Nobel disease

Nikolaas Tinbergen with his Nobel medal

“”The ideal audience would be Nobel Prize winners…. They often have an ego with them that says, ‘I am really smart so I can't be fooled.’ No one is easier to fool.

—Ricky Jay, stage magician

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Nobel disease, also known as nobelitis, is a phenomenon where a Nobel Prize-winning scientist endorses or performs "research" in pseudoscientific areas in their later years, generally (though not always) after having won the esteemed prize for some legitimate scientific achievement.

What makes the term special is the fact that you'd think Nobel laureates (of all people) would be the most resistant to crankery. On the contrary, however, the Nobel disease underscores the fact that human beings simply aren't "immune" to falling for crank ideas — accomplished scientists included.

A meager upside to all this is that at least the existence of the Nobel disease cancels out the oft-repeated argument from authority:

“”If a Nobel prize-winning scientist supports X, it must be true!

Science relies on the scientific method and institutions to discover what is true or false, rather than the authority of any individual. This is how scientific journals avoid publishing crankery, even if it is coming from a Nobel laureate.

Possible causes

“”Being a Nobel laureate is a license to be an expert in lots of things as long as you do your homework.

—Kary Mullis

Nobel Prizes are awarded to scientists who help make a great discovery, not for being good role models. Even if the Nobel institutes required winners to be good role models, there would be nothing to stop them from going off the rails after they won.

As a comparison, many other awards are claimed to be followed by a career decline or other misfortune, often called a "curse": the Oscars (both careerwise and in personal life), best new artist Grammy, English Premier League Manager of the Month, the Mercury Music Prize, and even the Nobel Prize for Literature.

One explanation for this is regression to the mean. These awards are typically given out to people because they reached the high point of their career. Where does someone go once they reach the high point? Downhill, of course. Furthermore, if someone is universally hailed as "right" or "a genius", it may bolster their own confirmation bias at the expense of skepticism, discourage others from likewise questioning them, and encourage them to comment on topics they don't actually know anything about.

It's not clear whether age is a factor. In the past, it was noticeable that scientists tended to make great discoveries before the age of 40, especially in some fields like quantum physics. Younger scientists sometimes had the edge because they were less stuck in the existing ways of thinking. Nowadays, the average Nobel laureate makes their discovery at the age of 48. Nobel Prizes are however often awarded to scientists decades after the discovery or invention that earned them the prize (in no small part because of some embarrassing instances of Nobel awards for discoveries that turned out to be false), which increases the chances of senility by the time the prize is awarded.

This actually highlights another possible cause: the one thing that scientists who make great discoveries have in common with the promoters of woo is that both are willing to go against the existing ways of thinking. That being said, there is no evidence that Nobel laureates are more likely to support pseudoscience, but the list of those who have is surprisingly long.

