1960

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Trail of Bubbles, Not Vapour

Donald A. Glaser

By the early 1950s, the cloud chamber — a vessel of supersaturated vapour through which charged particles leave ghostly white trails — had been the workhorse of particle physics for three decades, and it was showing its age: the vapour took time to reset between exposures, and the density of the medium was too low to stop many of the particles worth studying. Donald Glaser, a young physicist at Michigan, conceived the complementary device: fill a vessel with liquid instead of vapour, heat it above its boiling point under pressure, and the passage of a charged particle will trigger a string of bubbles along its track, each one photographable and precise before the whole chamber resets. He built his first prototype in 1952 using diethyl ether. The legend — which Glaser did not entirely discourage — that the idea came from watching bubbles rise in a beer glass is mostly myth, but the image is too pleasing to abandon entirely. Bubble chambers went on to reveal a menagerie of new particles through the 1960s and 70s, and Glaser received the Nobel at 34, making him one of the younger laureates in physics. He subsequently moved into molecular biology, finding particle physics, with some justice, a bit crowded.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Clock Inside Every Bone

Willard F. Libby

Every living thing — tree, fish, pharaoh — exchanges carbon with the atmosphere for as long as it lives, maintaining a tiny but fixed proportion of radioactive carbon-14 among its ordinary carbon-12 atoms. The moment it dies, the exchange stops and the carbon-14 begins its steady, undeviating decay with a half-life of roughly 5,730 years. Willard Libby, working at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s, recognised that this decay rate constituted an absolute clock: measure how much carbon-14 remains in a piece of charcoal, bone, or linen, compare it to the known initial proportion, and you can calculate when the organism died without needing a single written record or stratigraphic layer. He tested his method against objects of known age — wood from Egyptian tombs, charcoal from archaeological sites — and it held. The Nobel committee in 1960 was awarding a prize not just to a chemist but to the entire discipline of prehistory, which had, until Libby, been largely guessing about timescales. A world without radiocarbon dating is one in which Stonehenge, the cave paintings at Lascaux, and the migrations of early humans remain roughly datable only by the uneasy art of comparison.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Body Learns Who It Is

Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet · Peter Medawar

The central puzzle of immunology in the mid-twentieth century was not why the body attacks foreign tissue — that much was obvious — but why it does not attack itself. Frank Macfarlane Burnet, the Australian virologist, proposed an elegant theoretical answer in the late 1940s: the immune system learns during embryonic development which molecules belong to the body, treating them as "self" and acquiring a permanent tolerance toward them; anything introduced into the body before that learning is complete will subsequently be tolerated as if native. It was a beautiful idea that still needed an experiment. Peter Medawar, in Oxford, provided one — inducing tolerance to foreign skin grafts in mice by exposing them to foreign cells while still in the womb, exactly as Burnet's theory predicted. The implications for surgery were immediate and large. Organ transplantation had been failing for decades not because surgeons lacked the technical skill to stitch a kidney in place, but because the recipient's immune system invariably destroyed it. Burnet and Medawar had identified why, and in doing so pointed toward how rejection might eventually be prevented. Every transplanted organ that has survived in a human body since owes something to that collaboration between a theorist who thought carefully and an experimenter who built the proof.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Diplomat's Secret Second Voice

Saint-John Perse

Alexis Léger led two lives with startling completeness. As a senior official in the French Foreign Ministry, he negotiated, observed, and endured the diplomatic failures of the interwar years at close range; when France fell in June 1940 and his own government declared him a traitor for opposing appeasement, he left for the United States with almost nothing and lived there for over two decades. Under the name Saint-John Perse, the same man wrote long, incantatory poems — Anabase, Exil, Amers — that moved in great oceanic sweeps through sea, desert, and human passage across the earth, language stretched to contain distances that prose could not. The Swedish Academy, awarding him the prize in 1960, cited "a soaring flight and evocative imagery," which is accurate if slightly bloodless for a poet whose exile was not metaphorical. He returned to France in 1967 and lived until 1975. What stays with readers is not the diplomat's biography but the peculiar authority of a voice that sounds as if it has seen the whole surface of the earth and found it, on balance, worth the trouble of description.

Nobel Peace Prize

The World Had Formed a View

Albert Lutuli

Albert Lutuli had been a teacher and a chief of the Zulu people before becoming president-general of the African National Congress, and he brought to both roles the same composed insistence that dignity is not something a government can grant or rescind by legislation. The South African government had already banned him from attending most public gatherings and confined him to his district in Natal when the Nobel Committee announced in 1960 that he was the first African to receive the Peace Prize, recognising two decades of non-violent resistance to apartheid at a moment when the system's architects were making non-violence steadily harder to sustain — the Sharpeville massacre, in which police killed 69 protesters, had occurred in March of that year. Pretoria denied him a passport to travel to Oslo; he eventually received a temporary one. His acceptance speech, delivered in a city where apartheid's enforcers would have been thoroughly unwelcome, was calm, exact, and unyielding in tone. The prize did not alter apartheid's trajectory in the short term, which is one of the more instructive things about prizes. What it did was establish, for any government watching, that the world had formed a view.

