1972

Nobel Prize in Physics

Electrons Learn to Travel in Pairs

John Bardeen · Leon N. Cooper · Robert Schrieffer

Superconductivity had been observed since 1911 — certain metals, cooled to temperatures near absolute zero, lose all electrical resistance entirely — yet for nearly half a century no one could explain why. In 1957, John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and Robert Schrieffer published what became known as BCS theory: electrons in a superconductor, rather than repelling each other as textbook physics would suggest, pair up through subtle vibrations in the atomic lattice, forming what are now called Cooper pairs, which glide through the material without scattering and therefore without losing energy. The theory was beautiful enough to seem implausible at first, but it held, and it held in exactly the mathematical detail that physicists find most satisfying. The 1972 prize was, among other things, a biographical curiosity: Bardeen had already received the Physics Nobel in 1956 for the transistor, making him the only person ever to collect that particular honour twice. Without BCS theory, the physics behind MRI machines, maglev trains, and the superconducting magnets in nearly every particle accelerator would remain a black box — which is not a comfortable position for a civilization that keeps building those things.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Protein Remembers Its Own Shape

Christian Anfinsen · Stanford Moore · William H. Stein

A protein is a long string of amino acids that must, the moment it leaves the ribosome, fold itself into a precise three-dimensional shape — and the shape is, in a real sense, the whole point. For decades the question of how the string knew which shape to adopt was genuinely open: did it need a template, a chaperone, some cellular machinery to guide it? Christian Anfinsen's experiments on ribonuclease A in the 1950s and 1960s gave a clean answer: the amino acid sequence itself encodes the final structure, and a denatured protein, given time and the right conditions, will refold spontaneously back to its active form. This became known as the thermodynamic hypothesis, and it is the conceptual foundation on which the entire field of protein folding — including, eventually, AlphaFold — was built. Stanford Moore and William Stein, sharing the other half of the prize, worked out the precise chemical structure of ribonuclease: which amino acids sit in the active site, and what they do when they get there. Together the three men turned a molecule that had been a biochemical curiosity into a case study in how chemistry becomes biology.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Grip the Intruder, Signal for Backup

Gerald M. Edelman · Rodney R. Porter

Antibodies had been known since the late nineteenth century as the body's principal means of recognising and neutralising foreign invaders, but their actual molecular architecture — what they looked like, what each region did — was simply unknown for most of that time. The molecules were large, unwieldy, and chemically forbidding. Gerald Edelman in New York and Rodney Porter in Oxford attacked the problem from different directions: Porter cleaved antibody molecules with the enzyme papain, splitting them into distinct functional fragments — the Fab fragments that bind the antigen, and the Fc fragment that recruits the immune system's reinforcements — while Edelman painstakingly sequenced the complete amino acid chains of an IgG antibody, a feat of considerable labour for the era. The Y-shaped model that emerged from their combined work was not just satisfying to look at; it explained, in precise structural terms, how a single molecule could simultaneously do two very different jobs, gripping an intruder at its tips and signalling for backup at its base. Monoclonal antibody drugs, the engines of modern targeted therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases, are engineered with that architecture in mind.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Country Rebuilt Its Streets, Not Its Conscience

Heinrich Böll

Heinrich Böll grew up in Cologne, served in the Wehrmacht, and came home to a country that was simultaneously rebuilding its streets and actively not discussing what it had done — which gave him rather a lot to write about. His novels and stories anatomised postwar West German society with a clarity that made many of his compatriots uncomfortable: the Catholic church's accommodations with power, the moral numbness of the economic miracle, the persistence of authoritarian habits beneath democratic surfaces. The Swedish Academy cited his combination of a broad perspective on his time with a sensitive skill in characterisation, which is the kind of citation that sounds diplomatic until you read the books. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, published two years after the prize, turned its attention to tabloid journalism and what happens when a newspaper decides an ordinary woman is a story worth destroying; it remains, in its quiet fury, one of the more durable accounts of how institutions can crush individuals while maintaining perfect procedural innocence. Böll's reputation has faded somewhat in the English-speaking world, which says more about translation fashions than about the work.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

