1952

Nobel Prize in Physics

Felix Bloch · E. M. Purcell

Working independently in 1946, Bloch and Purcell discovered that atomic nuclei in a magnetic field will absorb and re-emit radio waves at a frequency characteristic of the element — a property so precise it became a tool for both physics and, decades later, the hospital scanner that images your spine without ionising radiation. The technique is now called MRI, because "nuclear magnetic resonance" frightened patients.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Archer J.P. Martin · Richard L.M. Synge

Martin and Synge had a problem: amino acids are chemically similar enough that separating them was tedious and unreliable. Their solution, partition chromatography, exploited tiny differences in how compounds distribute themselves between two liquid phases, cleanly resolving mixtures that had previously defeated analysis. From that 1941 invention came paper chromatography and, eventually, the whole apparatus of modern liquid separations.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Selman A. Waksman

Tuberculosis had been the leading infectious killer in the industrialised world for long enough that many people had quietly accepted it as permanent. Waksman and his student Albert Schatz isolated streptomycin from a soil bacterium in 1943, and by 1947 it was in clinical use — the first antibiotic that worked against TB, drawn, improbably, from a handful of dirt.

Nobel Prize in Literature

François Mauriac

Mauriac wrote about provincial Catholic France with the relentlessness of someone who knew it very well and found it only intermittently forgivable. His characters in Thérèse Desqueyroux and Le Nœud de vipères carry their spiritual torments through landscapes of pine forests and family money, and the reader is left with the distinct impression that grace, when it comes, costs something.

Nobel Peace Prize

Albert Schweitzer

Schweitzer was a theologian, an organist of some distinction, and a physician who spent decades running a hospital in Gabon at his own expense. He called his philosophy "reverence for life" and applied it with unusual consistency, which is not as common among moral philosophers as one might hope.

Hershey–Chase experiment confirms DNA is the genetic material

Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase labelled the DNA and protein coats of a bacteriophage with different radioactive isotopes, infected bacteria with the phage, and then used a kitchen blender to shake the viral husks loose. Only the DNA entered the cells; only the DNA directed the production of new viruses. The blender is now in the Smithsonian, which seems right.

Ivy Mike: first thermonuclear device test

On 1 November, the United States detonated Ivy Mike on Elugelab Island in the Marshall Islands, yielding 10.4 megatons — roughly 450 times the Nagasaki bomb. The island was vaporised. The device used liquid deuterium in a staged Teller–Ulam configuration, and the fact that it had to be the size of a house to work was the one limitation its designers were already busy solving.

Salk begins human trials of inactivated poliovirus vaccine

Jonas Salk began testing his formaldehyde-inactivated poliovirus vaccine in children who had already survived polio, then extended trials to seronegative subjects; all showed rising antibody levels without contracting disease. The results were encouraging enough to plan something larger — a nationwide field trial two years later that would involve 1.8 million children.