1976

Nobel Prize in Physics

Two Labs Found the Same Particle

Burton Richter · Samuel C.C. Ting

In November 1974, two rival teams on opposite sides of the United States independently found the same particle on the same weekend — a coincidence that particle physics, normally a field of cautious increments, had not previously arranged for itself. Richter's group at SLAC in California was using electron-positron annihilation; Ting's team at Brookhaven in New York was smashing protons into beryllium; both stumbled onto a meson roughly three times heavier than a proton, with a lifetime so improbably long that the first instinct of both teams was to assume they'd made an error. They had not. What they disagreed about was the name — Richter called it the ψ, Ting called it the J — and since neither man would concede, the particle entered the textbooks as the J/ψ, which at least has the virtue of being unmistakable. Its existence confirmed the charm quark, the fourth quark, whose theoretical necessity had been argued since 1970 but which had been stubbornly invisible until that November. The quark model finally had the experimental backbone it needed; without it, the entire standard model of particle physics would have remained a beautiful but unverified suspicion.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Bond Shared Among Three Atoms

William Lipscomb

Boranes — hydrogen compounds of boron — had been a source of quiet embarrassment to chemists for decades, because their structures flatly refused to obey the rules. Conventional bonding theory, which requires one pair of electrons per bond, kept running out of electrons before it could account for all the bonds the compounds seemed to contain; diborane alone presented a molecule that looked, on paper, as though it simply should not exist. William Lipscomb, working at Harvard from the 1950s onwards, attacked the problem with X-ray crystallography, patiently mapping the architecture of one borane after another and arriving at a solution that required a new kind of chemical bond: the three-centre, two-electron bond, in which a single pair of electrons is shared across three atoms simultaneously, a kind of democratic frugality that classical theory had never needed to consider. The description of how electrons could be stretched across a triangular bridge of atoms was, in its way, as conceptually tidy as the problem had been messy. It also extended to the study of metallocarborynes and gave theoretical chemists a new set of tools for understanding electron-deficient molecules generally — molecules that turn out, with hindsight, to crop up rather frequently in nature.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Stray Antigen and a Laughing Illness

Baruch S. Blumberg · D. Carleton Gajdusek

The 1976 Medicine prize rewarded two quite different encounters with the invisible — one a chance observation, the other a detective story played out in the highlands of New Guinea. Baruch Blumberg was studying inherited variation in blood proteins across human populations when he noticed that the serum of a haemophiliac patient from New York reacted to a protein present in an Australian Aboriginal blood sample; what he had found, though it took years to establish, was the surface antigen of the hepatitis B virus. He went on to develop both the diagnostic test and, eventually, a vaccine — making him one of the rare scientists who stumbled over a problem and then stayed to solve it all the way down. Gajdusek's Nobel came for something stranger still: his investigation of kuru, a fatal, laughing neurodegeneration afflicting the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, which he demonstrated was transmitted through the ritual consumption of the brains of the dead. The infectious agent responsible had no detectable nucleic acid — no DNA, no RNA — and was destroyed by nothing that ought to destroy it; it was, in effect, a category of pathogen that received wisdom had declared impossible. Both discoveries proved consequential well beyond the particular diseases: Blumberg's vaccine now prevents roughly 900,000 deaths from liver cancer annually, and Gajdusek's slow infectious agent pointed the way, decades later, to prions and BSE.

Nobel Prize in Literature

The Sensation of Being Understood

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, grew up in the slums of Montreal and then Chicago, and spent the rest of his life trying to write down what it felt like to be an educated, anxious, morally serious person loose in a twentieth-century American city — which is not a bad way to describe the condition of about half his readers. The Adventures of Augie March announced his mature voice in 1953 with a first sentence so irresistible it has been memorised by three generations of creative-writing students; Herzog gave him the character who thinks too much; Humboldt's Gift, published in 1975, the year before the prize, gave him Delmore Schwartz thinly disguised and the question of what an intellectual owes to beauty versus survival. He wrote English prose as though he had come to it from outside and found it more interesting than the natives did — dense, comic, supple, charged with a European philosophical seriousness that never tipped into solemnity. The Swedish Academy cited "the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture" he brought to his novels; what the novels themselves give you is something harder to name, which is the sensation of being understood.

