1972

Nobel Prize in Physics

John Bardeen · Leon N. Cooper · Robert Schrieffer

Certain metals, cooled far enough, lose all resistance to electrical current — a fact observed since 1911 but stubbornly unexplained. BCS theory, published by Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer in 1957, showed that electrons pair up through vibrations in the lattice and flow without friction; it also gave Bardeen his second Nobel in Physics, which remains a distinction he holds alone.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Christian Anfinsen · Stanford Moore · William H. Stein

A protein is a long chain of amino acids that folds, in water, into a precise three-dimensional shape — and that shape is everything. Anfinsen showed the folded form of ribonuclease is determined entirely by its sequence of amino acids; Moore and Stein mapped which parts of that structure do the actual chemical work.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Gerald M. Edelman · Rodney R. Porter

Antibodies were known to be large and Y-shaped — it took Edelman and Porter to work out precisely why. Edelman sequenced the complete amino acid chain of an IgG antibody; Porter cleaved antibodies with papain to reveal the functional Fab and Fc fragments. The Y-shaped model that emerged explained, at last, how a single molecule could both grip an invader and summon help.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Heinrich Böll

Böll wrote about postwar Germany the way a good doctor takes a history — methodically, without flinching, and with genuine concern for the patient. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, published three years later, extended that attention to the power of the press to destroy an ordinary person, a subject that has not dated.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

John R. Hicks · Kenneth J. Arrow

Hicks gave economists the IS-LM framework for thinking about interest rates and output in one diagram; Arrow proved his impossibility theorem, which demonstrated that no voting system can consistently translate individual preferences into a coherent collective ranking. One built a useful simplification; the other proved that certain useful simplifications are mathematically impossible.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Dijkstra's position was that programs should be correct by construction, not patched into submission, and he spent a career making that argument with the precision of someone who found imprecision physically uncomfortable. He invented the shortest-path algorithm almost as a side effect, and in his Turing lecture described the GOTO statement as an unconditional obstacle to clear thinking.

First in vitro construction of recombinant DNA

Paul Berg's laboratory at Stanford showed it was possible to join DNA fragments from entirely different organisms using restriction enzymes and DNA ligase — molecular scissors and glue, available in a test tube. The following year Boyer and Cohen cloned a foreign gene into E. coli and watched the bacterium express it, which is when people began asking what, exactly, ought to be permitted.

Pioneer 10 launched toward Jupiter

Nobody knew whether the asteroid belt was survivable until Pioneer 10 flew through it between July 1972 and February 1973 without incident, which was reassuring. It reached Jupiter in December 1973 and returned the first close images of the giant planet, along with measurements of radiation belts strong enough to permanently damage the spacecraft's systems.

Apollo 16 and 17: final crewed Moon landings

Apollo 16 landed in the Descartes Highlands in April, and Apollo 17 touched down in the Taurus-Littrow valley in December — the last time in the twentieth century that human feet would stand on another world. Geologist Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 17 was the first scientist to walk on the Moon; between them the two missions brought home more than 100 kg of samples.