1943

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

George de Hevesy

De Hevesy received the prize for devising the use of radioactive isotopes as tracers — tagging atoms so their movements through biological systems could be followed. The idea of labelling a molecule and watching where it goes quietly opened most of what we now call metabolic research.

Nobel Prize in Physics

Otto Stern

Stern was honoured for perfecting the molecular ray method and for measuring the magnetic moment of the proton — a measurement that turned out to be nearly three times what simple theory predicted, which was the beginning of a long and productive argument about nuclear structure.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Henrik Dam · Edward A. Doisy

Dam discovered that chicks deprived of certain dietary fats bled uncontrollably, and tracked the cause to a fat-soluble compound he named vitamin K. Doisy determined its chemical structure. Together they had found the body's mechanism for remembering how to clot.

Discovery of streptomycin

Albert Schatz · Selman Abraham Waksman

On 19 October, Albert Schatz isolated streptomycin from a soil bacterium in Selman Waksman's laboratory at Rutgers. The antibiotic could kill Mycobacterium tuberculosis — a bacterium that had defied every previous treatment — and the dirt from which it came would prove to be an astonishingly productive pharmacy.

Albert Hofmann synthesizes LSD

Albert Hofmann

On 16 April, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann resynthesized lysergic acid diethylamide, a compound he had set aside five years earlier, and absorbed enough through his fingertips during the process to spend an extremely unusual afternoon cycling home through Basel. He described the experience in meticulous scientific detail, which was both professionally admirable and personally necessary.

Construction begins on ENIAC

Work began on 31 May at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering on a machine designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert to calculate artillery firing tables. ENIAC would take three years to build, weigh thirty tons, and contain roughly 18,000 vacuum tubes — most of which, at any given moment, were working correctly.

Penicillin production reaches Allied demand

By September, fermentation at scale had advanced far enough that the entire Allied armed forces could be supplied. A drug that Florey's team had been coaxing from laboratory flasks just two years earlier was now being produced in quantities measured in doses per division.