1976

Nobel Prize in Physics

Burton Richter · Samuel C.C. Ting

In November 1974, Richter's team at SLAC and Ting's team at Brookhaven simultaneously discovered the same particle — a meson so long-lived it seemed impossible — and could not agree on what to call it, which is why it is still called the J/ψ. Its existence confirmed the charm quark and gave the quark model the experimental backbone it had been missing.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

William Lipscomb

Boron hydrides — boranes — had structures that made no sense under ordinary bonding theory, because they seemed to have more bonds than electrons. Lipscomb solved their crystal structures by X-ray crystallography and devised the three-centre, two-electron bond to explain them, an account of electron sharing so economical it borders on elegant.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Baruch S. Blumberg · D. Carleton Gajdusek

Blumberg stumbled on the hepatitis B antigen while studying blood proteins in various human populations, then used it to develop both a diagnostic test and a vaccine. Gajdusek investigated kuru, a fatal neurological disease among the Fore people of New Guinea, and demonstrated it was transmitted by a slow-acting infectious agent — a category of pathogen that nobody had previously believed could exist.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Saul Bellow

Bellow's novels — The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift — are immensely alive on the page: argumentative, learned, full of characters who think too much and feel more than they admit. He wrote American urban life with a European intellectual inheritance and made the combination entirely his own.

Nobel Peace Prize

Betty Williams · Mairead Corrigan

The proximate cause was a single incident in Belfast in August 1976: three children killed by a getaway car during an IRA chase. Williams and Corrigan, who were witnesses, founded the Community of Peace People within days and mobilised tens of thousands of ordinary Northern Irish citizens in marches that briefly made the civil conflict feel, to those marching, like something that could actually end.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Milton Friedman

Friedman spent decades arguing that the money supply, and not fiscal policy, was the variable that actually determined inflation — a view mainstream economics had resisted and that central bankers adopted, with varying conviction, over the following decades. He was not always right, but he was nearly always interesting, which is a rarer combination than it sounds.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

Michael O. Rabin · Dana Stewart Scott

Their 1959 paper on finite automata showed that nondeterministic machines — machines that can, in theory, try all possible paths simultaneously — are no more powerful than deterministic ones. This was a foundational result: it established that a certain apparent gulf in computational power was illusory, and opened the formal study of what machines can and cannot do.

Isolation of Ebola virus

Simultaneous outbreaks in Zaire and Sudan in 1976 killed with a speed that gave investigators almost no time to prepare. Scientists eventually isolated the responsible filovirus and named it after the Ebola river near the Zairean epicenter; the Zaire strain had a case fatality rate above 80 percent. Nobody had seen it before.

Identification of Legionella pneumophila

An outbreak of severe pneumonia at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia in July 1976 killed 29 of 182 cases before anyone knew what was causing it. CDC microbiologist Joseph McDade eventually found the culprit: a previously unknown gram-negative bacterium, living comfortably in water systems, that could cause pneumonia simply by being inhaled in fine droplets.

Viking 1 lands on Mars

On 20 July 1976 — seven years to the day after Apollo 11 — Viking 1 touched down on Chryse Planitia and became the first spacecraft to successfully operate on the Martian surface. Its biology experiments sniffed the soil for signs of life and returned ambiguous results that scientists are, in a technical sense, still arguing about.

Viking 2 lands on Mars

Viking 2 set down at Utopia Planitia on 3 September, farther north than its twin, and together the two landers spent years imaging the surface, measuring wind speeds, and testing soil chemistry. Between them they returned more than 50,000 photographs of a world that looked, close up, not entirely unlike a cold desert in the American Southwest.

Concorde enters commercial service

On 21 January 1976, British Airways and Air France inaugurated scheduled supersonic passenger services simultaneously — London to Bahrain and Paris to Rio de Janeiro. The Concorde cruised at Mach 2.04 at 18,300 metres, covering the Atlantic in under three and a half hours, and made crossing the ocean feel briefly like the future.

Genentech founded — first genetic-engineering company

Biochemist Herbert Boyer and venture capitalist Robert Swanson co-founded Genentech in April 1976 with the explicit aim of turning recombinant DNA into products. Within a year their scientists had produced somatostatin — the first human protein ever expressed in a microorganism — as a demonstration that the idea was not merely academic.