Nobel Prize Medicine Quotes

Even gene variants implicated in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s may have benefits: E. S. Lander, “Brave New Genome,” New England Journal of Medicine 373 (2015): 5–8.

The capital ... shall form a fund, the interest of which shall be distributed annually as prizes to those persons who shall have rendered humanity the best services during the past year. ... One-fifth to the person having made the most important discovery or invention in the science of physics, one-fifth to the person who has made the most eminent discovery or improvement in chemistry, one-fifth to the one having made the most important discovery with regard to physiology or medicine, one-fifth to the person who has produced the most distinguished idealistic work of literature, and one-fifth to the person who has worked the most or best for advancing the fraternization of all nations and for abolishing or diminishing the standing armies as well as for the forming or propagation of committees of peace.

And this is the ultimate lesson that our knowledge of the mode of transmission of typhus has taught us: Man carries on his skin a parasite, the louse. Civilization rids him of it. Should man regress, should he allow himself to resemble a primitive beast, the louse begins to multiply again and treats man as he deserves, as a brute beast. This conclusion would have endeared itself to the warm heart of Alfred Nobel. My contribution to it makes me feel less unworthy of the honour which you have conferred upon me in his name.

Defective is an adjective that has long been deemed too freighted for liberal discourse, but the medical terms that have supplanted it—illness, syndrome, condition—can be almost equally pejorative in their discreet way. We often use illness to disparage a way of being, and identity to validate that same way of being. This is a false dichotomy. In physics, the Copenhagen interpretation defines energy/matter as behaving sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle, which suggests that it is both, and posits that it is our human limitation to be unable to see both at the same time. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Paul Dirac identified how light appears to be a particle if we ask a particle-like question, and a wave if we ask a wavelike question. A similar duality obtains in this matter of self. Many conditions are both illness and identity, but we can see one only when we obscure the other. Identity politics refutes the idea of illness, while medicine shortchanges identity. Both are diminished by this narrowness. Physicists gain certain insights from understanding energy as a wave, and other insights from understanding it as a particle, and use quantum mechanics to reconcile the information they have gleaned. Similarly, we have to examine illness and identity, understand that observation will usually happen in one domain or the other, and come up with a syncretic mechanics. We need a vocabulary in which the two concepts are not opposites, but compatible aspects of a condition. The problem is to change how we assess the value of individuals and of lives, to reach for a more ecumenical take on healthy. Ludwig Wittgenstein said, ―All I know is what I have words for.‖ The absence of words is the absence of intimacy; these experiences are starved for language.

Women, it was believed, simply didn’t have the mind for science or medicine—in spite of the fact that Marie Curie had just become the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice.

Christians believe, as is reported in the New Testament scriptures, that Jesus of Nazareth healed 10 men with leprosy. It sounds like an astounding feat, but compare that to Jacinto Convit who saved thousands of lives when he developed the vaccine that protects us from it. In 1988, Convit was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his anti-leprosy vaccine. So, while the promise of Jesus’ healing power is a centerpiece of the Christian myth, the demigod’s results leave something to be desired when compared to the rigor of man’s scientific inquiry.

When Kilgore Trout accepted the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979, he declared: “Some people say there is no such thing as progress. The fact that human beings are now the only animals left on Earth, I confess, seems a confusing sort of victory. Those of you familiar with the nature of my earlier published works will understand why I mourned especially when the last beaver died.

If science and God do not mix, there would be no Christian Nobel Prize winners. In fact, between 1901 and 2000 over 60% of Nobel Laureates were Christians. According to 100 Years of Nobel Prizes (2005) by Baruch Aba Shalev, a review of Nobel Prizes awarded between 1901 and 2000, 65.4% of Nobel Prize Laureates, have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference (423 prizes). Overall, Christians have won a total of 78.3% of all the Nobel Prizes in Peace, 72.5% in Chemistry, 65.3% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, 54% in Economics and 49.5% of all Literature awards.

I would not be among you to-night (being awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) but for the mentors, colleagues and students who have guided and aided me throughout my scientific life. I wish I could name them all and tell you their contributions. More, however, than anyone else it was the late Rudolf Schoenheimer, a brilliant scholar and a man of infectious enthusiasm, who introduced me to the wonders of Biochemistry. Ever since, I have been happy to have chosen science as my career, and, to borrow a phrase of Jacques Barzun, have felt that 'Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment'.

