1985

Nobel Prize in Physics

Klaus von Klitzing

At very low temperatures in a strong magnetic field, the electrical resistance of a thin layer of electrons does not vary continuously but steps in precise fractions of a fundamental constant — an effect so exact it became a new international standard for resistance. Von Klitzing discovered it in 1980; the Nobel followed five years later, which for physics is brisk.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Herbert A. Hauptman · Jerome Karle

X-ray crystallography can measure how much a crystal diffracts a beam of X-rays but not the phase of the scattered waves — and without the phases, reconstructing the underlying structure seemed impossible. Hauptman and Karle developed statistical methods to extract the phases from the intensities alone, turning a laborious puzzle into an almost routine procedure.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Michael S. Brown · Joseph L. Goldstein

Cells need cholesterol and make it themselves, but they also take it in from the bloodstream via LDL receptors on their surfaces. Brown and Goldstein showed that familial hypercholesterolaemia — a hereditary tendency to dangerously high cholesterol — results from defective or absent receptors, and mapped the feedback loops that normally keep production in check. Their work pointed directly at the class of drugs called statins.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Claude Simon

Simon wrote novels in which memory and time do not behave as novels usually ask them to — sentences unfold across pages, and a scene from the Spanish Civil War can open without warning inside a memory from World War II. The committee described his work as combining the painter's and the poet's creativity with a deepened awareness of time.

Nobel Peace Prize

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War

American cardiologist Bernard Lown and Soviet cardiologist Yevgeny Chazov had founded IPPNW in 1980, a partnership so improbable given the Cold War that its mere existence was a kind of argument. The organisation communicated to governments and publics what a nuclear exchange would mean in clinical terms, which turned out to be a more disturbing framing than megatons.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Franco Modigliani

Modigliani's life-cycle hypothesis proposed that people spread their earning and spending across a lifetime in a reasonably rational way — save when young, spend in retirement — which made saving behaviour a function of demography as much as incentive. With Merton Miller he also showed, under idealised conditions, that how a firm finances itself has no bearing on what it is worth.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

Richard M. Karp

In 1972 Karp published a paper proving that 21 well-known combinatorial problems are all NP-complete — which meant that a fast solution to any one of them would solve all the others. The paper established the practical vocabulary for talking about computational difficulty, and those 21 problems are still waiting.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Michael S. Brown · Joseph L. Goldstein

The rare distinction of receiving both the Lasker Award and the Nobel Prize in the same year fell to Brown and Goldstein in 1985 — one of those occasions when the committees, for once, were working from the same reading list.

Discovery of buckminsterfullerene (C60)

In September 1985 Harold Kroto, Robert Curl, Richard Smalley, and students at Rice University were vaporising carbon and noticed a cluster of exactly sixty atoms appearing with suspicious regularity. They proposed it was shaped like a truncated icosahedron — a football — and named it after the architect Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembled. Kroto, Curl, and Smalley won the 1996 Nobel for the discovery.

Antarctic ozone hole announced

Joseph Farman, Brian Gardiner, and Jonathan Shanklin of the British Antarctic Survey had been measuring stratospheric ozone above Halley station since the 1950s. When their readings showed losses exceeding 40 percent relative to 1960s levels every austral spring, they checked the instruments rather than immediately publish — and when the instruments were fine, they published in Nature in May 1985. The Montreal Protocol followed within two years.

Wreck of RMS Titanic located

On 1 September 1985 a joint American-French expedition led by Robert Ballard located the Titanic at about 3,800 metres depth in the North Atlantic, seventy-three years after it sank. The ship lay in two pieces, the bow and stern separated by some distance, and a remotely operated vehicle sent back the first images of it: railings, portholes, a ship's telegraph, remarkably intact.