1945 Nobel prize for FAILURE in Medicine to Fleming and Florey

Admittedly , complaining about the Swedes and their awarding of Nobel prizes is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.

But their famous 1945 rewarding of a Nobel prize in medicine to some of the pioneers of penicillin has to rate near the top for ineptitude.

Penicillin's "Third Man" : the synthetic triad of Fleming, Florey and MERCK ...

Three individuals' beliefs in the superiority of human chemists over natural chemists drove the fifteen year effort to delay the use of life-saving penicillin until it had become a patented man-made synthetic analogue : Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and George Merck.

Fleming and Florey got Nobel prizes for their unsuccessful efforts to delay the use of this wonderful lifesaver --- Merck had to be content with the cover of TIME.

Man-made penicillin was to be literally that : something manufactured by people of the male gender with no females nurturing penicillium flasks and no fungi to be charmed into giving off their natural penicillin.