Of course. He didn't. And dozens of writers you have never heard of, much less read, much less quoted in everyday conversation, have. These wrongs are corrected in an alternative universe described here. The Biology/Medicine Prize has also been fairly ridiculous, although at least Robert Gallo hasn't gotten one:
Mistakes of commission:
1. Frontal lobotomies.
2. Eric Kandel. If you think he deserved it, read Explorers of the Black Box.
Mistakes of omission:
1. The scientists who discovered that smoking causes lung cancer.
2. The scientists who discovered that folate deficiency causes birth defects.
Several years ago, at a big Thanksgiving dinner in an Oakland loft, I told the woman sitting next to me, a genetic counselor, what a travesty the Biology prizes were. The discovery that smoking causes lung cancer had improved the lives of millions of people, I said; the discovery of so-called oncogenes hadn't improved the life of even one person. She replied that she was the sister of one of the oncogene discoverers.
The next day I learned she complained I had been rude!
