1952

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Fingerprint Made of Radio Waves

Felix Bloch · E. M. Purcell

In 1946, Felix Bloch at Stanford and Edward Purcell at Harvard discovered, entirely independently and within months of each other, that the nuclei of certain atoms — hydrogen being the most useful — will absorb radio-frequency energy when bathed in a strong magnetic field, and then release it again at a frequency as characteristic as a fingerprint. The technique, nuclear magnetic resonance, gave chemists a way to probe the structure of molecules without destroying them, and physicists a window into the quantum behaviour of matter that had previously required considerably more violence. Decades passed before the clinical implications became obvious: hydrogen is abundant in water, water is abundant in tissue, and if you build a large enough magnet around a person and apply the right radio pulses, you can map the interior of a living body in exquisite detail without a single ionising photon. The procedure was eventually renamed MRI because administrators discovered, with some justice, that the word "nuclear" was emptying waiting rooms. A world without it is one where the soft tissue of the brain is visible only on the autopsy table, which is a poor moment to make a diagnosis.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Sorting Wet Sand by Colour

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

By the 1940s, the amino acids making up proteins had long been known to exist, but separating them from each other was the analytical equivalent of trying to sort wet sand by colour — tedious, imprecise, and often wrong. Archer Martin and Richard Synge, working at the Wool Industries Research Association in Leeds, reasoned that compounds which are chemically similar might still differ in how they prefer to distribute themselves between two immiscible solvents, and that this preference could be exploited by flowing one solvent through the other on a stationary medium. The resulting partition chromatography, published in 1941 and recognised here eleven years late with the typical Nobel lag, could cleanly separate amino acids that had previously defeated analysis. Martin went on to invent paper chromatography and then, with Anthony James, gas chromatography — essentially making him the father of an entire laboratory discipline in a single career. Modern drug development, food analysis, environmental monitoring, and the forensic techniques that appear in every crime drama all rest on variations of the trick Martin and Synge worked out in a wool laboratory in West Yorkshire.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Soil Gave Up Its Weapon

Selman A. Waksman

Tuberculosis was, for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the background condition of modern life — the disease of Keats and Chekhov and a great many people whose names nobody recorded, accounting at its peak for roughly one in seven deaths in Europe. Sulfonamides and penicillin had transformed bacterial infection more broadly, but the tubercle bacillus, surrounded by a waxy coat impervious to most antibiotics, remained aloof from the revolution. Selman Waksman, a soil microbiologist at Rutgers who had spent two decades cataloguing the chemical warfare waged by soil organisms on each other, set his laboratory systematically hunting for something that would kill it, and in 1943 his student Albert Schatz isolated streptomycin from a common soil bacterium, Streptomyces griseus. By 1947 it was in clinical use; by the early 1950s, combination with other drugs was curing cases that would previously have meant a sanatorium bed and diminishing hope. The Nobel went to Waksman alone, which caused a legal dispute with Schatz that was eventually settled quietly, a reminder that credit in science, like credit in finance, is often distributed according to rank rather than contribution.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Provincial Suffering, Made Universal

François Mauriac

François Mauriac grew up in the Landes, the pine-forest country south of Bordeaux where Gascon Catholic families sat on inherited land and each other's nerves, and he spent the better part of his literary life writing novels that suggested he had never entirely left. In Thérèse Desqueyroux, a woman attempts to poison her husband and is returned, unpunished and unrehabilitated, to the household that produced her — a situation Mauriac treats with a cold, almost forensic pity that most novelists would mistake for cruelty. Le Nœud de vipères gives us a dying miser composing a memoir of grievance and finding, too late, that the examination of a life can become something like its repair. His characters carry their spiritual torments through landscapes of sand and resin, and grace, when it arrives, is never cheap or comfortable or particularly timely. The Swedish Academy awarded him the prize for "the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life," which is a polite way of saying he made provincial bourgeois suffering feel universal.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Hospital Built on Reverence for Life

Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer was, by most measures, one of the more implausibly accomplished people of the twentieth century — a theologian who wrote a study of Bach, an organist good enough to give concerts professionally, a philosopher who developed an ethic he called "reverence for life," and a physician who abandoned a distinguished European career to build and run a hospital at Lambaréné in what is now Gabon, largely at his own expense, from 1913 until his death in 1965. He arrived in equatorial Africa armed with a crate of medical supplies and the conviction that one could not profess respect for life in the abstract while ignoring its suffering in the concrete — a position of unusual internal consistency for a moral philosopher. The hospital he built was not, by contemporary standards, a model of cultural sensitivity or racial egalitarianism, and later assessments have been correspondingly complicated. But the scale of the need he met, and the discipline with which he met it, remain their own argument. He accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and donated the money to expand the hospital.

Hershey–Chase experiment confirms DNA is the genetic material

A Blender Settles What Genes Are Made Of

By 1952, there was still a constituency of biologists who believed that proteins, being far more chemically varied than DNA's four-letter alphabet, were the more plausible candidate for hereditary information — the argument from complexity seemed compelling, and complexity had always been protein's strong suit. Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase settled the argument with a bacteriophage, two radioactive isotopes, and a kitchen blender. They labelled the DNA of a phage with radioactive phosphorus and its protein coat with radioactive sulphur, then allowed the phage to infect bacteria. The blender sheared the empty protein husks from the bacterial surface; when the researchers centrifuged the mixture, the sulphur — the protein — stayed in the liquid. The phosphorus — the DNA — was inside the cells, directing the production of entirely new viruses. Only one conclusion was possible. The experiment was published in August 1952, months before Watson and Crick's model gave DNA a structure worthy of its new status, and it made that structure's announcement, the following April, feel less like a surprise than a confirmation. The blender used in the experiment is now held by the Smithsonian Institution, which seems exactly right.

Ivy Mike: first thermonuclear device test

An Island, Replaced by a Crater

At 7:15 on the morning of 1 November 1952, a device the size of a two-storey building was detonated on Elugelab Island in the Marshall Islands, and Elugelab ceased to exist — replaced by a crater 1.9 kilometres wide and 50 metres deep in the floor of the Pacific. The yield was 10.4 megatons, approximately 450 times the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and it was achieved by using a fission explosion to compress and ignite a secondary stage of liquid deuterium, the staged design that Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam had worked out the previous year. The Soviets, through intelligence channels, had a reasonable picture of American intentions within days; they tested their own thermonuclear device the following August, compressing the geopolitical calendar in ways that concentrated minds. Ivy Mike was never a weapon — the need for cryogenic deuterium made it impractical to deploy — but the principle it demonstrated did not require liquid hydrogen to work, a refinement that arrived quickly. The designers were already solving that problem while the mushroom cloud was still rising over what had, very recently, been an island.

Salk begins human trials of inactivated poliovirus vaccine

Antibodies, Without the Disease

Poliomyelitis had acquired, by the early 1950s, a particular species of dread — it struck without warning, favoured summer, and showed a baffling preference for children in wealthier, cleaner households, which rather undermined the comforting belief that hygiene was protection enough. Jonas Salk, working at the University of Pittsburgh, had spent years refining a vaccine based on poliovirus killed with formaldehyde rather than live-attenuated strains, reasoning that a dead virus could train the immune system without risking the disease itself. He began human trials in 1952, first in children who had already survived polio and therefore had natural antibodies — a reasonable population in which to check that his inactivated preparation provoked a measurable immune response without harm. All of them showed rising antibody titres; none contracted disease. The results justified something far larger: a nationwide field trial in 1954 involving more than 1.8 million children, the largest public health experiment in American history, whose results were announced to waiting journalists and a waiting country on 12 April 1955. The technique of inactivating a virus to produce a safe, effective vaccine — now applied to influenza, hepatitis A, and others — began in Pittsburgh in 1952, with a group of children who had already been through the worst.