The Medicine Nobel Prize committee made up a lot of lost ground with their 2005 award to Dr. Barry Marshall and Dr. Robin Warren of Australia for the activities of H. Pylori. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori The article below appears to be "retrospective ass-covering" at its best; Marshall & Warren had an incredibly difficult time getting funding for their controversial research; Marshall had to give himself H. Pylori gastritis & cure it with an antibiotic to make his point. Are we going to require researchers working on Ebola cures to cure themselves of Ebola? That sounds like a rather high bar for researchers; in particular, a bar far higher than just about any other Nobel field. --- "Bacteria, Ulcers, and Ostracism? H. Pylori and the Making of a Myth" "Medicine’s purported ostracism of the discovery of H. pylori has achieved a mythological quality. But it isn’t true. After appropriate initial scientific skepticism, the hypothesis was accepted right on schedule." http://www.csicop.org/si/show/bacteria_ulcers_and_ostracism_h._pylori_and_th... --- To date, I'm not aware of any apologies by the medical community to their patients for the torture they put their stomach ulcer patients through. At 09:16 AM 8/27/2014, Warren D Smith wrote:

It seems that many Nobel Prizes were awarded that, in retrospect, were very bad decisions. It looks like the Physics & Chemistry prizes are pretty much free of embarrassment, but the Medicine, Peace, and Economic prizes include many howlers.