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Bid to strip lobotomy pioneer of Nobel
REUTERS in Avanca
An unsettling rumour is doing the rounds in the dusty town of Avanca.

Egas Moniz, inventor of the lobotomy and Avanca's most famous son, could be stripped of his Nobel prize because of a battle being waged overseas, residents hear.

"A bunch of American scientists, they're going to take away his Nobel prize," grumbled 71-year-old Armando Hilario, speaking with two friends, across the street from Moniz's cemetery plot.

Fifty years after Moniz's death in 1955, relatives of lobotomy patients in the United States have launched a campaign which they say is meant to shame the Nobel Foundation into breaking precedent by withdrawing the scientist's 1949 award.

They argue that the Nobel prize legitimised the procedure, which sought to calm mentally ill patients by severing nerve fibres between the frontal lobes and the main part of the brain. Moniz called the process a prefrontal leucotomy.

He performed his first prefrontal leucotomies on people in the mid-1930s in Lisbon. At the time, this was considered a major medical breakthrough.

It was modified and popularised in the US with the so-called "ice-pick" procedure: using a hammer to tap a metal pick up through the eye socket and into the brain.

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