There’s a fascinating differential geopolitics of morality involved in all 
of this, isn’t there? I mean, take the case of Richard Doll, generally 
recognised to have saved millions of lives through pointing out the link 
between smoking and cancer, at a time in the 1950s when something over 80% 
of the UK population smoked:

“The 20, 40, and 50-year results, published in collaboration with Professor 
Sir Richard Peto, showed that half of all persistent smokers were eventually 
killed by their habit, but that stopping smoking cut the risks. As a result, 
tens of millions of people stopped smoking, and millions of premature deaths 
have been avoided. As well as confirming the link between tobacco and lung 
cancer, he showed that smoking could also cause many other types of cancer, 
as well as heart disease, respiratory disease and peptic ulcer.”

But then it turns out that Doll may was something less than the 
squeaky-clean hero he was made out to be, having accepted undeclared 
payments from Monsanto over a prolonged period which may or may not have 
caused him to step into the 245T controversy on their behalf:

“In 1985, while Sir Richard was a paid consultant for Monsanto, he stepped 
into the debate over the herbicides Agent Orange and dioxin, which had been 
sprayed from the air in the Vietnam War. An Australian royal commission was 
investigating whether the herbicides, made by Monsanto, had caused cancers 
in Australian personnel involved in the war. Sir Richard offered his 
unsolicited views in a letter to Justice Phillip Evatt, who headed the 
inquiry, and gave Agent Orange a clean bill of health.” (Sarah Boseley, The 
Guardian Friday December 8, 2006).

It seems beyond reason that a man who stood up to the threats and 
blandishments of the tobacco industry should have been so open to being 
suborned by Monsanto, as well as so oblivious to the health of the hundreds 
of thousands of Vietnamese whose lives have been wrecked by Agent Orange, 
but there you go.

Point being that, I suppose, irrespective of the cynicism surrounding the 
Nobel Foundation there are very few ‘pure’ heroes. Do dodgy foundations 
making awards to the less-than-pure render the whole process a fraud, or 
does this make for a more realistic geopolitics in which we recognise that, 
irrespective of flaws, someone’s lifetime contribution on the whole was 
worthy of recognition? Does this speak to a democratization of merit (or 
even morality), given that, say, 50 years ago the information needed to make 
these kinds of judgements would simply have been unavailable to the vast 
mass of humanity?

Some thoughts,

Jon