A good way to measure the ubiquity of the male perspective masquerading a the human perspective is to check out the Nobel Prizes. The Nobel Prizes are awarded in six categories: literature, medicine, chemistry, peace, physics, and economics. Who we are as a species, what we value, where we expend our energy and our resources, and our priorities, goals, and dreams can be charted through the development of these categories. As of 2018, Nobel Prizes in total have been awarded to 853 men and 51 women. One hundred ten Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded since 1901, and only 14 of those were awarded to women... The world would have been different-and better-if women had had equal say in the development of literature, medicine, chemistry, physics, peace, and economics. Better, not because women are better, but because they are more than half of humanity, representing more than half of what it means to be human. If you can convince me otherwise, you should receive a Nobel Prize." The Greatest Books - pg. 80-81

My father tells a story about Richard Feynman, who’d been dubbed the Great Explainer because of his talent for explaining theoretical physics. When a journalist asked him to describe in three minutes what he’d won the Nobel Prize for, Feynman replied that if he could explain it in three minutes, it wouldn’t be worth a Nobel Prize. Feynman, I think, is making the wider point that an explanation of something by reducing it and simplifying it over and over, until all that’s left is some familiar metaphor that is actually without content, helps no one’s understanding of the thing itself and is only the repetition of a familiar image. Even the basic elements of financial derivatives are mathematical. But quite apart from the mathematical content, the other problem is that to understand derivatives requires, I think, an understanding of other more basic ideas in finance, whether or not they in turn have some mathematical content. It’s accretive, to use Zafar’s language. Perhaps this is not exclusive to finance. As far as I can tell, medicine is just the same, as well as the law.

One of the most powerful tools for discovering structure is ‘X-ray diffraction’ or, because it is always applied to crystals of the substance of interest, ‘X-ray crystallography’. The technique has been a gushing fountain of Nobel prizes, starting with Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays (awarded in 1901, the first physics prize), then William and his son Laurence Bragg in 1915, Peter Debye in 1936, and continuing with Dorothy Hodgkin (1964), and culminating with Maurice Wilkins (but not Rosalind Franklin) in 1962, which provided the foundation of James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s formulation of the double-helix structure of DNA, with all its huge implications for understanding inheritance, tackling disease, and capturing criminals (a prize shared with Wilkins in 1962). If there is one technique that is responsible for blending biology into chemistry, then this is it. Another striking feature of this list is that the prize has been awarded in all three scientific categories: chemistry, physics, and physiology and medicine, such is the range of the technique and the illumination it has brought.

Indians have made some contribution to science in this century; but - with a few notable exceptions - their work has been done abroad. And this is more than a matter of equipment and facilities. It is a cause of concern to the Indian scientific community - which feels itself vulnerable in India - that many of those men who are so daring and original abroad should, when they are lured back to India, collapse into ordinariness and yet remain content, become people who seem unaware of their former worth, and seem to have been brilliant by accident. They have been claimed by the lesser civilization, the lesser idea of dharma and self-fulfillment. In a civilization reduced to its forms, they no longer have to strive intellectually to gain spiritual merit in their own eyes; that same merit is now to be had by religious right behaviour, correctness. India grieved for the scientist Har Gobind Khorana, who, as an American citizen, won a Nobel Prize in medicine for the United States a few years ago. India invited him back and fêted him; but what was most important about him was ignored. 'We could do everything for Khorana,' one of India's best journalists said, 'except do him the honour of discussing his work.' The work, the labour, the assessment of labour: it was expected that somehow that would occur elsewhere, outside India.

Флемінг ніколи не розглядав пеніцилін як антибіотик. Через десять років це зробили Говард Флорі та Ернст Чейн, яких фінансував Фонд Рокфеллера, і вони втілили спостереження Флемінга в перший диво-препарат. Цей засіб був такий дефіцитний і потужний, що під час Другої світової війни лікарі армії США відновлювали його з сечі людей, яких ним лікували, щоб потім використовувати повторно. У 1945 році Флорі, Чейн та Флемінг розділили між собою Нобелівську премію.

The German psychiatrist Hans Berger pioneered electroencephalography (EEG) in his lifelong quest to prove the reality of telepathy. He first recorded the brain waves of a patient in 1924 but, filled with doubt, did not publish his findings until 1929. EEG became the foundational tool of an entire field of medicine, clinical neurophysiology, although Berger was never accorded any significant recognition in Nazi Germany and hanged himself in 1941, despite being nominated several times for the Nobel Prize.

