There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer wins a Grammy Award, and the following dialog occurs:

Homer: Oh, why won’t anyone give me an award?

Lisa:       You won a Grammy!

Homer: I mean an award that’s worth winning.

Then a crawl line scrolls across the bottom of the screen, stating: “LEGAL DISCLAIMER:  Mr. Simpson’s opinions does not reflect those of the producers, who don’t consider the Grammy an award at all.”

That’s how I’m coming to feel about the once-noble Nobel Prize.

One of the most egregious awards they made was last year’s honoring of our president with a Nobel Peace Prize before he’d done anything. (It was awarded on his 11th day after inauguration.)

Even he said he did not feel worthy of the award—not that that stopped him from accepting it, mind you.

And the Nobel folks have a long history of lame decisions.

Now they have added to that legacy with the latest award, in which the culture of evil celebrates itself.

According to the Nobel web site,

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2010 was awarded to Robert G. Edwards “for the development of in vitro fertilization”.

Edwards was one of two doctors who pioneered IVF, though his partner has since died.

Take it away, Christian Science Monitor! . . .

The Nobel medicine prize committee acknowledged the role of British biologist Robert Edwards in developing in vitro fertilization, handing him on Monday the prestigious award for bringing “joy to infertile people all over the world.”

Of course, the Nobel committee didn’t mention that it also brought death to millions of children conceived in a dish and then intentionally not used, some of them spending their entire existence in a freezer, only to be treated later as medical waste.

Between 2 and 3 percent of newborns in many developed countries are now IVF babies. And about 4 million individuals have born so far been through IVF, according to the Nobel committee. The birth of the first “test-tube baby,” Louise Brown, was in 1978.

“What Louise Brown meant was, you held her up, all her parts were there, and she smiled, and that ended the ethics criticism,” says Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Well, among culture-of-death, establishment bioethicists, maybe. Their job is to not to actually say no to anything but to rationalize whatever whatever comes down the pike and help society accept it by declaring it ethical.

So where do we go from here?

“The Nobel Prize is for the work Edwards did helping the infertile, but [he could also have] unleashed the most controversial technology I can think of, which is, should we use it to design our offspring?”

At the same time, the prospect of scientists helping to create human life in a lab has raised vexing ethical issues. The foremost question – very real for many IVF parents – is about what happens to fertilized, but unused, embryos.

One unintended consequence of IVF includes an explosion in multiple births – as a result of parents choosing to implant multiple embryos to raise the likelihood of success for an expensive procedure.

FILE UNDER: Dr. Frankenstein’s Medicine Show

What are your thoughts?