Johannes Fibiger

Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger was a Danish physician and professor of anatomical pathology at the University of Copenhagen, born in 1867. While working at the Institute of Pathological Anatomy there he found new roundworms in wild rats in 1907 and suspected that they caused stomach cancer in the animals. In 1913 he reported that he had induced cancer in healthy rats with the worm he named Spiroptera carcinoma, a result then regarded as the greatest contribution to experimental medicine. He received the 1926 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for it, but his conclusion was later shown to be mistaken, and the award is now often cited as one of the Nobel committee blunders.