Nobel Prize Oversight
The Medical Tribune,
January 2, 1974 had a full page spread. The headline said “Radioimmunoassay’s
Impact on Medicine Revolutionary.” I read it to Lapius. For once he
showed an immediate interest.
“Read on, Harry,” Lapius
commanded.
I read on as
follows. “The word radioimmunoassay is not defined in medical
dictionaries (c. 1968) still on active duty, and has also been skipped by
Webster’s Third. Yet, in the nearly two decades since two New York
Investigators discovered the principle of radioimmunoassay (RIA) this technique
has had tremendous impact on both clinical medicine and basic research.
Its uses range from the diagnosis of digitalis intoxication to the screening of
unsuspected drug abusers, and the list of applications is expanding.
“The late Dr. Soloman A.
Berson, together with Rosalyn S. Yalow, PhD., performed the landmark research
leading to RIA at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital and Mount Sinai
School of Medicine. Their personal evaluation of what the technique can
accomplish was described succinctly in a lecture they had prepared just before
Dr. Berson’s death last year.
“’In brief,’ they summed
up ‘RIA or other competitive radioassays are likely to be adapted for the
measurement of any substance of interest that is difficult to measure by other
means.’”
Lapius waved his arm at
me, a substantive signal to shut up immediately. The great man wanted to
speak. I stopped reading, but he only sighed.
“That sigh was meant to
convey a message, I presume?” I asked.
“Yes it was,
Harry. The sigh was a lament.”
I was somewhat miffed
that all that reading had evoked naught but a sigh. “The article doesn’t
seem to be sad. What’s to sigh about?” I asked.
Lapius ignored the
question. “Do you realize, Harry, that the technique of Berson and Yalow
enables us to measure substances down to a trillionth of a gram. They
have indeed revolutionized medicine. They should receive the Nobel Prize
for that work. Up until their investigations we could only surmised at
gross hormone interactions. Now they can be proved, measured, and
evaluated.”
“And that’s what the
sigh was about,” Lapius continued. “Solly died last year, alone, while
attending a medical meeting at Atlantic City.”
“You know him?”
“Of course. But
the Nobel-Committee has a policy that it has adhered to throughout the years
with only one exception, never awarding the prize posthumously.”
“Who was the exception?”
“There were rumors that
Berson was to be nominated but that he stipulated that unless Yalow was
included, he would turn it
down.”
“But who was the
exception?” I asked.
“It’s not important,”
Lapius said impatiently. “However, there is now a possibility that Yalow
and Berson as a team will receive the prize, because Yalow is still alive, and
can accept it in behalf of Solly.”
“Who received the prize
posthumously?”
“What difference does it
make? How well I remember Berson. He reminded me of John
Garfield. He crackled and shot sparks like a high voltage line. I
knew him before he got into medical school, which was a long time because it
took him four years after graduating college to get in. He was rejected
by 30 medical schools.”
“Simon, never mind that,
who was awarded ---?”
“Yes 30 medical schools
rejected him. I hope he receives the Noble Prize for that alone, so that
their inglorious decision can be emblazoned in brass in their hallowed
halls. Berson and an entire generation of Bersons were refused entry to
medical school because they were Jews. In those days there was a lot of
racism in the school system.
“There was a saying that
Jews were aggressive, Italians lazy, Irish ambitious, and thus, with these
undesirable characteristics, shouldn’t be given first choice to medical
school.”
“Well, that’s a thing of
the past now, Simon.”
“Not entirely. Now
there is a sort of reverse racism. Schools tend to deny admission to
deserving students to accept instead marginal students from the ghettos.”
“Well, we owe it to
them.”
“Yes. But not to
marginal students. Only to the best. Otherwise the quality of
doctors will deteriorate.”
“But we need more black
doctors.”
“Harry. We need more
doctors. Period. No man should be denied admittance for his
race. No man should be admitted for his race. His credentials alone
are what must count. Actually we should probably follow the lead of many
European Universities. Admit anyone who wants to be a physician into the
first year of medical school, and then graduate those only who have met the
educational standard. This would be fair and eliminate all the nonsense
with respect to admission committees etc. And there would be less risk of
losing a Sol Berson by that practice. Think, Harry. Berson had to
struggle for four years with a fearsome singleness of purpose to thwart the
system that tried to exclude him from medical school. Yet look what a
tremendous contribution he made. No one person, no committee can decide
in advance who will be great. The answer, Harry, is open admission to
medical school.”
