Nobel Committee Issues Another Ignoble Prize

There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer wins a Grammy Award, and the following dialog occurs:

Homer: Oh, why won’t anyone give me an award?

Lisa:       You won a Grammy!

Homer: I mean an award that’s worth winning.

Then a crawl line scrolls across the bottom of the screen, stating: “LEGAL DISCLAIMER:  Mr. Simpson’s opinions does not reflect those of the producers, who don’t consider the Grammy an award at all.”

That’s how I’m coming to feel about the once-noble Nobel Prize.

One of the most egregious awards they made was last year’s honoring of our president with a Nobel Peace Prize before he’d done anything. (It was awarded on his 11th day after inauguration.)

Even he said he did not feel worthy of the award—not that that stopped him from accepting it, mind you.

And the Nobel folks have a long history of lame decisions.

Now they have added to that legacy with the latest award, in which the culture of evil celebrates itself.

According to the Nobel web site,

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2010 was awarded to Robert G. Edwards “for the development of in vitro fertilization”.

Edwards was one of two doctors who pioneered IVF, though his partner has since died.

Take it away, Christian Science Monitor! . . .

The Nobel medicine prize committee acknowledged the role of British biologist Robert Edwards in developing in vitro fertilization, handing him on Monday the prestigious award for bringing “joy to infertile people all over the world.”

Of course, the Nobel committee didn’t mention that it also brought death to millions of children conceived in a dish and then intentionally not used, some of them spending their entire existence in a freezer, only to be treated later as medical waste.

Between 2 and 3 percent of newborns in many developed countries are now IVF babies. And about 4 million individuals have born so far been through IVF, according to the Nobel committee. The birth of the first “test-tube baby,” Louise Brown, was in 1978.

“What Louise Brown meant was, you held her up, all her parts were there, and she smiled, and that ended the ethics criticism,” says Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Well, among culture-of-death, establishment bioethicists, maybe. Their job is to not to actually say no to anything but to rationalize whatever whatever comes down the pike and help society accept it by declaring it ethical.

So where do we go from here?

“The Nobel Prize is for the work Edwards did helping the infertile, but [he could also have] unleashed the most controversial technology I can think of, which is, should we use it to design our offspring?”

At the same time, the prospect of scientists helping to create human life in a lab has raised vexing ethical issues. The foremost question – very real for many IVF parents – is about what happens to fertilized, but unused, embryos.

One unintended consequence of IVF includes an explosion in multiple births – as a result of parents choosing to implant multiple embryos to raise the likelihood of success for an expensive procedure.

FILE UNDER: Dr. Frankenstein’s Medicine Show

What are your thoughts?

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

8 thoughts on “Nobel Committee Issues Another Ignoble Prize”

  1. Interesting wiki page about Nobel controversies.
    I’d never heard about William Bradford Shockley before, but it’s a great example of ego-induced beliefs:

    William Bradford Shockley was one of the winners of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for the transistor. There was a well-documented controversy hanging over his win — backed up by corroborating accounts from his colleagues (the other two Nobelists in the Prize), and also historical facts — which critics characterized as due mainly to Shockley’s then-directorship position and self-promotion efforts (Shockley’s original, self-designed ‘transistor’ did not work at all). A notable change was seen to have come over Shockley’s character soon after the Nobel award. Later, he strongly and seriously espoused eugenics, regarding his published works on this topic as the most important work of his career. His ideas are largely based on the research of Cyril Burt. He is the only Nobel Laureate who publicly admitted to donating sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank founded (1980) by eugenicist Robert Klark Graham in the hopes of passing down humanity’s best genes. The Repository was shut down in 1999.

  2. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827803.700-artificial-fertility-treatments-create-a-sex-bias.html
    Everyone says “let the individuals decide” about test-tube-babies, euthanasia, abortion, etc. The aggregate effects impact all of us and are properly labeled EUGENICS. Humanity is not capable of “self-directing” matters of life and death in a fair manner. History alone should be proof enough of this fact.
    We’re just not that smart and, certainly, not that kind.
    Nobel. I wish they would call it what it really is: The Liberal of the Year Award. And I say that as someone without a political party affiliation.

  3. I do not doubt the tremendous scientific and technical achievement of IVF. I was expecting this award a few years after the first IVF birth.
    The dispute is not over the scientific and technical achievement but over the ethical issues regarding destroying human embryos. If IVF techniques were developed on and restricted to animals then I don’t think Jimmy, or the Vatican or I would have reservations about this award.
    Countries, cultures and individuals which permit abortion on demand and regard human embryos as commodities will not see any moral problem but only the technique.
    The Nobel Committee seem to be reflecting prevailing western values regarding the status of human embryos by not referring to any controversies or moral issues brought up by IVF. Although the Nobel Committee are relying on more expert scientific judgments than most of us can make, their moral compass is faulty – like most of our fellow citizens.
    I think it is unfair to suggest that most of the Nobel prizes are undeserved – especially in the sciences. Controversial does not equal undeserved. There will always be scientific controversies regarding who/which development is the greatest this year/ever eg “who is the greatest scientist?” is controversial – but it does not mean that eg Newton, Darwin or Einstein are unworthy of that title.
    Even for the Peace Prize, most of the people on the list over the years seem to be deserving. The ‘less deserving’ ones are fairly clearly rewards and bribes to make peace. Which could be a good thing.
    I don’t think anyone claims that this year’s prize for Physics is undeserving. Even if some think that other Physics candidates are more worthy – they might get their recognition in a few years time.

  4. “I do not doubt the tremendous scientific and technical achievement of IVF”
    What’s odd is, the ones who received the award aren’t really the ones who pioneered the process (for instance, Yanagimachi and Chang in 1963) they were just the ones who first successfully adapted the principles to human use.
    If the interests of the Nobel committee were purely scientific, they would award those who really broke new scientific ground. Instead, they have rewarded ethical hubris. Very telling, that.
    Remember, ethics and morality are not scientifically provable concepts. Science unmoored from the law of God – natural law – is capable of any kind of moral outrage… without batting an eye.

  5. I agree completely that the Nobel prize has become even more of a bomb than in the past.
    However, I wince at the term “ignoble”, because it might be confused with the much superior “Ig Nobel” prize given out by Improbable Research.
    http://improbable.com/ig/

  6. Poor Alfred Nobel. He wanted to be remembered for something other than his invention of dynamite, and now, look how his name is being dragged through the mud by some of the recipients of his Prizes ! Sad…

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