1944

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Nucleus Splits, News Arrives in Captivity

Otto Hahn

In December 1938, working with Fritz Strassmann in a Berlin laboratory that was steadily emptying as Jewish colleagues fled the regime, Otto Hahn bombarded uranium with slow neutrons and found barium among the products — which made no chemical sense until his former collaborator Lise Meitner, already in exile in Stockholm, supplied the physics: the nucleus had split, releasing energy according to a formula most physicists still considered theoretical. The Nobel Committee, working within the constraints of a world at war, awarded the 1944 prize for chemistry to Hahn alone — Meitner, who contributed the theoretical insight, was left off in an omission that still rankles historians of science. Hahn himself heard news of the prize not in Stockholm but while interned at Farm Hall in England, when it was announced in November 1945. It reached him in the same captivity that, three months earlier, had brought a radio broadcast announcing that an atomic bomb — a device whose lineage ran directly through his basement — had been dropped on Hiroshima. He reportedly had to be kept under watch that August night. The fission of uranium became the hinge on which the second half of the twentieth century turned, for both its most terrible and its most quietly useful applications.

Nobel Prize in Physics

Asking a Nucleus Politely, With Magnets

Isidor Isaac Rabi

Isidor Rabi, born in a small village in what is now Poland and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, had an abiding conviction that the atomic nucleus could be made to talk if you asked it politely with the right magnetic field. In the 1930s at Columbia, he developed the molecular beam magnetic resonance method: firing a beam of atoms through cleverly arranged magnets and a small oscillating radio-frequency field, then measuring the tiny flip of nuclear spin with enough precision to extract magnetic moments to several decimal places — figures that offered a sharp test of quantum theory's predictions about the nucleus's innermost workings. The technique was fastidious, exacting, and, on the surface, entirely impractical. Some three decades later, after several lateral leaps and refinements by other researchers, the same resonance principle became the physical heart of magnetic resonance imaging, allowing clinicians to map soft tissue in three dimensions without a single X-ray. A world without Rabi's painstaking spectroscopy is one where the MRI scanner stays forever in the drawer marked 'nice idea.'

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Pain Travels on Separate Wires

Joseph Erlanger · Herbert S. Gasser

For much of the nineteenth century, physiologists treated a nerve as a wire — a single channel down which impulses raced at one speed in one direction. Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Gasser, working at Washington University in St. Louis, applied oscilloscope technology to individual nerve fibres in the 1920s and 1930s and revealed that this model was comically oversimplified. Nerve fibres come in a range of diameters; thick, heavily myelinated fibres carry motor commands and sharp-pain signals at speeds approaching 70 metres per second, while thin unmyelinated fibres carry slow, aching pain at a comparative crawl of under two metres per second. The brain, it emerged, was receiving a running commentary rather than a single telegram, with each sensation arriving in its own time on its own line. This differential timing is why a sharp burn produces a quick 'ouch' followed, a second later, by a deeper, spreading ache — two separate signals on two separate roads. Pain pharmacology, anaesthesia, and the treatment of neuropathic conditions all rest on the map Erlanger and Gasser drew.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Six-Volume Walk Through the Ice Age

Johannes V. Jensen

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen had spent the first forty years of the twentieth century attempting to write the longest coherent account of human evolution ever set in fiction, and largely succeeding. His six-volume cycle, 'The Long Journey,' traced humanity from the Ice Age through Columbus's voyage to America, blending natural history with mythology in a mode that Scandinavian critics found invigorating and foreign readers found difficult to categorise — which is perhaps the highest compliment available. The Swedish Academy cited the 'rare strength and fertility of his poetic imagination,' a formulation that manages to sound both grand and slightly baffled. Jensen was also a skilled lyric poet and an early Darwinist enthusiast in Danish letters, and his work shares with the best evolutionary writing an appreciation for the immense depth of ordinary human time. He remains, outside Denmark, largely the answer to a question nobody quite thinks to ask.

DNA identified as genetic material

The Simple Molecule Held the Instructions

Oswald Avery · Colin MacLeod · Maclyn McCarty

For two decades, the biochemical community had been watching bacteria 'transform' — a virulent strain's dead remains, somehow, could convert a harmless living strain into a killer — without agreeing on what exactly was carrying the instruction. Protein, the majority assumed, because proteins were complicated enough to encode specificity; DNA was thought too simple and repetitive to carry meaningful information. Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty, working at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, spent years systematically destroying or removing each class of molecule from transforming extracts until only one candidate remained standing: deoxyribonucleic acid. Their paper appeared in the Journal of Experimental Medicine in February 1944, and it was received — outside a small circle — with the polite bewilderment that greets results that are too consequential to absorb quickly. Some leading biochemists spent years running counter-experiments in hopes of finding the protein they were sure must be responsible. They didn't find it. Avery never won a Nobel Prize, which is perhaps the most discussed oversight in the history of that institution.

Colossus computing machine delivered to Bletchley Park

A Wardrobe-Sized Machine Reads the Enemy's Mail

In January 1944, a machine the size of a large wardrobe — built at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in London, designed by engineer Tommy Flowers and his colleagues — arrived at Bletchley Park and was set to work on the Lorenz cipher that the German High Command used for its highest-level communications. Colossus contained approximately 1,500 vacuum tubes, read coded messages from paper tape at 5,000 characters per second, and performed Boolean logical operations electronically rather than electromechanically — meaning it was, in the relevant sense, fast. A second, more powerful Mark 2 Colossus arrived in time for D-Day in June, helping to confirm that German command believed the main Allied invasion would fall at Pas-de-Calais rather than Normandy. After the war, the machines were dismantled and the project classified; Flowers and his team were forbidden to speak of it for thirty years, watching other candidates receive credit as computing's founders while they kept the actual story in a drawer. When the secret finally emerged, Colossus was quietly acknowledged as one of the first programmable electronic computers.

2.3 million doses of penicillin prepared for D-Day invasion

Enough Penicillin, Arriving Just in Time

When Alexander Fleming noticed a contaminating mould dissolving a plate of Staphylococcus in 1928, he published a note and largely moved on; it was Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at Oxford who, in 1940 and 1941, turned his observation into a medicine and demonstrated it could cure bacterial infections in humans. The problem then became industrial: growing Penicillium notatum in sufficient quantity required an enormous cooperative effort between British and American pharmaceutical companies, the USDA's Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria (which found better growth media and higher-yielding mould strains), and a wartime procurement apparatus that bent production targets upward every quarter. By June 1944, American manufacturers had produced 2.3 million doses for the Normandy landings. The result, in the field, was the effective end of wound infection as a dominant cause of battlefield death — a cause that had claimed more soldiers than bullets in virtually every prior war. The mathematics were blunt: sepsis, gas gangrene, and pneumonia now had an answer, and the answer arrived in adequate quantity just in time.