1938

Nobel Prize in Physics

Enrico Fermi

Fermi had been bombarding elements with slow neutrons since 1934, cataloguing the radioactive products and discovering that neutrons slowed by paraffin caused more reactions than fast ones — a finding that would matter enormously. When the Swedish Academy announced his prize in December, Fermi used the trip to Stockholm as his exit from Fascist Italy; he did not return.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Richard Kuhn

Kuhn's work on carotenoids and vitamins — the pigments that make carrots orange and eggs yellow, the molecules that shade into essential nutrition — earned him the prize. The Nazi government forbade him to accept it or receive the medal; he was permitted to accept the award itself only after the war ended.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Corneille Heymans

Heymans traced the nervous and chemical feedback loops that regulate breathing — showing that chemoreceptors in the carotid sinus and aortic arch detect blood oxygen and carbon dioxide levels and signal the brain to adjust the rate and depth of respiration. It is a loop running in every person reading this, continuously, without any effort or awareness on their part.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Pearl Buck

Buck had grown up in China, the daughter of missionaries, and wrote about Chinese peasant life from the inside rather than as spectacle. The Good Earth and its sequels treated their subjects as full human beings navigating an ancient, difficult world — a perspective that was less common in Western fiction than it should have been.

Nobel Peace Prize

Nansen International Office for Refugees

The Nansen Office had spent a decade issuing the Nansen passport — a travel document for stateless people who had no country to issue them one — and providing what practical assistance it could to refugees scattered across Europe from the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. The office closed its doors the same year it received the prize, its mandate expiring as a new refugee crisis was beginning.

Discovery of Teflon (PTFE)

Roy Plunkett at DuPont was trying to make a new refrigerant when he found his pressurised cylinder of gas had solidified into a waxy white powder that nothing would stick to and nothing would dissolve. Polytetrafluoroethylene — Teflon — was slipperier than anything previously synthesised, extraordinarily resistant to heat and chemicals, and entirely accidental.

Public announcement of nylon fibre

On 27 October, DuPont announced nylon to the world — a synthetic polyamide that Wallace Carothers and colleagues had developed from first principles, designing a molecule that would form long fibres with useful properties rather than stumbling across one. It was introduced as a substitute for silk in stockings, a comparison that undersold the material's eventual range.

Living coelacanth discovered off South Africa

A museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer noticed an unusual fish in a South African trawler's catch in December and sent a sketch to the ichthyologist J.L.B. Smith, who identified it as a coelacanth — a fish known only from fossils thought to be 66 million years old. It was, in the driest scientific language available, unexpected.

Albert Hofmann synthesises LSD

On 16 April, Hofmann at Sandoz Laboratories synthesised LSD-25, the twenty-fifth compound in a series of lysergic acid derivatives, looking for something to stimulate circulation and respiration. Finding it unremarkable, he set it aside. Its rather more remarkable property would not be discovered until 1943, when he accidentally absorbed a small amount through his fingertips.

Hahn and Strassmann observe uranium fission

On 22 December, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann bombarded uranium with neutrons and found, to their considerable bewilderment, that the products included barium — an element roughly half the weight of uranium, which had no business being there. Hahn wrote to his former colleague Lise Meitner, now in exile in Sweden, who would understand before the year was out what had actually happened.