I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation arising to evolution. —George Wald, Chemist and Nobel Prize winner for medicine29

Francis Crick477 was a British molecular biologist and co-discoverer with James Watson478 of the structure of DNA, for which he received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Mr. Crick was a militant atheist, a Christianophobe,479 and in favor of eugenics,480 an idea that he blamed religion for delaying (and on that point, he may have been right). He recognized the impossibility of DNA being produced by chance, and since he considered some intelligent cause necessary for it, he proposed his famous hypothesis of “panspermia,” which came to mean that life on Earth was sown by intelligent extraterrestrials. Yes, you read that correctly, by extraterrestrials.

Intuitive information—unuttered, mind-locked data—does pass from person to person. Energy medicine is largely dependent upon a practitioner getting an image, gut sense, or inner messages that provide diagnostic and treatment insight. Edgar Cayce, a well-known American psychic, was shown to be 43 percent accurate in his intuitive diagnoses in a posthumous analysis made from 150 randomly selected cases.43 Medical doctor C. Norman Shealy tested now well-known intuitive Caroline Myss, who achieved 93 percent diagnostic accuracy when given only a patient’s name and birth date.44 Compare these statistics to those of modern Western medicine. A recent study published by Health Services Research found significant errors in diagnostics in reviewed cases in the 1970s to 1990s, ranging from 80 percent error rates to below 50 percent. Acknowledging that “diagnosis is an expression of probability,” the paper’s authors emphasized the importance of doctor-patient interaction in gathering data as a way to improve these rates.45 A field transfers information through a medium—even to the point that thought can produce a physical effect, thus suggesting that T-fields might even predate, or can at least be causative to, L-fields. One study, for example, showed that accomplished meditators were able to imprint their intentions on electrical devices. After they concentrated on the devices, which were then placed in a room for three months, these devices could create changes in the room, including affecting pH and temperature.46 Thought fields are most often compared to magnetic fields, for there must be an interconnection to generate a thought, such as two people who wish to connect. Following classical physics, the transfer of energy occurs between atoms or molecules in a higher (more excited) energy state and those in a lower energy state; and if both are equal, there can be an even exchange of information. If there really is thought transmission, however, it must be able to occur without any physical touch for it to be “thought” or magnetic in nature versus an aspect of electricity. Besides anecdotal evidence, there is scientific evidence of this possibility. In studying semiconductors, solid materials that have electrical conduction between a conductor and an insulator, noteworthy scientist Albert Szent-Györgyi, who won the Nobel Prize in 1937, discovered that all molecules forming the living matrix are semiconductors. Even more important, he observed that energies can flow through the electromagnetic field without touching each other.47 These ideas would support the theory that while L-fields provide the blueprints for the body, T-fields carry aspects of thought and potentially modify the L-fields, influencing or even overriding the L-field of the body.48

In terms of ESP, Rawls and Davis discovered that the “third eye,” or sixth chakra area of the brain, stimulates inner vision or awareness. Subjects experienced an increase in this ability, as well as peace and calm, by holding a magnet in the left palm or on the back of the right hand. In 1976, Davis and Rawls were nominated for a Nobel Prize in medical physics. In summation, the electrical flow in the body is maintained by certain ions, such as sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. Imbalances in these fundamental materials can cause disease—and can occur because of disease. These imbalances will alter the electrical activity of the body and therefore the actual appearance—shape and form—of the various magnetic or auric fields outside of the body. This might explain the ability of certain “auric readers” to use their psychic skills to perceive deep-seated problems in the body even before medical technology can detect them, as well as the reverse ability to heal the aura and therefore, heal the body. The link between the meridians and the electrical system of the body, as Nordenström proposed, also provides an explanation for healing through the meridians and acupoints. The glial cells act as yet another major player in the body’s microcircuit system, receiving information from the magnetic spectrum inside and outside it, thus adding another dimension to Nordenström’s discoveries. Nordenström used his theories to cure cancer, sending electrical charges into a tumor to shrink it. What did Rawls and Davis discover but one of the primary concepts of healing? There is polarity to every aspect of life. Humans are electrical and magnetic, yin and yang, and health is dependent upon maintaining the appropriate balance of each. Humans are L-fields, acted upon by electricity. And humans are T-fields, acted upon by magnetism. Through the bipolarity that is “L,” or electrical, humans generate life, movement, and activity. Through the bipolarity of our “T,” or magnetic self, we attract what we need and what we can become. Humans are composed of the stuff of thought—and matter. FIGURE 3.6 FORMS OF MAGNETISM In his book A Practical Guide to Vibrational Medicine, Dr. Richard Gerber outlines many forms of magnetism.83 Here is a brief description of each, along with a sample of its effects.