Actually, Phil Anderson (also a physics Nobelist) thinks that Einstein's photoelectric effect WAS more important than his discovery of relativity, i.e. the Nobel Prize guys got that one right!! Anyhow, my feeling is, in chemistry & physics the Nobel prize did have some screw ups, but they weren't nearly as embarrassing as the Medicine, Peace & Economics prize screwups. I mean, sure, maybe the guy who won it for inventing a gas regulator was not so important, and relativity was omitted, but at least that gas regulator really did work and was of technical importance! (And Raman's student K.S.Krishnan was credited by Raman in his Nobel lecture; even if the prize went only to Raman, Krishnan claimed Raman's description in his Nobel lecture of what happened, was correct & Raman was not trying to steal the credit.) But in the case of medicine, Economics, and arguably peace, the Nobel prize mistakes have in some cases enshrined complete con-men and frauds, and other times totally false "discoveries", and in some cases have caused a great deal of harm. And indeed I think having an Economics Nobel at all is a bad joke, economics is no science, is a highly corrupt and inbred largely-pseudo science. You pretty much cannot get an economics Nobel unless you come from a handful of schools. (Apparently Murray Gell-mann was outraged hearing some physicist describe his experience getting a Nobel and yelled "WHAT! You mean they let the economists onto the SAME PODIUM with you!?!" Wonder whether that story true :) Milton Wainwright is a British scientist/historian who investigated the Waksman-Schatz affair and publicized, long after, the true story. Waksman systematically tried to deny Schatz credit, including telling numerous lies (which Wainwright documented, e.g. telling the thrilling story of how he'd discovered this and that, getting the sample thusly, etc etc while in fact he was not even at Rutgers at the time, the sample was given to Schatz not Waksman, etc etc) and blackballed him resulting in a pretty ruined career for Schatz compared to what probably should have happened. Schatz then spent a large part of his life complaining and suing, which just made him unpopular, plus it pretty much did not succeed at all. Waksman then indeed got the Nobel, and had conned Schatz into signing over his royalties to a charity, the Rutgers Foundation, with Waksman doing the same -- but unbeknownst to Schatz, Waksman had a secret deal with the Foundation that 20% of the royalties would be returned to him, while Schatz got zero! So then Waksman got rich and powerful, while Schatz got various shitty jobs for the rest of his professional life and mostly was unable to do further research in those jobs. All this would have stayed that way, except for the intercession of Wainwright who went back & read the original documents such as lab notebooks and Schatz's thesis, then documented lie after lie told by Waksman in a book and various articles he wrote. Waksman's scientific productivity seems to have been in large part due to him stealing credit from lots of other people, actually; it was not just from Schatz.