1944

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Otto Hahn

Hahn received the prize for his 1938 discovery that bombarding uranium with neutrons could split the nucleus itself — releasing an amount of energy that, briefly, nobody quite believed. The award was announced while Hahn was interned in England, learning from the radio that Hiroshima had been destroyed.

Nobel Prize in Physics

Isidor Isaac Rabi

Rabi developed the magnetic resonance method for measuring the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei with extraordinary precision. The technique would eventually become the basis of MRI, though that application was still three decades and several lateral leaps away.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Joseph Erlanger · Herbert S. Gasser

Erlanger and Gasser established that not all nerve fibres are equal: fibres of different diameter conduct signals at different speeds, meaning the signals for pain, pressure, and touch travel at their own rates and arrive in the brain in a particular order. The nervous system, it turned out, had been using variable-speed wiring all along.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Johannes V. Jensen

The Danish novelist and poet was cited for the rare strength and fertility of his poetic imagination, combined with wide intellectual curiosity and a boldly creative style. Jensen had published his sprawling six-volume novel cycle about human evolution across the preceding four decades.

DNA identified as genetic material

Oswald Avery · Colin MacLeod · Maclyn McCarty

Publishing in February in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty demonstrated with careful biochemistry that when one strain of bacteria transforms into another, the material carrying the instruction is DNA — not, as almost everyone assumed, protein. It was one of the most important experimental results of the century, and it arrived in the world with almost no fanfare.

Colossus computing machine delivered to Bletchley Park

Built at the Post Office Research Station in London and installed at Bletchley Park in January, Colossus was an electronic machine designed to crack the Lorenz cipher used by the German High Command. It contained 1,500 vacuum tubes and could perform Boolean operations at electronic speed — making it, in retrospect, one of the first programmable electronic computers, a fact that remained secret for three decades.

2.3 million doses of penicillin prepared for D-Day invasion

By June 1944, American pharmaceutical companies had produced enough penicillin to send 2.3 million doses ashore with the troops at Normandy. Wound infections that had killed the majority of soldiers in previous wars were being successfully treated within days; the drug's performance in the field was so striking that production targets kept being revised upward.