So There ... Until We Comment Again

This little blurb appeared in Clinical Neurology News:

Neurologist's Nobel Intact

The Nobel Foundation is rejecting efforts by a group of physicians and family members of lobotomy patients to revoke the 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to late neurologist Egas Moniz, the developer of the procedure. “The Nobel Committee has never taken responsibility for the fact that they awarded a prize for an operation that was a total failure and without any scientific merit,” said a statement on the Web site http://www.psychosurgery.org/, which is involved in the campaign to revoke the prize. “In the United States alone, lobotomy, leucotomy, and related operations resulted in at least 50,000 surgical casualties. Through the [Nobel] Committee's actions, they endorsed this brutal operation and provided justification for thousands of more operations.” The psychosurgery organization was founded by Christine Johnson, a medical librarian whose grandmother was lobotomized in 1954 and was in and out of institutions for the rest of her life. But Michael Sohlman, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, is having none of it. “There's no possibility to revoke it. It's a nonstarter,” he said in an interview. Asked to elaborate further in an e-mail, he wrote, “We divide mankind into two groups—one which has been awarded the Nobel Prize, and the other which has not. We only inform about the former group.” He added that “no further statements on this subject have been or, for that matter, will be made by the Nobel Foundation.”