"Nobel Disease:" The Surprising Tendency For Nobel Prizewinners To Develop Whacky – And Sometimes Dangerous – Beliefs

While it is reassuring that even Einstein felt like this, other Nobel Prizewinners haven't responded in the same humble manner to the recognition of their achievements. In fact, there's a popular meme referred to as "Nobel disease" or sometimes "Nobelitis," used to describe the sometimes wacky and unscientific views that Nobel Prizewinners have gone on to develop following their wins.

Alright, tell me who got whacky, I haven't got all day

There's a surprisingly long list of Nobel Prizewinners who have expressed non-scientific or even pseudoscientific beliefs after taking home arguably the biggest accolade in science. And the phenomenon usually coincides with straying away from their field of expertise. 

These include scientists, noted in their field, who went on to develop interests in psychic research, extrasensory perception, and one winner who believed he had been visited by a talking, motorcycling, glowing green raccoon. Which, to be fair, let's not rule out completely.

In one chapter of the book Critical Thinking in Psychology, researchers listed a number of such cases. Some developed mundane and predictably grim pseudoscientific ideas, such as James Watson's widely debunked beliefs regarding race and intelligence, notable for being one of the few things he didn't steal from Rosalind Franklin.

That's depressing, hit me with a fun one

Fortunately, many developed much more "enjoyable" versions of "Nobel disease." Pierre Curie, for instance, won the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of radium and polonium alongside the superior Curie (Marie, you radioactive genius). Afterwards, however, he went on to participate in seances and believed that investigating the paranormal could help us answer questions about magnetism. 

We don't really see how this would work, unless you're conjuring up the spirit of James Clerk Maxwell or Michael Faraday. Even then, we imagine they would be rather confused not to be asked a single question about the other side an instead get hit with a lyric from the Insane Clown Posse. 

Okay, tell me about Joseph Thompson, he's clearly the most fun

Alright alright. Like Curie, Joseph Thomson won the Nobel Prize in physics (his in 1906 for his discovery the electron) and developed a similar interest in psychic phenomena, becoming a member of the Society for Psychical Research for 34 years. 

He actually did show some good old-fashioned scientific skepticism towards some reportedly paranormal phenomena. He visited one medium, for example, who claimed they had a direct line to a ghost who would write answers on a slate, but ONLY IF that slate was under the table.

"He then asked each of us a question which we should like the spirits to answer,"  Thomson wrote. "Myers and Hood asked questions concerning spiritualism, I preferred a question to which I knew the answer, so I asked what county Manchester was in."

"We then sat for, I should think, a quarter of an hour without anything happening. Then he seemed to be seized with convulsions and it was all I could do to hold him up and prevent him from falling off the chair."

"He recovered in a short time, brought the slate from under the table, and on it was written in a sprawling hand with large illformed letters: Manchester." 

"My view is that Eglinton thought there must be some catch in my very simple question and that he knew that some English towns were counties in themselves and supposed, because I had asked the question, that Manchester was one of them."

Thompson deduced that the medium had simply jammed a piece of a slate pencil under the table, and was wiggling around the slate to write on it. 

Weirdly though, Thompson was quite into the idea of short-range, non slate-based telepathy. While he didn't think it had been proven, he also thought it was quite important that we investigate the hell out of it: "It is often asserted that telepathy has been conclusively proved. I cannot agree with this for the case of short range telepathy… This does not mean that it has been shown not to exist," he wrote.

"Compared with other branches of psychical research, little has been done on this short range thought transference between living people, though it was this which first suggested the idea. One reason for this is that this power of thought-reading is exceedingly rare, very much rarer than was at first supposed."

"Another reason is that attention was at first directed to thought transference between the living and the dead, which raises much deeper and more important questions." 

"In my opinion, the investigation of shortrange thought transference is of the highest importance. It is quite possible, indeed very probable, that it may turn out to be of an entirely different character from the kind of thought transference that is supposed to occur in dreams or premonitions."

While not the most scientific interests, we can forgive any man who gave us a model of the atom with such a delightful name as "plum pudding".

Now bring on ectoplasm

Charles Richet, who won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1913, meanwhile, is the man responsible for the word "ectoplasm," which he believed could be expelled from mediums during seances. In reality, any essence being produced is merely a trick by mediums. 

We're getting sidetracked here, but one medium, Helen Duncan, used to swallow a line of cheesecloth and then regurgitate it on demand, sometimes attaching rubber gloves or magazine portraits to it to make it look spookier. A trick, you'd hope, that would not get past someone with a Nobel Prize in medicine.

It's not all fun

Sometimes, as with Watson, the "disease" can be harmful. Richard Smalley, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering a third form of carbon in 1996, went on to argue against evolution, while other laureates have advocated in favor of eugenics, lobotomies, and harmful practices and ideas around autism. 

Then there was Dr Kary Mullis, who won a share of the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Following his win, he expressed skepticism about climate change and the role of HIV in AIDS, as well as belief in the heavily debunked idea of astrology. In addition to this, he was the guy we alluded to earlier, who claimed he once saw a glowing racoon on a bike that talked to him.

"I encountered a glowing green raccoon riding a neon orange motorcycle at my cabin in the woods of northern California around midnight one night in 1985," Mullis reportedly said. "The raccoon proceeded to metamorphose into a singing dolphin at the stroke of midnight."

Why does this happen so often?

So, why do so many Nobel Prizewinners end up with such pseudoscientific beliefs? According to one winner, Paul Nurse, it could partly come down to external pressure from the media and other groups urging Prizewinners to step outside of their area of expertise.

"In the eyes of many people, I had suddenly become a world leading expert on almost everything. This was rather a shock. It is not that I am an overly modest person and I do know something about biology and science more generally, but an expert on everything, assuredly I am not," Nurse explained in a piece for the Independent advising other Prizewinners to stay clear of this path. 

"You will be inundated with requests to comment on a wide range of issues, to sign letters and petitions and to generally lend your name to causes, some noble, other less so," he added. "But do not be tempted to stray too far from your specialist knowledge or from science more generally."

In the book analyzing Prizewinners mentioned near the top of this article, the authors had their own suggestion.

"A number of cognitive errors, including bias blind spot and the senses of omniscience, omnipotence, and invulnerability; personality traits such as narcissism and excessive openness; and the 'guru complex' may predispose highly intelligent individuals to disastrous critical thinking errors," the team wrote, citing, as well as many Prizewinners, Isaac Newton's love of alchemy and strange religious beliefs.

While this is an interesting idea, they point out we do not have any data on whether Nobel Prizewinners are more inclined to such pseudoscientific beliefs. Though interesting that Nobel Prizewinners are not immune to such thinking, don't put off your prizewinning research – it is not a real disease.