1953

Nobel Prize in Physics

Frits Zernike

To look at a living cell before Zernike, you had to kill it first — stain it, fix it, and hope the process hadn't rearranged anything important. His phase-contrast microscope converted the invisible differences in how light slows through transparent tissue into differences in brightness, so that living cells could be watched going about their business entirely unmolested.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Hermann Staudinger

In the 1920s, Staudinger proposed something his colleagues found improbable: that rubber and cellulose were not clusters of small molecules hovering near each other, but single enormous molecules held together by ordinary covalent bonds. He was right, they were wrong, and the science of macromolecular chemistry — which underpins every plastic object you have ever touched — dates from his insistence on the point.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Hans Krebs · Fritz Lipmann

Krebs mapped the citric acid cycle, the looping chemical pathway by which every cell that breathes oxygen extracts energy from food — a process running continuously in your body as you read this. Lipmann discovered coenzyme A, the small molecule that feeds material into that cycle; between them, they had sketched the engine of cellular life.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Winston Churchill

Churchill won the prize not for running a country through its worst hour but for writing about it — six volumes on the Second World War and four on the history of the English-speaking peoples, written with the rolling, slightly theatrical prose of a man who knew he was also a character in the story. The Swedish Academy cited his mastery of historical description and "brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values," which Churchill almost certainly took as less than his due.

Nobel Peace Prize

George C. Marshall

Marshall proposed the European Recovery Program in 1947, directing more than $13 billion toward the rebuilding of Western European economies after the war — the largest foreign-aid effort in history to that point. That a military general had designed the plan for European reconstruction was not lost on those who received it.

Watson and Crick publish the double-helix structure of DNA

On 25 April, Watson and Crick published a single page in Nature describing a double helix — two strands wound around each other, their bases paired in the middle like rungs on a twisted ladder. The structure made its own implications obvious: the two strands could separate, each serving as a template for a new copy. It drew on X-ray diffraction data from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins in ways that, at the time, were not fully acknowledged.

Miller–Urey experiment produces organic molecules from inorganic precursors

Stanley Miller and Harold Urey filled a flask with water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen — a rough approximation of early Earth's atmosphere — passed electrical sparks through it for a week, and found amino acids accumulating at the bottom. It was the first experimental demonstration that the chemical building blocks of life could arise from nothing more than simple molecules and a thunderstorm.

First ascent of Mount Everest

Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Everest at 11:30 on the morning of 29 May 1953 — 8,849 metres above sea level, where the air contains roughly a third of the oxygen available at the coast. They stayed for fifteen minutes, took photographs, and came back down. The expedition had been trying since 1921, and the mountain had not grown easier.