1943

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Failed Separation, Tagged and Followed

George de Hevesy

George de Hevesy had spent much of his early career in Ernest Rutherford's Manchester laboratory trying, at Rutherford's request, to separate radium D from a vat of lead — a task that turned out to be chemically impossible, since radium D is simply an isotope of lead itself. The failed separation gave him an idea: if a radioactive isotope behaved chemically like its stable twin but could be detected from a distance, you could tag a molecule with it and track the molecule through any system you liked, living or otherwise. By the 1920s de Hevesy was feeding radioactive phosphorus to plants and watching where it went; by the 1930s he had traced the dynamics of red blood cells in humans with comparable elegance. The Prize, awarded for his work on isotope tracers, recognized a technique so quietly foundational that nearly every branch of modern biochemistry runs on it. Without isotope tracing, the metabolic pathways we now draw in first-year textbooks would still be black boxes — we would know what went in and what came out, but have no honest picture of the journey.

Nobel Prize in Physics

The Proton Misbehaved on Purpose

Otto Stern

Otto Stern had a gift for making the unobservably small behave in ways a physicist could measure — he was, in some respects, the most precise experimenter of his generation. The molecular beam method he developed through the 1920s fired streams of atoms or molecules through evacuated chambers with extraordinary control, allowing magnetic and quantum properties to be read directly rather than inferred. His measurement of the proton's magnetic moment, completed in the early 1930s with Immanuel Estermann and Otto Frisch, delivered a shock: the value came out at nearly 2.79 nuclear magnetons, where a simple Dirac particle should have given roughly 1. Theorists were perplexed. That discrepancy — stubbornly real, precisely measured — eventually helped reveal that the proton is not a fundamental point particle but a composite object with rich inner structure; it was one of the first experimental fingerprints of what would decades later be understood as quarks. Stern had left Germany in 1933, reading the political weather correctly and early, and the Prize reached him at Carnegie Mellon a decade on. He had built a career on making beams of atoms obey, and the atoms had rewarded him by misbehaving in exactly the right way.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Starved Chick Names the Clotting Switch

Henrik Dam · Edward A. Doisy

In the late 1920s, Carl Peter Henrik Dam set out to study how chicks synthesized cholesterol, and fed them an experimental diet deliberately stripped of all fats. The chicks began to hemorrhage; their blood refused to clot. Dam worked for several years to rule out the known vitamins — C, D, A — and concluded something new was responsible, which he named vitamin K, for the Danish and German word Koagulation, a piece of nomenclature that manages to be both logical and slightly on the nose. Across the Atlantic, Edward Doisy, who had already isolated oestrone and oestriol, turned his considerable chemical skill to determining vitamin K's exact structure, publishing the answer in 1939. Together the two men had mapped the body's central clotting switch: without vitamin K, the liver cannot produce prothrombin or several other clotting factors, and the blood simply will not stop. The practical debts are large — vitamin K supplementation is now given routinely to newborns, who are born with almost none, and warfarin, one of the most prescribed anticoagulants in history, works precisely by blocking the vitamin's action. That a malnourished chicken's tragedy illuminated one of medicine's most valuable on-off switches is the sort of thing that would sound contrived in a novel.

Discovery of streptomycin

Dirt Held a Cure for the White Plague

Albert Schatz · Selman Abraham Waksman

Tuberculosis had been killing humans for millennia — the White Plague that hollowed out lungs and poets alike — and as late as 1940 it remained largely beyond the reach of medicine; penicillin, for all its virtues, did nothing against Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Selman Waksman at Rutgers had long argued that the soil was an untapped pharmacopoeia: microbes in it competed ferociously, and some of them must produce substances that killed bacteria. On 19 October 1943, a doctoral student named Albert Schatz, working long hours in a basement laboratory, isolated a compound from the actinomycete Streptomyces griseus that stopped tuberculosis bacilli dead. It was named streptomycin. Clinical trials the following year confirmed what the cultures had suggested; by the late 1940s it was in use worldwide, and tuberculosis mortality began its long, overdue decline. The credit question turned ugly — Waksman received the Nobel in 1952, Schatz did not, and their subsequent lawsuit established one of the more uncomfortable episodes in twentieth-century science. The compound itself, however, cared nothing for the dispute. Dirt, properly interrogated, turned out to be one of the great reservoirs of medicine.

Albert Hofmann synthesizes LSD

A Bicycle Ride Through an Unmeasured Dose

Albert Hofmann

Albert Hofmann had first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938, while working at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel on ergot alkaloid derivatives in hopes of finding a circulatory stimulant. It showed no interesting pharmacological activity in animal tests, and he set it aside. Five years later — on 16 April 1943, a date now known to its admirers as Bicycle Day — he resynthesized it and absorbed an unmeasured amount through his skin during the process, leading to an afternoon described in his laboratory notes as a remarkable restlessness combined with a slight dizziness, followed by a condition he found impossible to describe in the conventions of chemistry. He cycled home through Basel accompanied by his laboratory assistant and the most intense perceptual experience of his life, and then composed one of the more extraordinary scientific self-reports in the literature: precise, measured, methodical, and documenting something his instruments were entirely unequipped to quantify. Whether LSD's subsequent history — the psychedelic research that followed, the cultural upheaval that ensued, the research moratoriums that intervened — constitutes a net benefit is a question still not resolved. That it all began with a chemist cycling home, possibly believing he was dying, and nevertheless managing to take notes, is at least a good story.

Construction begins on ENIAC

Eighteen Thousand Tubes to Aim a Gun

By 1943 the United States Army was confronting a supply problem that had nothing to do with steel or fuel: it could not produce ballistic firing tables fast enough. Artillery accuracy depended on tables calculated for every gun, every shell, every charge weight, every elevation — and human 'computers,' working with mechanical desk calculators, took weeks per table. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School proposed building an electronic machine to do it faster; work began on 31 May 1943 with Army funding. What they built — completed in 1945 and formally unveiled in 1946 — weighed thirty tons, occupied a room roughly the size of a large apartment, and contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes, the failure rate of which gave the engineers something to do in the small hours. ENIAC was not the first electronic computer by every definition, and the patent battles over that question have occupied lawyers to this day. What is uncontested is its scale, its speed, and what it demonstrated: that a general-purpose electronic calculator was buildable, and that the age of human computers was nearly over. The immediate customer was the artillery corps; the lasting consequences reached somewhat further.

Penicillin production reaches Allied demand

A Cantaloupe Solved the Scaling Problem

When Alexander Fleming noticed the mould killing bacteria on a forgotten Petri dish in 1928, the practical challenge of producing penicillin in any meaningful quantity seemed insurmountable; the yields from surface-flask culture were minuscule, and Fleming himself largely moved on. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain revived the work at Oxford in 1940, achieved the first therapeutic use in humans in 1941, and then ran immediately into the problem of scale — Britain, under wartime pressure, could not manufacture enough. American pharmaceutical companies were recruited, deep-fermentation methods were developed, and a higher-yielding mould strain was found on a mouldy cantaloupe in Peoria, Illinois, which is the sort of detail that historians of medicine cannot resist and neither can anyone else. By September 1943 output had climbed to a point where the entire Allied armed forces could be supplied. Wound infections that had killed soldiers in every previous conflict now met something that could stop them. The transition from laboratory curiosity to industrial medicine happened in roughly three years, driven by the concentrated pressure of war — and left behind a pharmaceutical infrastructure that would eventually produce antibiotics at a scale their discoverers could not have imagined.