1951

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Nucleus Comes Apart on a Cambridge Bench

John Cockcroft · Ernest T.S. Walton

In April 1932, at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton switched on the world's first practical particle accelerator — a contraption of glass tubes and carefully shaped electrodes — and aimed a beam of protons at a thin sliver of lithium. The nucleus came apart, producing two helium nuclei that flew off with considerably more energy than the incoming proton had brought, and the deficit was accounted for exactly by Einstein's equation relating mass to energy, which had spent seventeen years as an elegant theory in want of experimental confirmation. Cockcroft, an electrical engineer by training, had only entered nuclear physics because Rutherford needed someone who could build a reliable power supply; Walton, an Irishman of extraordinary patience, had attempted two earlier accelerator designs before this one worked. They had, in short, done deliberately and precisely what nature had been doing accidentally in cosmic rays for billions of years — the difference being that nature had never had to write a grant application. The Nobel arrived nineteen years after the experiment, which is the committee's business, but the experiment itself established that nuclear reactions could be controlled, initiated, and measured from a bench, and everything that followed — reactors, medical isotopes, particle physics as a systematic discipline — traces a line back to that Cambridge afternoon.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Ten New Rooms Added to the Periodic Table

Edwin M. McMillan · Glenn T. Seaborg

When Dmitri Mendeleev arranged the elements into his periodic table in 1869, he was careful to leave gaps for elements not yet discovered — but he stopped at uranium, which at atomic number 92 seemed a reasonable place to stop, nature being only so generous. Edwin McMillan ended that assumption in 1940 when he bombarded uranium with neutrons at Berkeley and found, accumulating in the target, an element with 93 protons that had never existed in any quantity on Earth; he named it neptunium, the next planet out, and the naming convention held. Glenn Seaborg then proceeded, with an almost suspicious degree of productivity, to extend the sequence through plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, and beyond — a total of ten new elements in roughly a decade, which reordered the periodic table's lower rows into what Seaborg called the actinide series, a group that turned out to be a better chemical analogy to the lanthanides than anyone had anticipated. He proposed this rearrangement while the elements themselves were still classified secrets, which gave the act a pleasingly abstract quality. The Nobel recognized not just discovery but the transformation of the periodic table from a map of nature into a construction project — an ongoing one, with elements still being synthesized in heavy-ion accelerators today.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Twenty-Eight Million Doses of a Tamed Virus

Max Theiler

Yellow fever had been erasing expeditions, cities, and armies for centuries — it killed roughly a fifth of Philadelphia's population in 1793, derailed the French attempt to build a Panama canal, and remained without reliable remedy well into the twentieth century, when the only known preventive was the almost equally dangerous inoculation with live blood from a recovering patient. Max Theiler, a South African working at the Rockefeller Institute, spent years coaxing the virus through hundreds of passages in mouse brains and, later, chick embryos, gradually attenuating it until it retained immunogenicity but shed its lethality — a process requiring a tolerance for setback that would have discouraged a less methodical temperament. The resulting 17D vaccine, developed in the mid-1930s, proved remarkably stable, remarkably effective, and remarkably safe, and by the time Theiler received the Nobel in 1951 more than 28 million doses had been administered across Africa and South America. He remains, as of this writing, the only person to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on a vaccine derived from a virus he himself cultured. The disease is still out there, still lethal, still circulating in parts of Africa and South America where vaccination coverage lapses — which is precisely why 28 million doses is a number worth pausing on rather than reading past.

Nobel Prize in Literature

The Man the Crowd Chose to Release

Pär Lagerkvist

Pär Lagerkvist grew up in a small Swedish town at the end of the nineteenth century, in a household where Lutheran faith was the weather rather than the furniture, and he spent the rest of his life — through two world wars, through the rise and fall of fascism, through everything the century arranged to demonstrate that confident belief was difficult to sustain — writing about what remains when certainty goes. His prose is bare almost to the point of austerity, sentences stripped of ornamentation as though he trusted the questions to carry their own weight. The novel that preceded and probably clinched the prize, Barabbas (1950), follows the man the crowd chose to release instead of Jesus: a hardened criminal who is, against his will, made a witness, and who then spends the rest of his life neither able to believe what he saw nor able to return to a world in which he had not seen it. It is not a comfortable book, and it does not try to be. Lagerkvist's legacy is that he wrote about the absence of faith with precisely the seriousness that faith itself demands — which is a harder thing to do, and a rarer one, than writing either devotional literature or contemptuous dismissal.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Matchstick Dipper Who Argued for Peace

