Why did Alfred Blalock and Helen Taussig not receive the nobel prize?

From the 1940s to the 1960s, the number of cardiac surgeons nominated for the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine grew rapidly. These nominations pinpoint major developments ranging from the first closed extracardiac operations to the era of complete intracardiac repair and treatment of congenital heart diseases. The aim of this article is to present the motivations for the numerous Nobel Prize nominations for the cardiac surgeon Alfred Blalock and the pediatric cardiologist Helen B. Taussig, and to show why the Nobel committee finally chose not to award them for the development of the Blalock-Taussig shunt.

The authors have gathered and analyzed files on Blalock and Taussig from the Nobel Prize archive for Physiology and Medicine in Solna, Sweden.

More than forty scholars, primarily from the United States and Europe, nominated Blalock and Taussig for the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Such a strong transatlantic support is rare for nominated surgeons. The authors discuss why the number of Nobel Prize nominations for cardiac surgeons in general reached a climax around the 1950s and formulate open research questions on why relatively few surgeons have received the prestigious prize for the development of surgical procedures.