Jesse F. Bone

“ Eklund protested. “This award will make the prize for medicine a laughingstock. No doctor will ever accept another. If we go through with this, we might as well forget about the medical award from now on. This will be its swan song. It hits too close to home. Too many people have been saying similar things about our profession and its trend toward specialization. And to have the Nobel Prize confirm them would alienate every doctor in the world. We simply can’t do it.”
“Yet who else has made a comparable discovery? Or one that is even half as important?” Christianson asked. ”

“ Making a personality out of a computer—ugh! I suppose it’s their idea of a joke.”
“I doubt it,” Christianson said. “They just like to name things—preferably with female names. It’s a form of insecurity, the mother fixation. But that’s not important. I’m afraid, gentlemen, that we shall have to make the award as we have planned. I can see no way out. After all, there’s no reason why the machine cannot receive the prize. The conditions merely state that it is to be presented to the one, regardless of nationality, who makes the greatest contribution to medicine or physiology.” ”

“ Hanson, Alphax Laboratories, and Edie were all at the bottom of the ocean—in some nice deep spot like the Mariannas Trench.” He shrugged. “Of course, we won’t have that sort of luck, so we’ll have to make the best of it.”
“It just goes to show that you can’t trust Americans,” Eklund said. “I’ve always thought we should keep our awards on this side of the Atlantic where people are sane and civilized. ”