1951

Nobel Prize in Physics

John Cockcroft · Ernest T.S. Walton

At the Cavendish Laboratory in 1932, Cockcroft and Walton aimed a beam of protons at a sliver of lithium and watched the nucleus come apart — the first time human beings had deliberately split an atom rather than waiting for nature to do it. The energy released matched Einstein's equation exactly, which was satisfying, if slightly alarming.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Edwin M. McMillan · Glenn T. Seaborg

The periodic table had always implied a logical continuation beyond uranium, and McMillan found it in 1940 when he detected neptunium (element 93) accumulating in an irradiated uranium sample. Seaborg kept going, producing plutonium and eight further elements and rearranging the bottom rows of the table into the actinide series — a revision that chemists had not seen coming.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Max Theiler

Yellow fever had a particular talent for killing people in large numbers, and no reliable way to stop it existed until Theiler coaxed the virus into a live-attenuated form in the 1930s. By 1951 more than 28 million doses of the 17D vaccine had been administered, which is the sort of statistic that is easy to read past and shouldn't be.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Pär Lagerkvist

Lagerkvist spent his career asking large questions — about faith, about evil, about what it means to live without certainty — and doing so in prose spare enough that the questions had room to breathe. His novel Barabbas, published the year before the prize, follows the man released instead of Christ, who spends his life unable to believe and equally unable to stop trying.

Nobel Peace Prize

Léon Jouhaux

For nearly four decades Jouhaux led the French General Confederation of Labour, treating the rights of workers and the avoidance of war as essentially the same problem. He was also a founding figure of the International Labour Organization, which is the sort of institution that sounds bureaucratic until you consider what the world looked like before anyone thought to build it.

Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Karl F. Meyer

Meyer worked on plague, psittacosis, botulism, and assorted other diseases with an energy that suggested he found the sheer variety of things trying to kill people genuinely interesting. His colleagues considered him the most versatile epidemiologist of the century, which is a title with a good deal of competition.

UNIVAC I: first commercial electronic computer delivered

On 31 March, Remington Rand delivered UNIVAC I to the United States Census Bureau — a machine that used magnetic tape instead of punched cards and was designed, unusually for the time, to be useful to people who were not themselves engineers. It weighed 13 tonnes, occupied a large room, and could perform about 1,905 operations per second, which seemed extraordinary.

Rosalind Franklin begins X-ray crystallography of DNA

Franklin arrived at King's College London and set about photographing DNA fibres with a patience and precision the problem demanded and rarely received. She established that the phosphate groups sit on the outside of the molecule and identified two distinct structural forms — findings that were, as it turned out, rather important to two men working in Cambridge who had not yet solved the structure.