He Could Have Been a Contender

By Rick Horowitz

Stiffed. And stiffed again. There's only so much of this a person can take, you know.

I keep waiting for the phone to ring, for the call to come in from Stockholm or Oslo, the call that will change my life. Then the phone does ring, and my heart does the mambo from all the excitement. It's somebody pitching another credit card. It's somebody pitching another long-distance company. What it isn't -- what it never is -- is somebody calling to tell me I've won the Nobel Prize.

This is getting pretty annoying.

They've already announced the first of this year's winners; the rest will be along any day now. And I have to tell you, this year looks just like last year, which looked just like the year before. Every year they announce the winners -- every Tom, Dick and Edmond with a chemistry set or a sudden urge for international diplomacy -- and every year I'm left sitting there with egg on my face and a perfectly good acceptance speech bouncing around in my head.

I know just how it's supposed to go, too. I thank the Academy (or the Council of Elders, or whoever the top Nobel honchos are) for the wonderful honor they've bestowed on me, then I tell the joke about the Swedish doctor and the herring (or the Norwegian doctor -- I can go either way), then I say something about how we all have to get along because we're all part of the same small planet, then I tell the one about Ingrid Bergman and the lutefisk. I shake a few hands, grab the medal and the prize money and I skedaddle -- no big deal.

Except for the first part -- I can't get past the first part. They keep forgetting to give me the prize.

This year I really thought I had a chance, especially when I heard about the Nobel Prize in Medicine. They gave the Nobel Prize in Medicine to some neurologist/biochemist in California named Stanley B. Prusiner. I don't know Dr. Prusiner from Dr. Ruth, but in biology circles apparently he's a very big deal -- but not because everyone thinks he's so great.

In fact, it's just the opposite. This Dr. Prusiner's a maverick, a lone wolf. (Most of the time the prize goes to a whole team of researchers, not to a solo act.) He spent years pitching some pretty far-out theories about what causes things like mad cow disease, and certain fatal brain diseases in humans. He even fingered the culprit: a previously unknown, nastily infectious, totally warped kind of protein he called a "prion." Or so he said.

Now, there were lots of scientists out there who didn't happen to believe him, who didn't believe that proteins -- even proteins with cute names like "prions" -- could cause diseases all by themselves. There had to be some bacteria or fungi or viruses around somewhere, they insisted. They "derided" Dr. Prusiner, the stories said. They claimed his theories were unproven. Some of them still think that way.

The Nobeloids begged to differ. They said Dr. Prusiner had discovered a "new biological principle of infection." Good enough for them -- he's a winner!

And I'm not.

But why not? That's what I want to know. Dr. Prusiner works pretty much by himself; I work pretty much by myself. Dr. Prusiner gets "derided" by colleagues in his field; I get derided by people I don't even know. Dr. Prusiner has theories some people think are weird; I've got theories that aren't half as good as that. Dr. Prusiner knows his way around a "prion"; my air conditioner used to leak Freon. I love the look of neon. I used to know a guy named Leon. What's the difference?

It has to be connections.

10/10/97