1950

Nobel Prize in Physics

Cecil Powell

Powell's group at Bristol exposed specially sensitised photographic emulsions at high altitude and read the particle tracks left in them as one reads handwriting — patiently, with a magnifying glass. The tracks revealed the pion, the meson Yukawa had predicted in 1935, and the method itself became a standard tool of particle physics.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Otto Diels · Kurt Alder

The Diels-Alder reaction — in which a conjugated diene and a dienophile combine to form a six-membered ring — became one of the most versatile tools in organic synthesis for building complex carbon frameworks. Diels and Alder discovered it in 1928; by 1950 it was in the toolkit of every synthetic chemist alive, which is approximately the definition of a useful reaction.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Edward C. Kendall · Tadeus Reichstein · Philip S. Hench

Kendall and Reichstein independently isolated cortisone and other hormones of the adrenal cortex; Hench then demonstrated that cortisone dramatically relieved rheumatoid arthritis — patients who had been bedridden stood up and walked. It was the founding moment of anti-inflammatory steroid therapy, and Hench's patients must have found it rather more impressive than the committee citation managed to convey.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Bertrand Russell

Russell's prize, for writings championing humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought, acknowledged a career spanning mathematical logic, analytic philosophy, popular philosophy, and decades of public advocacy for nuclear disarmament — a range of output that his critics considered dilettantism and his admirers considered superhuman industry.

Nobel Peace Prize

Ralph Bunche

Bunche negotiated the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and four Arab states, conducting shuttle diplomacy that prevented a resumption of full-scale war. He became the first person of African descent to receive the Nobel Peace Prize — an honor he received while being unable to eat at certain restaurants in Washington, DC.

Fields Medal

Fields Medal

Laurent Schwartz · Atle Selberg

Awarded at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, Massachusetts — the first since the war allowed the congress to reconvene — the medals went to Schwartz for his theory of distributions, which gave mathematicians a rigorous way to handle objects like Dirac's delta function, and to Selberg for analytic number theory including an elementary proof of the prime number theorem.

Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

George Wells Beadle

Beadle was recognized for the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis, developed through Neurospora experiments with Edward Tatum through the early 1940s. The 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine would confirm what the Lasker committee had recognized eight years earlier.

Chargaff's rules published: equal base pairing in DNA

Erwin Chargaff published measurements showing that in DNA, adenine always equals thymine in quantity, and guanine always equals cytosine — regardless of species or tissue type. The rules were noted by Watson and Crick three years later as an essential clue to the double helix's structure, though Chargaff himself found their appropriation of his data rather more casual than he would have preferred.

Jan Oort proposes the Oort Cloud

Dutch astronomer Jan Oort noted that long-period comets arrive from all directions equally and proposed that a vast spherical reservoir of cometary nuclei surrounds the solar system at tens of thousands of astronomical units — a cloud so remote that it has never been directly observed. It remains the accepted explanation for where long-period comets come from, which is to say we infer it from the comets that fall out of it.