1958

Nobel Prize in Physics

Pavel A. Cherenkov · Il'ja M. Frank · Igor Y. Tamm

Cherenkov noticed in 1934 that charged particles moving faster than light travels through water emit a faint blue glow — the electromagnetic equivalent of a sonic boom. Frank and Tamm worked out the theory in 1937. The effect is now used in particle detectors worldwide; the eerie blue light glowing in the water of research reactors is this same phenomenon, made visible at scale.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Frederick Sanger

Sanger spent ten years determining the complete amino acid sequence of bovine insulin — the first protein to be fully sequenced — demonstrating that proteins have a definite, reproducible primary structure rather than being variable mixtures. He later received a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry for DNA sequencing, making him the only person to do so twice in the same discipline. Two Nobels in the same category is, by any measure, an extraordinary form of emphasis.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

George Beadle · Edward Tatum · Joshua Lederberg

Beadle and Tatum showed, using bread mould, that each gene controls a specific enzyme — the one gene, one enzyme hypothesis that gave molecular biology its first clear causal link between heredity and chemistry. Lederberg received the other half for discovering that bacteria can exchange genetic material directly, which meant that evolution in microbes was considerably more promiscuous than anyone had imagined.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Boris Pasternak

Pasternak was awarded the prize principally for Doctor Zhivago, which the Soviet Union had refused to publish; under pressure from the Soviet government, he declined the prize — the only Nobel laureate ever compelled to do so. He wrote privately that accepting would have meant exile or worse. The Swedish Academy recorded the acceptance it would have liked to receive and awarded the prize anyway.

Nobel Peace Prize

Georges Pire

The Belgian Dominican friar Georges Pire founded the Aid to Displaced Persons organisation and built what he called "European villages" — settlements specifically designed to give refugees from the Second World War somewhere to live that felt like a community rather than a camp. By 1958 the war had been over for thirteen years, and the problem of where to put its survivors had not yet resolved itself.

Fields Medal

Fields Medal

Klaus Roth · René Thom

Awarded in Edinburgh: Roth for proving the best possible bound on how well algebraic numbers can be approximated by rationals, settling a conjecture that had accumulated partial results for decades; Thom for his theory of cobordism and the foundational work in differential topology that would later underpin catastrophe theory. Two quite different kinds of mathematical achievement, honoured in the same afternoon.

Discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts

Explorer 1 launched on 31 January carrying a cosmic-ray detector built by James Van Allen; at high altitude it returned almost no data, which Van Allen correctly interpreted as the detector being overwhelmed rather than finding nothing. Explorer 3 confirmed in March: two doughnut-shaped belts of magnetically trapped charged particles girdled the Earth, entirely unsuspected. The planet had been wearing them the whole time.

Meselson–Stahl experiment proves semiconservative DNA replication

Meselson and Stahl grew bacteria in heavy nitrogen, switched them to normal nitrogen, and used density-gradient centrifugation to watch what happened to their DNA across generations. The result confirmed Watson and Crick's proposed mechanism exactly: each daughter DNA molecule keeps one original strand and builds one new one. It has been called the most beautiful experiment in biology, which is a competitive category.

First semiconductor integrated circuit demonstrated

On 12 September, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments showed his managers an oscillator built on a single bar of germanium measuring roughly 11 by 1.5 millimetres — transistors, resistors, and capacitors all fabricated from one semiconductor and connected without wires. The implications took a few years to sink in, but the device Kilby demonstrated that morning is the direct ancestor of every chip made since.

NASA established

On 1 October, NASA formally opened for business, replacing the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and absorbing its 8,000 employees, laboratories, and $100 million annual budget. President Eisenhower had signed the legislation in July, in direct response to Sputnik. America had decided that space was too important to leave to the military alone, which was a sound instinct, if one that arrived slightly behind schedule.