(In)famous victims of disease

• Pierre Curie (Physics, 1903) — His support for psychic medium Eusapia Palladino.
• Marie Curie (Physics, 1903 and Chemistry, 1911) — Her support for Eusapia Palladino (though less so than Pierre, see above).
• John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh (Physics, 1904) — Paranormal, ghosts
• Philipp Lenard (Physics, 1905) — Deutsche Physik
• Joseph Thomson (Physics, 1906) — Psychic, dowsing and paranormal
• Alexis Carrel (Physiology or Medicine, 1912) — eugenics and Nazi racial theories.
• Charles Richet (Physiology or Medicine, 1913) — ESP, paranormal, dowsing, ghosts
• Albert Einstein (Physics, 1921) — Endorsed a psychic in 1932.
• Erwin Schrödinger (Physics, 1933) — Quantum mysticism and global consciousness and cruelty to cats
• Otto Stern (Physics, 1943) — Psychokinesis and Pauli effect
• Ernst Boris Chain (Physiology or Medicine, 1945) — Evolution denial
• Wolfgang Pauli (Physics, 1945) — Pauli effect, psychokinesis and paranormal
• Hideki Yukawa (Physics, 1949) — Intuition and mysticism superior to logic and reason, anti-science and Taoist relativism
• Linus Pauling (Chemistry, 1954, and Peace, 1962) — Vitamin C quackery/orthomolecular medicine
• William Shockley (Physics, 1956) — Racialism and eugenics
• James Watson (Physiology or Medicine, 1962) — Promoter of racialism
• Eugene Wigner (Physics, 1963) — Quantum mysticism^{[citation needed]}
• John Eccles (Physiology or Medicine, 1963) — Quantum consciousness
• Julian Schwinger (Physics, 1965) — Pushed cold fusion as late as 1991.
• Alfred Kastler (Physics, 1966) — Paranormal
• Hannes Alfvén (Physics, 1970) — Plasma cosmology
• Ivar Giaever (Physics, 1973) — Global warming denial
• Brian Josephson (Physics, 1973) — Psychic and paranormal phenomena. Cold fusion. Water memory and homeopathy.
• Nikolaas Tinbergen (Physiology or Medicine, 1973) — Crank theories of autism
• Kary Mullis (Chemistry, 1993) — Generally barking mad. AIDS denial, alien abduction, Aliensdidit, astrology, astral projection, conspiracy theories, cosmic raccoons, global warming denial, ozone denial. Possibly related to his heavy use of LSD.
• Walter Gilbert (Chemistry, 1980) — AIDS denial. Although there are claims he is no longer skeptical of the claim HIV causes AIDS, the source for that seems to be a message board post that no longer exists.
• Richard Smalley (Chemistry, 1996) — Creationism, Intelligent Design and evolution denial
• Louis J. Ignarro (Physiology or Medicine, 1998) — Herbalife
• Roger Penrose (Physics 2020) — quantum consciousness
• Martin Evans (Physiology or Medicine, 2007) stem cell quackery
• Luc Montagnier (Physiology or Medicine, 2008) — Homeopathy, water memory, autism quackery, AIDS cured by nutrition and vaccine hysteria
• Michael Levitt (Chemistry, 2013) — said that COVID was "exactly as dangerous as flu". He is a signatory to the pseudoscientific Great Barrington Declaration that opposes non-pharmaceutical interventions to COVID.
• John F. Clauser (Physics, 2022) – rapid-onset Nobel disease in 2023, self-admitted climate change denier in 2023 (his Nobel prize was for quantum mechanics, unrelated to climate forecasting)

Inverted Nobel disease

Here, we show a picture of Tu Youyou to you.

See also: stopped clock

In a more bizarre case, Tu Youyou received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of artemisinin, a drug used to treat malaria and that is saving millions of lives. She discovered this while testing thousands of different herbs that were in her field of study: Traditional Chinese Medicine. Tu Youyou tested various herbal remedies and found another important drug, and for that we are thankful. Science works.

If the Scientific Method had not been developed yet, many parts of TCM would be considered proto-science rather than pseudoscience. Shamans, medicine men, cunning men, witch doctors, and the likes would often perceive an apparent correlation between administration of herb or practice X with the outcome of ailment Y, and would pass these hypotheses down through the generations.

Oftentimes, no causation was actually present, of course, and a lot of superstitions were formed in this manner, but without things like rapid communication, peer review, an understanding of cognitive biases, or access to well-equipped laboratories, any better form of acquiring knowledge was simply unavailable. Then when society did reach a point where a city could afford the resources for the labs, many early scientists began testing various herbal remedies that had been passed down from the shamans. What worked was carefully recorded and kept, such as aspirin from willow bark tea, while what didn't was discarded as proven ineffective stays in use to this day in the realm of alternative medicine. Many have not been tested, or have been tested in studies without sufficient controls or sample size. Such results are disregarded as statistically insignificant and disregarded on the assumption of the negative until further data is available.

See also

• Stopped clock
• Inverse stopped clock
• Engineers and woo
• Ultracrepidarian
• Science woo
• Dunning-Kruger effect
• Igon Value Problem
• Fun:Sudden Moron Syndrome
• Aung San Suu Kyi — the Nobel Peace Prize recipient who has denied that an ethnic cleansing occurred under her de facto leadership

External links

• The Nobel Disease, The Skeptic's Dictionary
• See the Wikipedia article on Nobel disease.
• See the Wikipedia article on Nobel Prize effect.