No Vote Can Be Perfectly Fair

John R. Hicks · Kenneth J. Arrow

The 1972 economics prize united two men whose contributions, taken together, define a certain kind of mid-twentieth-century ambition: to see how far rigorous mathematics could take you in understanding collective human behaviour. John Hicks gave the profession the IS-LM framework in 1937, a two-curve diagram relating interest rates, output, and money supply that became, for better or worse, the lingua franca of macroeconomic pedagogy for decades; economists still argue about whether it captures what Keynes actually meant, which is itself a sign of how thoroughly it took hold. Kenneth Arrow's contribution was of a different, sharper kind: his impossibility theorem of 1951 proved, with remorseless logic, that no voting system translating individual preference orderings into a collective ranking can satisfy a modest set of fairness conditions simultaneously. One man built the most useful simplification in macroeconomics; the other demonstrated that certain useful simplifications cannot exist at all. Arrow's theorem has the particular quality of results that seem to say something bleak — and then, on reflection, say something clarifying instead.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Twenty Minutes at a Café, No Pencil Needed

Turing Award

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Edsger Dijkstra held the view that a program ought to be proved correct before it is run, rather than tested into adequacy after the fact, and he held it with the unshakeable conviction of someone who found any other approach faintly embarrassing. Born in Rotterdam in 1930 and trained as a physicist before turning to computing, he became one of the field's most prolific and pointed thinkers: his shortest-path algorithm, devised in 1956 in about twenty minutes at a café in Amsterdam while not carrying pencil or paper, became a foundational piece of graph theory and is still running silently inside GPS navigation, network routing, and game engines. He invented the concept of the semaphore for process synchronisation, contributed foundational ideas to structured programming, and in his Turing Award lecture delivered what remains one of the field's more quotable demolitions — arguing that the GOTO statement was an unconditional obstacle to clear thinking about programs. Dijkstra's prose, collected across hundreds of handwritten manuscripts he called EWDs and personally typed and distributed, is still read, sometimes for the ideas and sometimes for the pleasure of watching someone be right with such composed relentlessness.

First in vitro construction of recombinant DNA

Molecular Scissors, Molecular Glue

Restriction enzymes had been discovered in bacteria in the 1960s as a kind of molecular immune system — proteins that recognise specific DNA sequences and cut them cleanly — but Paul Berg's laboratory at Stanford was among the first to see what they implied as a tool: if nature had produced scissors for cutting DNA, then ligase enzymes were the glue, and in principle one could join fragments from entirely different organisms into a hybrid molecule that had never existed before. In 1972, Berg's group achieved exactly that, constructing in vitro the first piece of recombinant DNA. The following year, Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen went further, inserting a foreign gene into E. coli and watching the bacterium express it — the bacteria were, in effect, running software that had been written by a different organism. The implications were plain enough that the scientific community took the unusual step of voluntarily pausing certain experiments in 1974 while biosafety guidelines were worked out, gathering at Asilomar in 1975 to decide what ought to be permitted. That conversation has not ended. Every insulin-producing bacterium, every genetically engineered crop, every gene therapy trial in a clinic today traces its intellectual lineage to Berg's experiment in a California laboratory more than fifty years ago.

Pioneer 10 launched toward Jupiter

It Crossed the Rubble Belt Unscratched

When Pioneer 10 left Earth on 2 March 1972, one of the first questions it would answer was genuinely uncertain: could a spacecraft survive the asteroid belt? The region between Mars and Jupiter is populated with debris ranging from fine dust to rocks many kilometres across, and no probe had traversed it before. Pioneer 10 did, passing through between July 1972 and February 1973 without collecting so much as a noteworthy scratch — which was, in retrospect, reassuring, though it would have been more reassuring to know in advance. It reached Jupiter in December 1973 and returned the first close-up images of the planet, along with measurements of radiation belts so intense they permanently damaged several of the spacecraft's scientific instruments; Jupiter turned out to be a considerably more hostile environment than anyone had planned for, which recalibrated every subsequent mission design. Pioneer 10 also carried a gold-anodised plaque bearing a diagram of the spacecraft, a map of the solar system, and illustrations of a man and woman, on the theory that interstellar space is large and it costs nothing to be polite.

Apollo 16 and 17: final crewed Moon landings

The Last Bootprints of the Century

Apollo 16 landed in the Descartes Highlands on 21 April 1972, the first mission to study the lunar highlands specifically, and returned samples that overturned prevailing theories about volcanic activity in that region — the rocks were not volcanic after all, which is the kind of discovery that scientists describe as important and privately find somewhat embarrassing. Apollo 17 followed in December, touching down in the Taurus-Littrow valley with a crew that included Harrison Schmitt, a geologist and the only professional scientist ever to walk on the Moon; NASA had resisted sending scientists for years, and Schmitt's presence was partly the result of sustained lobbying by the scientific community. Together the two missions recovered more than 110 kilograms of lunar material. When Eugene Cernan climbed back into the lunar module on 14 December 1972, he became the last human being to stand on another world in the twentieth century — a distinction nobody expected him to hold for so long, and which grows more peculiar with each passing decade.