1985

Nobel Prize in Physics

Resistance That Refused to Wobble

Klaus von Klitzing

The quantum Hall effect was not discovered by careful theoretical prediction followed by careful experiment — it turned up, with some indignity to settled expectation, on a February night in 1980 when Klaus von Klitzing was running measurements at a high-field magnet facility in Grenoble. He found that in a thin layer of electrons cooled to a few Kelvin and subjected to a ferocious magnetic field, electrical resistance did not change smoothly but jumped between precise, discrete values — exact fractions of a combination of two fundamental constants, e² and h, that had no business being so clean. The precision was so unnerving, so impervious to impurities and sample geometry, that the effect eventually replaced the standard resistor as the international definition of the ohm. Five years from discovery to Nobel is brisk for physics, where the committees are not usually given to haste. We owe von Klitzing a standard of electrical measurement so reliable it is trusted to a part in ten billion, and the quantum Hall effect would go on to father an entire dynasty of topological phenomena that theorists are still trying to exhaust.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Intensities Alone Told Where the Atoms Were

Herbert A. Hauptman · Jerome Karle

X-ray crystallography had been revealing molecular structures since the 1910s, but it carried a maddening limitation baked into the physics: a detector measures intensity, not phase, and without the phases of diffracted waves you cannot run the calculation backwards to recover where the atoms are. This was not a minor inconvenience — it was called the phase problem, and for decades the only way around it required laborious trial and error, or the trick of soaking crystals in heavy atoms whose positions could be independently inferred. Herbert Hauptman, a mathematician, and Jerome Karle, a chemist, collaborated at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington through the late 1940s and 1950s on a different idea: that the intensities alone, subjected to statistical analysis, carry enough information to determine the phases, at least for small molecules. Their methods were initially received with significant scepticism by the crystallographic community, which prefers results that can be understood intuitively. In time, though, the methods proved so effective that structure determination was transformed from months of work into hours of computation, and the cascade of drug structures they enabled is long enough to fill a pharmacopoeia.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Door on the Cell That Wouldn't Open

Michael S. Brown · Joseph L. Goldstein

By the 1970s, the connection between cholesterol and heart disease was already a source of great public anxiety and considerable dietary advice — much of it, it turned out, aimed at the wrong target. Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein, working at the University of Texas Southwestern, chose to study patients with familial hypercholesterolaemia, a hereditary condition so extreme that affected children can suffer heart attacks before adolescence. What they found was a receptor on cell surfaces: a protein that latches onto LDL particles and drags them inside, removing cholesterol from the blood. In patients with the hereditary condition, these receptors were defective or absent, so LDL accumulated regardless of what the patient ate. More than that, Brown and Goldstein mapped the exquisitely tuned feedback loops by which cells sense how much cholesterol they need and adjust both synthesis and receptor production accordingly. It was a tour de force of cell biology delivered with the clarity of a very good detective story. The practical consequence arrived a decade later in the form of statins, drugs designed to exploit exactly these feedback loops by inhibiting the enzyme that drives cholesterol synthesis, thereby forcing cells to manufacture more receptors and clear the blood more vigorously — a therapy now taken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Memory Written the Way It Actually Behaves

Claude Simon

Claude Simon fought in the French cavalry during the 1940 campaign in the Ardennes, was captured, escaped, and joined the Resistance — and then spent four decades writing novels in which time and memory behave the way they actually do in the mind rather than the way fiction usually pretends they do. His sentences can run for a page or more, winding through subordinate clauses and unexpected turns until the reader is not entirely certain where they began, which is, one suspects, the intended sensation. In a Simon novel, a scene from the Spanish Civil War (where he also fought) can erupt without warning inside a recollection of the Second World War, and the line between what is happening and what is being remembered is deliberately left blurred. The Swedish Academy described his work as combining the painter's and the poet's creativity with a deepened awareness of time, which is accurate if unusually lucid for a committee known for poetry in its citations. Simon is not the most widely read Nobelist in the French canon, but those who encounter him tend not to forget the experience — which is perhaps the most honest measure of literary achievement.

Nobel Peace Prize

Two Cardiologists Diagnosed a War

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War

The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War was founded in 1980 by Bernard Lown, an American cardiologist at Harvard, and Yevgeny Chazov, a Soviet cardiologist who was personal physician to the Kremlin leadership — a collaboration so improbable in the context of the Cold War that its mere existence functioned as a kind of argument about human possibility. Their method was not diplomacy in the usual sense but something more clinical and, in its way, more unsettling: they presented governments and publics with what a nuclear exchange would mean as a medical problem. Not megatons and blast radii, but burn casualties, overwhelmed hospitals, the simple fact that no functioning medical infrastructure could survive such an event, and that physicians could therefore offer nothing at all. It turned out that stating the obvious in the language of triage was more disturbing to many audiences than the technical briefings of strategic analysts. The award was itself slightly awkward, given Chazov's position within the Soviet system, but the Nobel Committee apparently decided that the clinical argument was worth the political complication.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Households Save on a Life-Long Clock

