1945

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Artturi Virtanen

Virtanen was recognized for his AIV method of preserving green fodder by acidification — a technique for keeping grass nutritious through winter that sounds undramatic until you consider how many animals and people it helped to feed during years of European scarcity.

Nobel Prize in Physics

Wolfgang Pauli

Pauli's exclusion principle — the rule that no two electrons in an atom may occupy the same quantum state — was proposed in 1925 and explains, among other things, why matter is solid rather than permeable. Without it, you would pass through your chair. The Nobel arrived twenty years after the idea, which is a relatively modest delay for something so fundamental.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

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

Fleming noticed in 1928 that a mould was killing the bacteria around it; Chain and Florey spent the early 1940s working out how to purify penicillin in quantities large enough to matter, and then demonstrated that it worked in people. All three shared the prize, though not, by accounts, entirely harmoniously.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Gabriela Mistral

The Chilean poet — born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga — was the first Latin American writer to receive the Nobel, cited for lyric poetry of powerful emotion that had made her name a symbol of idealistic aspiration across the continent. She accepted the prize in Stockholm wearing a dress of Chilean wool.

Nobel Peace Prize

Cordell Hull

Roosevelt's long-serving Secretary of State was honoured for his work toward international cooperation and his role in establishing the United Nations. Hull had already resigned from office in poor health by the time the prize was announced — he received the news from hospital.

Lasker Awards established

Albert and Mary Lasker founded their eponymous awards in 1945 to honour advances in biomedical research, with the first prizes to be presented in 1946. The awards would become among the most reliable predictors of a future Nobel, which was not the original intention but turned out to be a reasonable accident.

Trinity atomic test demonstrates nuclear weapons viability

At 5:29 a.m. on 16 July, a plutonium implosion device designated the Gadget detonated at Alamogordo, New Mexico, releasing energy equivalent to 21,000 tons of TNT and raising a cloud 38,000 feet into the pre-dawn sky. J. Robert Oppenheimer, watching from the observation post, recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita. The scientists celebrated, then drove back to Los Alamos in relative silence.