1930

Nobel Prize in Physics

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman

Raman had observed that when light passes through a transparent material, a tiny fraction of it scatters at a different wavelength — shifted by the vibrational energy of the molecules it has encountered. This Raman scattering, as it is now universally called, became a precise tool for identifying molecules by their vibrational fingerprints and earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to an Asian scientist.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Hans Fischer

Fischer spent twenty years working out the molecular structure of haemin — the iron-containing core of haemoglobin — and then synthesised it, demonstrating that one of the key molecules of biological life could be built from scratch in a chemistry laboratory. He also worked extensively on chlorophyll, the light-harvesting molecule in plants, finding it and haemin to be unexpectedly close cousins.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Karl Landsteiner

In 1900 and 1901, Landsteiner had noticed that mixing the blood of different people sometimes caused the red cells to clump together and sometimes did not, and had worked out why: there are four blood groups, A, B, AB, and O, and transfusing across the wrong boundary kills. His discovery made blood transfusion safe. The prize came thirty years later.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Sinclair Lewis

Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature — a fact the committee noted without embarrassment. His novels Main Street and Babbitt had spent the 1920s holding a mirror up to middle-class American life and declining to flatter what they showed. He accepted the prize with a speech that made pointed remarks about the American literary establishment.

Nobel Peace Prize

Nathan Söderblom

Söderblom, the Archbishop of Uppsala, had spent the First World War attempting to persuade European churches that the killing was not, in fact, divinely sanctioned — and then spent the years afterwards building the ecumenical movement that would eventually become the World Council of Churches. The committee recognised a quiet persistence that had accomplished rather more than most louder efforts.

Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto

On 18 February, twenty-three-year-old Clyde Tombaugh — a Kansas farmer's son with a telescope he had built himself, now employed at Lowell Observatory to do the tedious work of comparing photographic plates — spotted a faint point of light that had moved between two exposures taken three weeks apart. He had found the ninth planet. The announcement came on 13 March, the anniversary of Percival Lowell's birth and of William Herschel's discovery of Uranus, and a competition for names was opened.

Blood group typing advances transfusion medicine

Landsteiner's Nobel recognition in 1930 drew wide attention to a practice — typing blood before transfusion — that had already saved many lives but remained inconsistently applied. The prize was as much an endorsement of a clinical protocol as a scientific honour, and its effect on hospital practice was measurable.

Synthetic haemin synthesis demonstrates organic chemistry advances

Fischer's total synthesis of haemin — a molecule containing four interlocked nitrogen-rich rings surrounding a single iron atom — was a technical tour de force that showed chemists could, in principle, reconstruct molecules of genuine biological complexity. It was a proof of possibility as much as an achievement in itself.