1934
The year radioactivity became something you could manufacture rather than merely find, and two of the figures who had shaped modern science — Marie Curie and Santiago Ramón y Cajal — died within months of each other, leaving gaps that science has spent the decades since pretending it can fill.
Nobel Prizes
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A Second, Heavier Hydrogen
Harold C. Urey
Ordinary hydrogen, the lightest of all elements, turned out to have a heavier sibling sitting quietly in natural water at a ratio of about one part in six thousand — overlooked for the entirety of chemistry's history because it behaves almost identically and constitutes almost none of the supply. Urey found it in 1931 by a method that required heroic patience: evaporating liquid hydrogen again and again until the heavier fraction, with its extra neutron stubbornly weighing it down, accumulated enough to measure spectroscopically. He called it deuterium, from the Greek for second, which is either modest or the most accurate possible name for a discovery of that magnitude. Heavy water — water built with deuterium instead of ordinary hydrogen — would prove essential to early nuclear reactors as a neutron moderator, quietly underpinning the physics that defined the second half of the century. Without Urey's patient evaporations, the neutron economy of the Manhattan Project looks rather different, though one hesitates to count that among the benefits one cheerfully catalogues.
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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Liver Cured What Doctors Could Not
George H. Whipple · George R. Minot · William P. Murphy
Pernicious anaemia had a way of killing people slowly and with great thoroughness — a progressive destruction of the blood that was, until the 1920s, reliably fatal, leaving physicians with nothing to offer but sympathy and a professional expression of regret. The first clue came from George Whipple's experiments on anaemic dogs: he found that feeding them raw liver restored their red blood cells with unexpected swiftness. It was not an appetising therapy, but Minot and Murphy moved it into human trials, having patients consume half a pound or more of raw or lightly cooked liver daily, which the patients endured with rather more grace than the treatment deserved. It worked. The underlying deficiency — in what would eventually be identified as vitamin B12, which the patients could not absorb normally from food — would take another fifteen years to isolate precisely, but by then the disease had already been tamed. Today a simple injection of cyanocobalamin every few months keeps what was once a death sentence to a quietly managed inconvenience, which is about as good an outcome as medicine ever gets.
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Six Characters Demand an Ending
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello spent his career asking a single unfashionable question — whether any person has a stable identity at all, or whether the self is merely a performance that collapses under examination — and he asked it with a dramatic severity that the Sicilian sun and a difficult domestic life had done nothing to soften. His play 'Six Characters in Search of an Author', which premiered in Rome in 1921 and was met initially with a near-riot, placed on stage a family of unfinished fictional characters demanding that a theatre company complete their story, collapsing the distinction between fiction and life until neither audience nor characters could be entirely certain of the boundary. It sounds like a philosophical stunt; in performance it is something stranger and more disquieting. The Swedish Academy, awarding the prize for his 'bold and brilliant revival of dramatic and scenic art', were perhaps understating things. Pirandello's theatrical restlessness — his insistence that the mask is not distinct from the face wearing it — runs through the whole of twentieth-century drama, and the discomfort he placed in the audience has not aged a single day.
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Holding a Table Together as It Collapses
Arthur Henderson
Arthur Henderson came to disarmament diplomacy via a working-class childhood in Glasgow, a career in the British Labour Party, and three separate stints as Home Secretary, a trajectory that gave him a pragmatist's eye for what institutions could and could not be made to do. He was appointed president of the World Disarmament Conference in 1932, a gathering at Geneva that represented, in retrospect, one of history's more poignant exercises in hope against evidence: sixty nations negotiating the reduction of arms while Germany's new government quietly prepared to discard the Versailles limits altogether. Henderson held the conference together through procedural manoeuvre and sheer stubbornness for three years, even as the ground dissolved beneath it; the conference formally collapsed in 1934, the year he won the prize. The Nobel Committee's decision was not ironic — it was a deliberate statement that the effort to restrain catastrophe deserves recognition precisely when catastrophe wins. History judged the timing grimly apt.