First working laser demonstrated by Theodore Maiman

Light Marching in Step With Itself

The theoretical groundwork had been laid by Einstein in 1917 and elaborated by Charles Townes and others through the 1950s — stimulated emission, in which a photon passing through an excited medium causes other atoms to shed identical photons, producing coherent, amplified light. What nobody had yet managed was to make it work with visible light rather than microwaves. On 16 May 1960, Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu wrapped a coiled xenon flash lamp around a synthetic ruby rod, pulsed the lamp, and produced a burst of coherent red light at 694 nanometres. His subsequent paper was rejected by Physical Review Letters as insufficiently interesting; Nature published it in August. The editors of Physical Review Letters would spend decades quietly not mentioning this decision. The applications arrived in waves: surveying, ranging, cutting, welding, eye surgery, barcode scanners, fibre-optic communications, DVD and Blu-ray players, and the gratuitous but genuinely enjoyable laser pointer. Maiman died in 2007 having spent much of his later career correcting accounts of his invention that gave credit to others — a modest grievance, as such things go, from the man who first made light travel in step with itself.

Three-dimensional structure of myoglobin and hemoglobin resolved

Not Ropes After All

The prevailing assumption well into the twentieth century was that proteins were probably simple repetitive structures — biologically useful ropes, in effect. X-ray crystallography, which had been reading the periodic arrangements of atoms in crystals since von Laue's discovery in 1912, was not obviously suited to something as large and irregular as a protein, but John Kendrew and Max Perutz at Cambridge thought otherwise and spent roughly two decades collecting diffraction data and building models before the answer came. In 1960, Kendrew published the first atomic-resolution structure of myoglobin, the protein that stores oxygen in muscle tissue, revealing a dense, irregular tangle of helices quite unlike anything a theorist would have drawn; Perutz completed a lower-resolution structure of hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in blood and turned out to be four myoglobin-like units assembled together. For the first time, it was possible to see precisely how a chain of amino acids folds itself into a three-dimensional shape and how that shape creates a pocket — just the right size and chemistry — for holding and releasing a single oxygen molecule. Both men received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry two years later. Structural biology has since produced hundreds of thousands of such structures, including that of the virus SARS-CoV-2; the whole field stands on the ground Kendrew and Perutz cleared.

TIROS-1 — first successful weather satellite

Weather Seen Whole, From Above

Before April 1960, meteorologists looking at the weather from the ground were like physicians limited to examining only what a patient voluntarily described: incomplete, asymmetric, and dependent on where observers happened to be stationed. Hurricanes formed over empty ocean and arrived, sometimes, as near-total surprises. TIROS-1 — Television and Infrared Observation Satellite — launched on 1 April and changed the geometry of the problem entirely, transmitting more than 22,000 cloud-cover photographs over its 78-day operational life and showing, for the first time, large-scale weather systems as coherent wholes rather than patchworks of surface reports. The images were not especially sharp by later standards; the satellite tumbled somewhat erratically in orbit; and early meteorologists had to learn an entirely new visual language for reading cloud patterns from above. None of that diminished what had shifted. The ability to track a tropical storm from formation to landfall, to see cold fronts as continuous arcs of cloud thousands of miles long, became so quickly routine that it is now difficult to convey why it felt extraordinary. Every forecast that has ever warned a coastline of an approaching hurricane traces something back to those early, slightly blurry photographs.

FDA approves first oral contraceptive pill

Conception Made Optional, Daily

The chemistry had accumulated through the 1950s: Carl Djerassi synthesised norethindrone in Mexico City in 1951, Frank Colton independently synthesised norethynodrel for G. D. Searle, and the biologist Gregory Pincus ran clinical trials in Puerto Rico and Haiti that were ethically imperfect by any later standard but pharmacologically decisive. On 9 May 1960, the FDA approved Enovid — norethynodrel combined with mestranol — initially for menstrual disorders, with contraceptive approval following. Within five years, 6.5 million American women were taking it. The practical effect was to separate, for the first time in human history, the question of whether to have intercourse from the question of whether to risk conception — reliably, daily, at the discretion of the woman rather than negotiated in the moment. The social consequences were large, various, slow to unfold, and not yet entirely finished: workforce participation, marriage timing, educational attainment, the economics of divorce, the politics of reproductive rights. The pill arrived as a piece of pharmacology and became, whether its developers intended it or not, a hinge in the history of the twentieth century.

Death of Max von Laue

Crystals Caught Bending Light

Max von Laue

Max von Laue died in Berlin on 24 April 1960, at the age of 80, from injuries sustained when a motorcyclist drove into his car — an ending that would have seemed implausible for a man whose chief distinction was a profound stillness of mind. In 1912, working in Munich, he proposed that if X-rays were truly waves with wavelengths comparable to the spacing between atoms in a crystal, then a crystal ought to act as a diffraction grating for X-rays. His colleagues Walter Friedrich and Paul Knipping carried out the experiment; it worked. In a single result, the argument was closed on two questions that had occupied physicists for years: X-rays were indeed waves, and crystals were indeed arranged in periodic atomic lattices. Von Laue received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914. The technique he established — X-ray crystallography — went on to determine the structure of table salt, of penicillin, and eventually, in 1953, of DNA itself; Kendrew and Perutz used it for myoglobin and hemoglobin; whole industries of pharmaceutical design now depend on it. He had also, quietly and at some personal risk, opposed both the Nazi regime and the campaign to expel Jewish scientists from German universities. It is possible to admire the physics alone and still come away impressed.