1945

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

How Silage Survived a Long Winter

Artturi Virtanen

The Finnish biochemist Artturi Virtanen spent the 1920s and 1930s working on a problem that sounded agricultural to the point of somnolence: how do you keep silage — fermented grass, essentially — from rotting over a long winter without destroying its nutritional value? His AIV method, developed through the 1930s, involved acidifying the fodder with hydrochloric and sulphuric acid, which suppressed the microbial activity that degraded proteins while leaving the feed genuinely useful to livestock. It sounds undramatic until you place it in context: Virtanen was Finnish, and his country's agriculture operated on narrow margins even without a world war grinding supply chains to powder. The method spread through Scandinavia and beyond, helping maintain dairy and livestock production through years when every calorie was contested. Virtanen was also notably meticulous — he simultaneously investigated the nitrogen fixation of legumes, the chemistry of milk proteins, and vitamins in butter, and he lived to ninety-two, which he attributed in part to diet, which is perhaps the most Finnish possible footnote to a career in food chemistry.

Nobel Prize in Physics

No Two Electrons Share a Seat

Wolfgang Pauli

In 1925, the twenty-five-year-old Wolfgang Pauli — already so notoriously critical that equipment in his vicinity was said to malfunction merely from his proximity, a phenomenon his colleagues called the 'Pauli effect' — proposed a principle so deceptively simple that it is easy to miss how much of the physical world hangs on it: no two electrons in an atom can share the same set of quantum numbers. That is all. The consequences, however, are total. Without the exclusion principle, electrons would all collapse into the lowest energy state; atoms would not have the electronic structure that makes chemistry possible; matter would not have the rigidity that lets it resist being compressed; and you would fall through your chair, through the floor, and, eventually, through the planet. The Nobel came twenty years after the idea, which is a generous lag for a rule that explains why solids are solid. Pauli received the news by telegram while at Princeton — the same year the bombs fell — and accepted with characteristic Austrian formality and private satisfaction.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Spoiled Dish, A Saved World

Sir Alexander Fleming · Ernst B. Chain · Sir Howard Florey

The story begins with a messy laboratory and a spoiled Petri dish. In September 1928, Alexander Fleming returned from holiday to find that a mould — Penicillium notatum, blown in through a window or drifted up from the mycology lab below, accounts vary — had contaminated one of his staphylococcal cultures and was dissolving the bacteria around it in a neat, suggestive ring. Fleming published his observation in 1929, found the active substance difficult to isolate in useful quantities, and more or less moved on. It took Ernst Chain and Howard Florey at Oxford, working urgently through the early years of the war, to solve the purification problem and then — in 1941 — to demonstrate that penicillin actually saved human lives, injecting it into patients who were dying of bacterial infections and watching them recover. By 1944 it was being manufactured industrially in the United States and deployed across both theatres of war. The three men shared the 1945 prize, though their personal relations were not especially warm: Fleming received the lion's share of public credit, which Florey in particular found galling, having done the hard chemical and clinical work that turned a curiosity into a cure. A world without their combined effort is one where a scratch can still kill you, and surgery remains largely a controlled form of infection.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Village Schoolteacher's Wool Dress

Gabriela Mistral

She was born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga in a small village in northern Chile in 1889, adopted the pen name Gabriela Mistral from an archangel and a Provençal wind, and taught school for years in the Chilean countryside before her poetry began to circulate beyond it. Her early work was marked by grief — a young man she had loved died by suicide in 1909, and the loss saturated her most famous early collection, Desolación, with an anguish that readers found both raw and formally controlled. She eventually became a diplomat, a correspondent for the League of Nations, a presence in Mexico's post-revolutionary cultural reform, and something of a conscience for Latin American letters. The Swedish Academy cited her lyric poetry of powerful emotion as having made her name a symbol of idealistic aspiration across the Spanish-speaking world. She was the first Latin American writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, and she accepted the award in Stockholm wearing a dress of Chilean wool — a gesture of studied simplicity from a woman who never stopped thinking of herself as a village schoolteacher. Her poetry remains untranslatable in the way that all poetry is, and indispensable in the way that very little is.

Nobel Peace Prize

Prevention, Not Drama, From a Hospital Bed

Cordell Hull

Cordell Hull served as Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of State for eleven years — longer than anyone else in the role — and spent much of that time managing the diplomatic architecture that would eventually hold the Allied coalition together and, more ambitiously, designing what would come after the war. He was a Tennessee lawyer and former congressman who believed, with the methodical certainty of the self-made man, that lowering trade barriers and building multilateral institutions were not just practical policies but moral ones — that commerce and cooperation were the surest deterrents to the kind of nationalist convulsion that had twice devastated Europe in his lifetime. He played a significant role in the early planning for the United Nations, the organisation that would be formally chartered in San Francisco in 1945. The Nobel Committee honoured him for that contribution. Hull had already resigned as Secretary of State in November 1944, his health broken, and he received news of the prize from hospital — a fitting, if melancholy, setting for a man whose life's work was the unglamorous business of preventing catastrophe rather than dramatising it.

Lasker Awards established

America's Nobels, Before Stockholm Knew

Albert Lasker was the most successful advertising executive in early twentieth-century America — he had helped sell cigarettes, soap, and presidential candidates — and his wife Mary was a committed health activist who had spent years lobbying Congress to take biomedical research seriously. Together in 1945 they founded the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation and its eponymous awards, which would begin presenting prizes to biomedical researchers in 1946. Their stated aim was to recognise advances that brought medicine closer to understanding and treating disease; the unstated ambition was to make medical science feel as culturally significant as it actually was. What they did not plan, but what emerged anyway, was an astonishing predictive record: an improbable fraction of Lasker Award recipients have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, often years or even decades later, earning the Lasker the informal designation 'America's Nobels.' This was not a design feature but a reasonable accident — or, more precisely, a sign that the committee developed genuine instincts for recognising work of lasting importance before Stockholm did.

Trinity atomic test demonstrates nuclear weapons viability

A Fireball Thirty-Eight Thousand Feet High

At 5:29 in the morning on 16 July 1945, in a stretch of New Mexico desert the test planners had named Trinity, a plutonium implosion device designated the Gadget detonated with an energy equivalent to roughly 21,000 tons of TNT, sending a fireball visible for hundreds of miles and a cloud 38,000 feet into the pre-dawn sky. The flash was seen in three states; the shockwave broke windows in a town a hundred miles away; the ground beneath the detonation point had been fused into a glassy mineral — later named trinitite — which is still faintly radioactive today. J. Robert Oppenheimer, watching from the observation bunker, later recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita — 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds' — though he also recalled feeling, in that first stunned moment, simply that it had worked. Kenneth Bainbridge, the test director, put it more plainly: 'Now we are all sons of bitches.' The scientists celebrated briefly and drove back to Los Alamos in considerable quiet. Less than four weeks later, devices of similar design were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Trinity was not a discovery in the ordinary scientific sense; it was a demonstration that a decades-old theoretical possibility had become a practical weapon. The age it inaugurated has not yet found a satisfactory name for itself.