Name: The Worst Nobel Prize Ever Awarded
Uploaded: 2017-11-15T09:37:29.000Z
Duration: 9 min 26 s
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And I don’t mean all the math that’s involved.

Or the fact that you can do an experiment
a dozen times and not get the same results

Like, we’ve told you before about Fritz
Haber, the chemist who developed the technology

that made fertilizer possible, and helped
feed millions of people.

Except he didn’t use his discovery for that.

In a similar way, most of the innovations
that make all of modern space flight possible

were developed to make ballistic missiles
for Nazis.

Now, when you think about it, the science
in these cases was totally benign -- neither

But sometimes, the things people learn from
scientific endeavor can lead them to conclusions,

and applications, that turn out to be just
… well, just wrong.

There are few better examples of this than
the work of Portuguese physician Antonio Egas

Moniz pioneered a surgical procedure that,
to his peers, was remarkably effective at

It came to be adopted by neuroscientists,
surgeons, and psychiatrists around the world,

But it soon proved to be, at its best, irreversibly
destructive, and at its worst, inhumane.

And yet Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Medicine for it.

It’s quite possibly the most regrettable
Nobel Prize ever awarded.

Because Moniz was given the Prize for developing
the lobotomy.

The story begins with John Fulton, a Yale
neuroscientist, in 1935.

Fulton had spent the past five years cutting
out sections of chimpanzees’ brains and

studying how that affected their behavior.

He was mostly working with the cerebral cortex,
the outer layer of the cerebrum, which is

And each lobe is responsible for a different
set of cognitive functions.

The temporal lobe, for example, is located
on the bottom of the brain and is associated

And the frontal lobe, at the front of the
brain, is the home of our personality.

It’s responsible for our higher reasoning,
our emotions, motor skills, and attention

In 1935, scientists like Fulton were just
beginning to understand how each of these

But most of their knowledge on the frontal
lobe came from just a few studies, or records

of brain injuries, like the case of a man
named Phineas Gage.

Gage was working on a railroad in 1848 when
an accidental explosion lodged a railroad

The spike stabbed right through his frontal
lobe.

Amazingly, Gage survived, and his memory was
still in tact, but his personality was…

He became kind of mean and aggressive, because
the part of his frontal lobe that was damaged

-- his orbitofrontal cortex -- was the part
that’s responsible for emotions.

And Fulton found that his results were similar,
when he removed the orbitofrontal cortex from

He performed this procedure on two chimps
named Becky and Lucy.

And they quickly began exhibiting inappropriate
behavior - defecating on the floor, throwing

temper tantrums, generally just acting out
of control.

However... when Fulton removed their entire
frontal lobe, they became more docile, relaxed,

Fulton presented his findings at the second
annual international neurological conference

And in attendance was Antonio Egas Moniz.

Now, in some ways, Moniz was a true renaissance
man.

He was a medical professor who served as the
Ambassador to Spain during World War One.

He was a successful legislator who wrote a
series of popular books on human sexuality.

And he was a flamboyant socialite who threw
lavish parties and designed his wife’s evening

He was driven, passionate, confident, and
intelligent.

In fact, by the time he had met Fulton in
London, Moniz had already almost won the Nobel

Prize, for developing one of the most important
innovations in neurosurgery at the time.

Back in 1925, he had wanted to figure out
a noninvasive way to diagnose tumors in the

So he devised a concept called cerebral angiography,
in which a solution of sodium iodide was injected

into the carotid artery, in a patient’s
neck.

The solution would then flow into the brain.

Since sodium iodine can’t be penetrated
by most kinds of electromagnetic radiation,

it rendered blood vessels opaque when viewed
in an x-ray.

And this allowed doctors to find problems
in the brain’s blood vessels, caused by

Moniz’s technique was a huge breakthrough
in brain imaging, and it laid the foundation

for methods we still use today to diagnose
conditions like aneurysms.

Moniz was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize,
but was thwarted, some historians say, by

But when Moniz saw Fulton’s presentation
on his chimp research, he became newly inspired.

Because, in addition to his work on brain-imaging,
Moniz had spent years working with severely

depressed, anxious and schizophrenic patients.

And he had developed a theory -- not based
on any empirical data -- that mental illness

was caused by malfunctioning synapses, or
connections between brain cells, in the frontal

He believed it was these bad connections firing
over and over again that led to obsessive

thought patterns that tormented many of his
patients.

However, Moniz had no way of identifying which
individual synapses were supposedly malfunctioning.

So he proposed a procedure, based on Fulton’s
work, to destroy the nerve fibers -- also

known as the white matter -- that connects
the frontal lobe to the thalamus, the structure

deep in the brain that receives and relays
sensory signals.

By severing that connection, Moniz believed
he could cut off the frontal lobe, and its

broken synapses, from the rest of the brain,
rendering it useless.

Four months after the London conference, Moniz
attempted this operation on a human for the

He didn’t perform it himself, because his
hands were deformed with gout.

Instead, he directed a lab assistant to drill
two holes into the skull of a 60-year-old

former prostitute suffering from psychosis.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The Worst Nobel Prize Ever Awarded

anxiety

cognitive

essentially

mental