Discoveries
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Discovery of artificial radioactivity
Radioactivity, Made to Order
Frédéric Joliot · Irène Joliot-Curie
For the first three decades after Becquerel noticed in 1896 that uranium salts fogged photographic plates without any encouragement from the sun, radioactivity was understood as a fixed property of nature: certain atoms decayed, and the only human role was to find them, measure them, and try not to absorb too many. Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie — working in Paris, which meant working in the shadow of Marie Curie, who was also Irène's mother — changed that understanding on a Wednesday afternoon in January 1934. They had been bombarding aluminium, boron, and magnesium with alpha particles, and they noticed something that puzzled them: when they removed the radioactive polonium source, the target materials went on emitting positrons. The targets had become radioactive in their own right, having been nudged by the bombardment into unstable isotopes that then decayed on their own schedule. Radioactivity could be manufactured. The Joliot-Curies collected the Nobel Prize in Chemistry the following year, making Irène the second woman after her mother to win in a scientific category — a symmetry that, in a more just arrangement of history, would have been remarkable only for what it added to science rather than for what it said about the profession.
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Enrico Fermi bombards uranium with neutrons
Splitting Uranium Without Knowing It
Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi ran his Rome laboratory with the systematic efficiency of a man who had decided that the periodic table was simply a to-do list. In 1934, inspired by the Joliot-Curies' discovery that alpha bombardment could produce artificial radioactivity, he switched to neutrons — electrically neutral, and therefore able to approach atomic nuclei without being deflected — and worked his way methodically through the elements. By the time he reached uranium, the heaviest known element, his team had produced a zoo of new radioactive species. They concluded, not unreasonably, that they had manufactured elements heavier than uranium, and Fermi wrote cautious papers to that effect. What they had actually done — as Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch would work out in late 1938, after Otto Hahn measured the barium in the debris — was split uranium nuclei into two smaller atoms, releasing energy in the process. Fermi had observed nuclear fission four years before anyone understood it, which is one of the more consequential misreadings in the history of science, though the eventual correction would set the world on a path from which it has not since deviated.
Milestones
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A Notebook Still Warm With Radium
Marie Curie
She died on 4 July 1934 at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in the French Alps, of aplastic anaemia: a collapse of the bone marrow's ability to produce blood cells, almost certainly caused by decades of exposure to the ionising radiation she had studied, carried in her pockets, and handled with her bare hands before anyone fully understood what it did to living tissue. Born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867, she had moved to Paris to study when Polish universities would not admit women, shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel for the discovery of radioactivity, and then won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — alone, after Pierre's death — for isolating radium and polonium. No one has held Nobel Prizes in two separate sciences since. Her personal notebooks, research diaries, and even her cookbooks remain so contaminated with polonium-210 — whose half-life is 138 days, but which has been refreshed by decades of proximity — that researchers wishing to consult them at the Bibliothèque nationale must sign a waiver and handle them in lead-lined boxes. Her handwriting, in other words, is still radioactive. It seems about right.
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Death of Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Gaps Between Cells, Drawn From Memory
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Santiago Ramón y Cajal died in Madrid on 17 October 1934, aged eighty-two, having spent more than half a century with a microscope and a set of coloured inks, producing drawings of neurons so exquisitely detailed and so anatomically correct that twenty-first century electron microscopy essentially confirms them without amendment. He came to neuroscience circuitously — he had wanted to be an artist, his father insisted on medicine — and he brought to it an artist's attention to structure and a scientist's refusal to accept received opinion. The received opinion he most productively refused was that of Camillo Golgi, who had invented the silver staining technique Cajal used and who believed, incorrectly, that the nervous system was a continuous web of tissue. Cajal's drawings showed clearly that neurons were discrete cells communicating across tiny gaps — the foundations of what we now call the neuron doctrine — and the Nobel Committee acknowledged this in 1906, awarding the prize jointly to Cajal and Golgi in one of science's great ironies of arrangement: the two men shared a stage to accept the same prize while holding opposite views on the same fundamental question. Cajal's view was right. The architecture he described with pen and ink remains the architecture we teach in every biology classroom, and the synaptic gaps he inferred are still the site of most of what we call thought.
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