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!
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