“Simon, for goodness
sakes. Tell me, who was awarded the Nobel---.”
“Dag Hammarskjold.” *
Author’s Note:
*The Nobel Prize was for RIA was awarded to Roslyn
Yalow. Correspondence with the Nobel Committee resulted in a copy of Nobel
Foundation Code of Statutes that stated the rule for the award. “Work produced by a person since deceased
shall not be considered for an award ---“. However, in this case the
prize WAS awarded for the work of someone who had died, but his name was excluded.
I expanded on this in the following acddendum:
Nobel Catch
22: Genius Forgotten. Printed Daily
Obesrver June 30, 1980
The
1977 Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Roslyn S. Yalow for work she did
in conjunction with Dr. Soloman Berson in developing the
radio-immune-assay techniques which has revolutionized the science and practice
of medicine. Briefly, this technique enables laboratories to measure all
hormones and other substances in quantities as small as a billionth of a gram
(or 1/30 billionth of an ounce, for those not yet converted to the metric
system).
Until this epochal work of Yalow and Berson, hormones
were roughly quantitated by injecting a sample of blood or serum from a patient
into a laboratory animal and judging its biologic effect by the crudest of
standards, then translating the result into international units. For most
hormones biologic endpoints were not available to do even rough assays. Only
after the RISA technique evolved did scientists appreciate the minute
quantities of the substance that made the endocrine system work.
Unfortunately Dr. Berson died in 1971, and therefore
he became, according to interpretation of the will of Dr. Nobel, ineligible for
the prize. Dr. Yalow in her acceptance speech acknowledged that had Dr. Berson
been alive he would have been right there with her in Sweden sharing the
prize.
In his speech awarding the prize, Professor Rolf Luft
of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, fully described the work of Berson and
Yalow in the opening paragraphs, but towards the end of the dissertation Dr.
Berson’s name gradually faded into the background and the award was made to Dr.
Yalow.
In a fateful way the award does a disservice to
history, because in the genesis of the development of RIA it is impossible to
separate the contributions of Yalow and Berson. The unique intellectual
qualities of each of the doctors dovetailed over a collaborative period of more
than 15 years to produce the phenomenal scientific by which medicine thrives
today. All publications during this period are either Berson-Yalow or
Yalow-Berson. Thus to award the prize only to Dr. Yalow fails to perpetuate the
historical truth of the discovery.
My interest in this event stems from the fact that I
was casually acquainted with Dr. Berson before he entered medical school, and
that Dr. Yalow, prior to receiving the Nobel Prize was gracious enough to
address the Ocean County Medical Society, so I had a chance to meet this
brilliant lady as well.
Distressed that Berson’s name is omitted from Nobel
archives, I wrote the Nobel Committee to point out that the development of RIA
was so monumental that the omission of Berson’s name perpetuated a historical
distortion. I do not recall having received a satisfactory answer.
I thought that perhaps the King of Sweden might be
interested in this unique situation, and having had nothing to do one afternoon,
dropped him a line. He forwarded my letter to the Nobel Committee where it
received prompt attention. The committee stated that it had acted in accordance
with the will of Dr. Alfred Nobel, and sent me a copy of that portion which
alluded to the Nobel Prize.
I had always understood that no Nobel award could be
made to a person who had died, although an exception was of course made in the
case of Dr. Dag Hammerskjold, former Secretary General of the United Nations,
who received the Nobel Peace Prize after he had been killed in an airplane
accident.
The Nobel Committee obviously felt that Nobel’s will
preclude giving the prize to the deceased Berson. Imagine then my surprise to
read that the Code of Statutes for the Nobel Foundation states “Work produced
by a person since deceased shall not be considered for an award ---“.
And there’s
the rub. In awarding the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 1977, the Nobel Committee
did award the prize for the work “of a person since deceased”, since the
scientific contributions of Berson and Yalow are so intertwined as to be
indistinguishable. By awarding the prize to Dr. Yalow the Nobel Committee was
also awarding the Prize for the work of Dr. Berson. Only it forgot to mention
it.
It is a unique situation and the Nobel Committee
should acknowledge the fact that the award of the prize to Dr. Yalow is indeed
official recognition of the work of Dr. Berson also. His name should be on the plaque.