Nobel Peace Prize

Grief Given a Public Form

Betty Williams · Mairead Corrigan

The proximate cause of the Peace People was a single afternoon in August 1976 in Belfast. During an IRA chase, a wounded driver lost control of his car and killed three children — siblings, playing on a pavement — in front of their aunt, Mairead Corrigan. Betty Williams, who witnessed the scene from her window, was so undone by it that she went door to door gathering signatures for a petition within hours. Within days the two women had co-founded the Community of Peace People, and within weeks they had organised marches that drew tens of thousands of ordinary Northern Irish citizens — Catholic and Protestant, standing together on streets that had functioned as front lines — in a public refusal of the logic of the Troubles. The movement's immediate political impact was limited; the violence did not stop. But Williams and Corrigan had demonstrated that the silence of people who did not want the war was not the same as consent, and that grief, when given a public form, could briefly override the tribalism that had made the conflict feel inevitable. The Nobel Committee awarded the 1976 prize to them the following year — a rounding of the dates that gave the committee time to decide but could not diminish what those marches had cost two women who had already lost more than enough.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Inflation Is a Monetary Animal

Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman spent much of his career at the University of Chicago doing something economists find genuinely difficult: being right about something important at a time when the profession disagreed. His central argument — hammered out across decades in books, articles, and the 1963 monograph A Monetary History of the United States, co-authored with Anna Schwartz — was that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, meaning that the money supply, rather than the government's fiscal position, is what central banks ought to be watching. Mainstream Keynesian economics had largely bracketed money as secondary; the catastrophic inflation of the 1970s gave Friedman's view a practical advertisement more effective than anything he could have written. He was also, awkwardly for his admirers, not always right: his permanent income hypothesis reshaped consumption theory, his natural rate of unemployment concept proved durable, and his advocacy for floating exchange rates was vindicated — but his confidence in the precision of monetary targeting was eventually abandoned by the central banks that had adopted it. He was, however, nearly always interesting, which in an academic discipline where careful boredom is sometimes mistaken for rigour makes him genuinely unusual, and his ideas about school vouchers and a negative income tax shaped policy debates long after his macroeconomics had been modified beyond recognition.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

One Path or Many, Same Power

Turing Award

Michael O. Rabin · Dana Stewart Scott

In 1959, when Michael Rabin and Dana Scott published their paper on finite automata and their decision problems, computer science as a discipline was barely old enough to have orthodoxies — but one informal assumption was already spreading, which was that a machine able to explore multiple computational paths simultaneously ought to be more powerful than one forced to follow a single thread. Rabin and Scott proved, with the particular neatness that characterises the best theoretical results, that this assumption was wrong. Nondeterministic finite automata — abstract machines that can, in theory, fork into all possible futures at each step — can be converted into deterministic ones that produce exactly the same output, at the cost of an exponential blowup in the number of states but no loss of expressive power. The result was foundational not just because it closed a question but because it opened a framework: the formal study of what classes of machines can compute, which computations require which resources, and where the genuine gulfs in computational power lie. It seeded formal language theory, the study of regular expressions, and ultimately the distinction between P and NP problems that has occupied theoretical computer science for most of the subsequent half-century. The Turing Award arrived seventeen years after the paper — computer science being a field where recognition, like compilation, sometimes takes longer than expected.

Isolation of Ebola virus

Named for a River, Not a Village

In the summer of 1976, two separate outbreaks of haemorrhagic fever began, independently and nearly simultaneously, in Zaire and Sudan, killing with a speed that left local health systems almost nothing to work with. The Zaire outbreak began near the Bumba Zone in what was then a remote river basin; the Sudan strain appeared in a cotton factory in Nzara. Neither the patients nor the health workers who first encountered them had any context for what they were seeing, and by the time outside investigators arrived there were already dozens dead. Scientists eventually isolated the responsible filovirus — an elongated, thread-shaped pathogen unlike anything in the catalogues — and named it after the Ebola River, which ran near the Zairean epicentre and had the additional virtue of not stigmatising any specific community. The Zaire strain achieved a case fatality rate of above 88 percent in that first outbreak; the Sudan strain was somewhat less lethal, which is the kind of distinction that feels almost cruel to make. Nobody had seen it before, nobody had antibodies against it, and the outbreak ended largely through quarantine and the grim arithmetic of the disease killing its hosts faster than it could find new ones. It would resurface, sporadically, for decades — and when it did, virologists reached for the work done in that first desperate autumn.

Identification of Legionella pneumophila

The Culprit Was in the Air Conditioning

In July 1976, some 4,000 members of the American Legion gathered at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia for their annual state convention; within days of returning home, delegates began falling severely ill with a pneumonia that did not respond to standard antibiotics and that killed 29 of the 182 eventually diagnosed. The outbreak triggered one of the largest epidemiological investigations the CDC had mounted to that point, and for months the cause remained entirely unknown — fuelling, in the anxious post-Vietnam, post-Watergate atmosphere of that summer, a degree of public alarm that bore little relation to the actual scale. Joseph McDade, a CDC microbiologist working on rickettsial diseases, eventually cracked it early in 1977 by returning to samples he had set aside months earlier, finding that the culprit was not a virus but a gram-negative bacterium living quietly in the hotel's water system and dispersed through the air-conditioning. The organism, Legionella pneumophila, turned out to be widespread in engineered water systems — cooling towers, shower heads, hospital plumbing — and to have been causing undiagnosed pneumonia cases for years before Philadelphia gave it a name. It was a reminder, arriving at a moment when antibiotics had made infectious disease feel like a solved problem, that the natural world is under no obligation to be fully catalogued before killing people.