Franco Modigliani

Franco Modigliani was born in Rome in 1918, left Italy in 1939 with the racial laws closing in, and made his way eventually to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he spent most of his career developing ideas that had the useful quality of being counterintuitive and correct. His life-cycle hypothesis, formulated in the 1950s, proposed that households smooth their consumption over time — borrowing or running down savings when young and earning little, accumulating assets during peak earning years, and drawing on them in retirement — which made the aggregate saving rate a function of a country's age distribution as much as its interest rates or tax incentives. The policy implications were consequential: an ageing population saves differently from a young one, a fact that would only become more pressing. Separately, with Merton Miller, he demonstrated — under carefully specified idealized conditions — that the way a firm finances itself, whether through debt or equity, has no bearing on its total market value. The Modigliani-Miller theorem is mostly famous for its assumptions, which are obviously false in the real world, but that is rather the point: the theorem identifies, with some precision, exactly which market imperfections make capital structure matter, and the practical study of corporate finance has been navigating those imperfections ever since.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Twenty-One Problems, Secretly the Same Problem

Turing Award

Richard M. Karp

By 1971 computer scientists had a rough intuition that certain combinatorial problems were somehow harder than others — that scheduling, routing, and packing problems all seemed to resist fast solutions in a way that sorting and searching did not. What was missing was a rigorous way to say so. Richard Karp's 1972 paper supplied it with something close to violence: he listed twenty-one well-known problems, including the travelling salesman, satisfiability, clique, and vertex cover, and proved that they were all NP-complete — that is, each could be translated into any of the others in polynomial time, so that a fast algorithm for any one would immediately produce fast algorithms for all. The paper did not prove that no fast algorithms exist (that remains the P versus NP problem, which is to computer science what the Riemann hypothesis is to number theory), but it gave the field a vocabulary and a practical working assumption. When a new problem turns out to be NP-complete, the appropriate response shifts from looking for an exact fast solution to looking for a good approximate one — and that shift in expectations has shaped algorithm design for half a century. Those twenty-one problems are still waiting for their efficient solutions.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

The Same Discovery, Praised Twice in One Year

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Michael S. Brown · Joseph L. Goldstein

The Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine are, in the ecosystem of scientific honours, close neighbours — the Lasker is sometimes called America's Nobel, and its winners' list is studded with people who later acquired the Swedish version. Brown and Goldstein managed the rare feat of receiving both in the same calendar year, 1985, which suggests either exceptional timing or that the committees were, for once, reading the same correspondence. Their work on LDL receptors and cholesterol metabolism had by that point already been widely recognized as one of the more consequential achievements in cell biology of the postwar era. The double recognition in a single year was, at minimum, a considerable inconvenience to the prize-giving calendar, and almost certainly a pleasant one for the laureates.

Discovery of buckminsterfullerene (C60)

Sixty Carbon Atoms Kept Forming a Ball

In September 1985, Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex and Robert Curl and Richard Smalley of Rice University were using a laser to vaporise graphite and study the resulting carbon clusters, trying to understand the chemistry of interstellar space. In the mass spectrometer traces, a cluster of exactly sixty carbon atoms kept appearing with suspicious, obsessive regularity — far more than the sixty-one, or fifty-nine, or any other number around it. The question was what shape could produce such stability, and after some frantic model-building the answer they landed on was a truncated icosahedron: thirty-two faces, twelve pentagonal and twenty hexagonal, arranged in the precise geometry of a football. They named it buckminsterfullerene, after the American architect R. Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic dome designs the molecule resembled, which is either the most apt or the most whimsical act of nomenclature in twentieth-century chemistry depending on one's temperament. It was the third known form of pure carbon, after graphite and diamond, and its discovery opened an entirely new branch of the subject. Kroto, Curl, and Smalley shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for what had started as a rather specialised question about the atmosphere of dying stars.

Antarctic ozone hole announced

The Instruments Were Fine

Joseph Farman, Brian Gardiner, and Jonathan Shanklin of the British Antarctic Survey had been making routine measurements of stratospheric ozone above Halley Research Station since the late 1950s — unglamorous, careful, seasonal work of exactly the kind that produces results nobody notices until they cannot be ignored. By the early 1980s, their readings for each austral spring were showing losses of more than 40 percent relative to 1960s baseline levels, a decline so large that the team spent considerable time checking whether their instruments had simply broken. The instruments were fine. Their paper appeared in Nature in May 1985, and it was not immediately greeted with universal enthusiasm: satellite data that could have corroborated the finding earlier had, it emerged, been programmed to flag anomalously low ozone values as errors and discard them. The mechanism — chlorofluorocarbons releasing chlorine that destroys ozone in the particular cold chemistry of polar stratospheric clouds — was worked out in the months that followed, and the Montreal Protocol, limiting CFC production, was agreed within two years, making it arguably the fastest the world has ever moved from scientific warning to binding international treaty. The ozone layer is recovering, slowly.

Wreck of RMS Titanic located

A Debris Trail Led to the Hull

The Titanic had been at the bottom of the North Atlantic for seventy-three years, lying in approximately 3,800 metres of water some 370 miles south-southeast of Newfoundland, and several previous expeditions had failed to find it. Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution led a joint American-French expedition that located the wreck on 1 September 1985, not by systematic grid searching but by following the trail of debris that had drifted downward from the sinking ship across the ocean floor. The ship lay in two pieces — bow and stern separated by some distance, the hull otherwise remarkably intact — and the images returned by the remotely operated vehicle Argo showed railings, portholes, a ship's telegraph, and a great field of objects scattered across the mud: luggage, crockery, shoes. Ballard had covered the discovery under contract with the United States Navy, which was funding the expedition partly for its ability to locate sunken nuclear submarines, and the Titanic itself was something of a public bonus to clandestine work. The discovery reignited popular fascination with the ship, fuelled decades of documentary expeditions, and began a long, unresolved argument about what humanity owes to the dead and their belongings.