1960

Nobel Prize in Physics

Donald A. Glaser

The cloud chamber had served particle physicists well, but Glaser conceived something better in 1952: a vessel of superheated liquid in which a charged particle leaves a trail of tiny bubbles, each track photographable and precise. The bubble chamber superseded its predecessor as the primary instrument for visualising particle interactions, and Glaser received the Nobel at 34 — a fact he had not especially planned for.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Willard F. Libby

Every living thing absorbs a small, fixed proportion of radioactive carbon-14 from the atmosphere; when it dies, the carbon-14 begins to decay at a known rate. Libby realised in the late 1940s that you could read that decay like a clock, dating organic materials up to roughly 50,000 years old without any other evidence. Archaeologists, geologists, and palaeoclimatologists have been using it ever since to place events in time with a precision that would previously have required witness testimony.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet · Peter Medawar

Burnet predicted theoretically that the immune system learns, during embryonic development, to recognise the body's own tissues as "self" — and that anything introduced before that learning is complete will subsequently be tolerated rather than attacked. Medawar confirmed this experimentally by inducing tolerance to foreign skin grafts in mice. The work explained why organ transplants were rejected and pointed toward how that rejection might be prevented.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Saint-John Perse

The French diplomat Alexis Léger, writing as Saint-John Perse, produced long, surging poems — Anabase, Amers — that celebrated the elemental forces of sea, wind, and human movement across the earth. He had been living in the United States since the fall of France in 1940, and the committee found in his work "a soaring flight and evocative imagery" that rather captured what it means to write in a language whose country has temporarily ceased to exist.

Nobel Peace Prize

Albert Lutuli

Chief Albert Lutuli, president-general of the African National Congress, was the first African to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, recognised for his non-violent struggle against apartheid at a time when the South African government was making non-violence increasingly difficult to sustain. The prize drew international attention to the apartheid system in a way that the system's architects found unwelcome.

First working laser demonstrated by Theodore Maiman

On 16 May, Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu fired a xenon flash lamp around a synthetic ruby crystal and produced a coherent pulse of red light at 694 nanometres — the first laser. His paper was initially rejected by Physical Review Letters; Nature published it in August. The device that editors had not thought important enough to publish quickly became the foundation of fibre-optic communications, precision surgery, barcode scanners, and DVD players.

Three-dimensional structure of myoglobin and hemoglobin resolved

John Kendrew published the first atomic-resolution X-ray structure of myoglobin in 1960; Max Perutz completed a lower-resolution structure of hemoglobin. For the first time it was possible to see how a chain of amino acids folds itself into a specific three-dimensional shape — and how that shape creates a hollow pocket that holds, and releases, a single oxygen molecule. Protein crystallography has been explaining biology in this way ever since.

TIROS-1 — first successful weather satellite

Launched on 1 April, TIROS-1 transmitted more than 22,000 cloud-cover photographs over 78 days, demonstrating that weather systems could be tracked continuously from orbit. Before TIROS, a hurricane could cross a thousand miles of empty ocean before anyone knew it existed; after it, the view from above became routine, and weather forecasting changed shape around that new kind of seeing.

FDA approves first oral contraceptive pill

On 9 May, the FDA approved Enovid — norethynodrel with mestranol, developed by Carl Djerassi, Frank Colton, and colleagues — as the first combined oral contraceptive pill. It was approved initially for menstrual disorders, then for contraception; within five years, 6.5 million American women were taking it. The social consequences of reliable hormonal contraception were large, various, and not yet finished.

Death of Max von Laue

Max von Laue

Von Laue died in Berlin on 24 April following a car accident, aged 80. His 1912 discovery that X-rays diffract through crystal lattices simultaneously proved that X-rays are waves and that crystals have a periodic atomic structure — two open questions resolved in a single experiment. The technique he established, X-ray crystallography, went on to determine the structure of DNA, proteins, and a great deal else.