Viking 1 lands on Mars

A Positive Signal, Argued for Years

On 20 July 1976 — chosen with an eye toward the date, seven years to the day after Apollo 11 touched down at Tranquility Base — Viking 1 settled onto Chryse Planitia and became the first spacecraft to successfully operate on the surface of Mars. The engineering required to land softly on a planet with an atmosphere just thick enough to complicate entry but too thin to rely on for braking was considerable; NASA had spent a decade and multiple failed Soviet attempts accumulating the knowledge needed. What followed was a biology experiment of almost Shakespearean dramatic structure: Viking's three life-detection instruments returned results that were, depending on the scientist interpreting them, either strongly suggestive of chemical reactions involving living organisms or strongly suggestive of purely inorganic chemistry mimicking biology. The labelled release experiment, in particular, produced a positive signal that the Viking team argued about for years and that some researchers — most notably Gilbert Levin, one of the experiment's designers — maintained until his death represented evidence of life. The majority view was, and largely remains, that the Martian soil contains highly reactive peroxides or perchlorates that could produce the same result without any organisms being involved. This is almost certainly correct. The near-certainty, however, is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

Viking 2 lands on Mars

Frost Photographed, a World Mapped

Viking 2 touched down at Utopia Planitia on 3 September 1976, farther north than its twin — close enough to the polar region that it photographed frost on the ground during the Martian winter. Together the two landers operated for years, far beyond their design lifetimes, sending back wind speeds, temperature readings, soil chemistry results, and more than 50,000 photographs of a surface that looked, close up, not entirely unlike the high desert of the American Southwest, except for the absence of plants, roads, and the general impression that anything was happening at all. Viking 2's seismometer, unfortunately, was resting on a lander leg that transmitted vibrations from the wind rather than from the ground, so its seismic data was largely useless — though this was not established for certain until InSight landed, more than four decades later, and provided the first genuine Martian seismic record. The two Vikings together constitute one of the most expensive null results in the history of science, which is an unfair way of describing them: they did not find life, but they mapped a world, and mapping a world is not nothing.

Concorde enters commercial service

A Fuselage That Stretched in Flight

On 21 January 1976, at 11:40 in the morning, British Airways and Air France inaugurated scheduled supersonic passenger service simultaneously — London departing for Bahrain, Paris departing for Rio de Janeiro — a synchronised launch that was less a coincidence than a reflection of the political arrangements that had kept the jointly funded programme from collapsing under its own cost overruns. The Concorde cruised at Mach 2.04, roughly twice the speed of sound, at an altitude of 18,300 metres, where the sky is noticeably darker and the curvature of the Earth is faintly visible, and covered the North Atlantic in under three and a half hours on the routes it would eventually fly. It was a genuinely remarkable piece of engineering, produced at a genuinely unjustifiable cost, serving a genuinely thin slice of the travelling public at ticket prices that reflected all of the above. The aircraft's thermal expansion at speed was such that the fuselage stretched by up to 30 centimetres in flight, a fact that regular passengers regarded with equanimity and occasional pride. It crossed the Atlantic in anger for twenty-seven years before being retired in 2003, leaving behind a record that no passenger aircraft has since approached, and a persistent vague melancholy among people who never flew on it but feel, somehow, that they should have.

Genentech founded — first genetic-engineering company

An Hour in a Bar Started an Industry

The meeting that produced Genentech happened in April 1976 at a bar in San Francisco, when Robert Swanson, a twenty-nine-year-old venture capitalist who had read the recent papers on recombinant DNA with more attention than most bankers were giving them, cold-called Herbert Boyer at the University of California San Francisco and asked for ten minutes of his time. Boyer gave him an hour. Boyer had, with Stanley Cohen in 1973, demonstrated that genes from one organism could be cut and spliced into another, then expressed; the question Swanson was asking was whether that could become a business. They co-founded Genentech with $500 each, and within a year their scientists had produced somatostatin — a human hormone, the first human protein ever expressed in a bacterium — demonstrating that the idea was not just academic. Insulin followed in 1978, human growth hormone after that, and eventually the entire modern biopharmaceutical industry followed them down the path they had opened with those first bacterial cultures. The meeting lasted an hour; what it started has, by any reasonable measure, altered more lives than almost any other business founded in the twentieth century, a claim that has the additional virtue of being true without needing to be inflated.