his heroes, Carleton was going to become a microbe hunter and earn his own step. He did that in 1976, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of a novel type of infectious agent that was causing a terrible ailment among the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea.
Known as 'kuru' in the language of the Fore, meaning 'shaking,' the disease starts with tremors and progresses to total incapacitation and then death within months. Gajdusek, who had obtained a medical degree from Harvard and further trained under Nobel laureates Linus Pauling, John Enders and Frank Macfarlane Burnet, believed that kuru was transmitted by a ritualistic practice followed by the Fore. As a form of respect and mourning, family members consumed the brains of deceased relatives.
Gajdusek proved that this was the mode of transmission by drilling holes in the skull of chimps and inserting mashed tissue from the brains of kuru victims into their cerebellum, the part of the brain that coordinates voluntary movement. The chimps developed symptoms of kuru. Gajdusek was unable to isolate an infectious agent but theorized that it was 'unconventional virus.' That turned out to be incorrect. In 1997, Stanley Prusiner received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of a novel type of infectious agent, a misfolded protein he called a 'prion' that triggers normal proteins in the brain to fold abnormally. This turned out to be the cause of mad cow disease as well as kuru.
The Nobel Prize is the most significant recognition of a scientist's work, but it also shines a spotlight that follows the recipient for the rest of their life. Such scrutiny can sometimes taint the awardee's reputation, as is the case with Gajdusek.
Many of his research trips took him to the South Pacific, where he encountered impoverished children who had no opportunity for traditional education. In what seemed to be a benevolent and charitable act, he brought 56 mostly male children back with him to the U.S. and gave them the opportunity to go to high school and college. Events took a dramatic turn in 1996 when one of his adopted children accused him of sexual abuse. This led to an investigation that unveiled incriminating entries in his diary and resulted in a charge of child molestation. Subsequent to a plea bargain, he served about 12 months in jail, after which he left the U.S. and spent the rest of his years in Europe as a visiting scientist in a number of research institutes.
Gajdusek is not the only Nobel winner with a blemished reputation. Fritz Haber was awarded the 1918 prize in chemistry for one of the most important discoveries in the annals of science, the synthesis of ammonia. Haber used a catalyst to react nitrogen, a gas that makes up 80 per cent of air, with hydrogen that was available from the reaction of natural gas with steam. The ammonia produced was reacted with nitric acid to form ammonium nitrate, an excellent fertilizer. This triggered the 'green revolution' that greatly decreased world hunger by increasing crop yields.
Haber was widely celebrated as the man who 'made bread out of air.' But that was not all Haber made. As a patriotic German, during the First World War he developed a program to produce chlorine gas on a large scale as a chemical weapon. Not only did he develop the program, he supervised the release of the gas at the battle of Ypres in Belgium in 1915 that killed more than a thousand French and Algerian troops, earning him the title 'the father of chemical warfare.'
Egas Moniz was a Portuguese neurologist who in 1949 was awarded the Nobel for 'his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses.' Later renamed 'lobotomy,' this surgical procedure severed the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain with the aim of treating such severe mental illnesses as schizophrenia and depression.
Before experimenting with lobotomy, Moniz had established a reputation as an inventor by having devised 'cerebral angiography,' a procedure by which sodium iodide is injected into the carotid artery and travels to the brain. Since sodium iodide is opaque to X-rays, blood vessels in the brain can be visualized and tumours and aneurisms located. In 1935, he attended a conference where Yale neuroscientist John Fulton described an experiment in which he had removed the frontal cortex from the brains of chimps; they became docile and lost all aggressiveness. Moniz had been working with patients whose mental disease manifested as violent behaviour, so he thought that what works in chimps can work in humans as well.
After performing 19 lobotomies, he reported that symptoms of schizophrenia and depression abated. Inspired by Moniz's results, American neuroscientist Walter Freeman also took up the 'leucotome,' a tool resembling an icepick that could be inserted through the eye socket to severe connections in the frontal lobe. He performed 3,500 lobotomies with an estimated 490 deaths as a direct result.
One of his patients was President John F. Kennedy's sister Rosemary, who was institutionalized as a result. It soon became clear that even when aggressive behaviour subsided, the side effects of the procedure were intolerable. Patients suffered personality changes, cognitive impairment, infections and seizures. There has been much criticism of Moniz's Nobel Prize because by 1949, it was already apparent that the claims of efficacy were exaggerated and side effects minimized.
A number of other Nobel laureates have been criticized for offering disturbing opinions on subjects outside their area of expertise. William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, and James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, both expressed racist views and gave credence to eugenics. Kary Mullis, who received the 1993 Nobel in Chemistry for the invention of the polymerase chain reaction, an invaluable tool for genetic testing, did not think that humans play a role in climate change and was skeptical about AIDS being caused by a virus. He also described a meeting with a fluorescent racoon that he thought could have been an extraterrestrial alien.
Nobel laureates may bask in the spotlight, but that spotlight can sometimes illuminate dark corners.