Hi! This might be a little bit of a shorter issue than most but I found out something I hadn’t heard of before. Nobel disease or nobelitis (not to be confused with the Noble Disease, which is gout btw) is the term for Nobel Prize winners who, start getting into weird stuff. The theory is that after you win a Nobel Prize, even if it’s only for one specific subject or thing that you did, you start to believe that you’re an expert in other topics too, and the media and others around you reinforce that. Here are a few examples I found interesting:

• Phillip Lenard won the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physics and later supported the Nazis. He was also in opposition to Albert Einstein’s ideas just because Einstein was Jewish.

• Alexis Carrel won the 1912 Nobel Prize in Medicine, and later in Nazi France got super into eugenics.

• Charles Richet won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Medicine, and also ended up believing in ESP, ghosts, and paranormal activity.

• Linus Pauling won the 1945 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He also believed that consuming high doses of Vitamin C (specifically 120 times the recommended intake) cured his Bright’s Disease, prevented the common cold, could treat schizophrenia, and cure cancer. (This was probably because he had a serious health scare and it was his way of coping).

• William Shockley won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics and believed in racial science and eugenics.

• James Watson won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine but later in life he was been racist specifically against black people.

• Nikolaas Tinbergen won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Medicine but also has unscientific and dangerous theories and opinoins about autism.

• Brian Josephson won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics and he believes in telepathy among other psuedoscientific concepts.

• Kary Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry but he didn’t agree that AIDS is caused by HIV, didn’t believe in climate change, is into astrology, and in his book described how he encountered a fluorescent alien talking raccoon. (Kary was really into LSD which could explain some of this including his interest in chemistry)

• Louis J. Ignarro won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine. He was a member of the scientific advisory board for Herbalife (a scam) where he promoted fake dietary supplements.

• Luc Montagnier won the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine, and wrote a paper that wasn’t peer-reviewed, in a journal he founded, about how water had wild properties and could remember things. He also believed that vaccines cause autism and antibiotics can cure it,

• Pierre Curie, who won the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics, was into Spiritualism, which was the Victorian era belief in being able to do seances and communicate with ghosts. On his wikipedia page though, someone clearly was inserting some opinions here: He did not attend séances…as a mere spectator, and his goal certainly was not to communicate with spirits. He saw the séances as scientific experiments, tried to monitor different parameters, and took detailed notes of every observation.

• John William Strutt won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics. He was interested in parapsychology and was a member and later president of the Society for Psychical Research. He was open to the possibility of supernatural phenomena but had not come to any specific conclusions before his death.

• Ivar Giaver won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics. He also did not believe in evolution or climate change.

• Richard Smalley won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He did not believe in evolution.

If you expand this out to people who are just experts in their field but dumb in other ways, Dr. Oz and Dr. Ben Carson are the first two people who come to mind, but this is so much more common than you’d think. I would say you can include many business people and tech people in this but they don’t have the expertise that people like Ben Carson had to at least TRY to back up their credibility.