Léon Jouhaux

Léon Jouhaux came from the working-class districts of Paris and began his career dipping matchsticks in a factory — work that, given the phosphorus involved, was slowly poisonous — before becoming secretary-general of the Confédération Générale du Travail in 1909 and holding the post, with wartime interruptions and a wartime imprisonment in Buchenwald, for nearly four decades. His central conviction was that labor rights and international peace were not separate problems but the same problem wearing different clothes: poverty, exploitation, and powerlessness within nations were, in his view, the same engine that drove conflict between them. He brought this argument to the founding of the International Labour Organization after the First World War and pressed it again, with somewhat weary persistence, after the Second. The ILO sounds like exactly the kind of institution that a cynical observer might dismiss as a talking shop, and it has had its share of talking; but the conventions it established on working hours, forced labor, child labor, and workplace safety created the legal architecture within which hundreds of millions of workers have since argued — successfully, often — for something better. Jouhaux's particular contribution was that he understood organizing and diplomacy as the same trade, and practiced both for long enough that the combination made a measurable difference.

Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research

One Epidemiologist, Seven Diseases

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Karl F. Meyer

Karl Friedrich Meyer arrived in the United States from Switzerland in 1913 and proceeded to work on plague, brucellosis, psittacosis, botulism, leptospirosis, equine encephalomyelitis, and various other diseases with a range that suggests either extraordinary breadth of curiosity or an unusually combative relationship with nature. He was based at the George Williams Hooper Foundation at UC San Francisco, which under his directorship became one of the most productive centers of infectious disease research in the country, and his work on psittacosis — the parrot fever that had caused a major American outbreak in 1929 — led directly to the protocols that still govern the import and quarantine of birds. His colleagues regarded him as the most versatile epidemiologist of the twentieth century, which is a title with no shortage of candidates given the century in question. The Lasker Foundation, which has a respectable record of identifying important scientists before Stockholm does, gave him its Basic Medical Research Award in 1951 — and it is a reasonable measure of how many fields he touched that a biographer would need at least three distinct literatures to write his life.

UNIVAC I: first commercial electronic computer delivered

Thirteen Tonnes, Bought Off the Shelf

The Census Bureau had been struggling with the 1950 count — America's population was growing faster than the Bureau's ability to tabulate it, a problem that had plagued the 1880 census so badly that a punched-card system was invented specifically to survive it. UNIVAC I, designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly and delivered by Remington Rand on 31 March 1951, was a different order of machine: it read data from magnetic tape rather than punched cards, weighed approximately 13 tonnes, occupied a room, and could perform around 1,905 operations per second, which at the time seemed almost extravagant. More importantly, it was designed from the outset to be operated by people who were not themselves engineers, which was a philosophical departure from the bespoke machines that had come before. It became briefly famous in 1952 when CBS used a UNIVAC to predict the presidential election — it forecast Eisenhower's landslide correctly, though the network initially suppressed the result because it seemed implausible. The line from that Census Bureau room to every data center running every government system today is unbroken; UNIVAC I established that a computer could be a general-purpose commercial tool rather than a one-off scientific instrument, and the economy has been rearranging itself around that idea ever since.

Rosalind Franklin begins X-ray crystallography of DNA

The Phosphates Were on the Outside

Rosalind Franklin arrived at King's College London in January 1951 carrying expertise in X-ray diffraction that she had honed in Paris, where she had produced some of the finest crystallographic work on carbon yet achieved, and she turned that precision on DNA fibres with a methodical care that the problem had rarely received. Within months she had established that the phosphate groups sit on the outside of the molecule — not the inside, as some models assumed — and identified two distinct structural forms, the dry A-form and the wet B-form, photographing each with an exposure discipline that pushed the technique close to its practical limits. Her Photograph 51, taken in May 1952, would later provide Watson and Crick with the critical dimensions they needed; the circumstances of its use, passed without her knowledge by her colleague Maurice Wilkins, became one of the more uncomfortable episodes in the history of science. The Nobel Prize for the double helix went in 1962 to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins; Franklin had died of ovarian cancer in 1958, and the prize is not awarded posthumously. What she established in 1951 — with rigour, with patience, with a refusal to publish until the data supported the conclusion — was the empirical foundation on which the structure was eventually built, and that foundation has not shifted.