1987

Nobel Prize in Physics

J. Georg Bednorz · K. Alex Müller

Bednorz and Müller had published their discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in a copper-oxide ceramic only the previous year, breaking the temperature record for superconductivity by a margin that made some physicists suspect an error. The Nobel committee, uncharacteristically, awarded the prize within twelve months of publication.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Donald J. Cram · Jean-Marie Lehn · Charles J. Pedersen

Pedersen had stumbled across crown ethers while trying to make something else and noticed they could selectively bind metal ions as if clasping them in a ring. Cram and Lehn extended this idea into a new field — supramolecular chemistry — in which molecules are designed to fit together like lock and key, a discipline that now underpins much of modern drug design and materials science.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Susumu Tonegawa

The immune system can recognise billions of different molecular intruders, but the genome contains only tens of thousands of genes — far too few to encode a different antibody for each threat. Tonegawa showed that immune cells solve this by shuffling and recombining a modest library of gene segments during their development, generating diversity on the fly.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Joseph Brodsky

Soviet authorities had put Brodsky on trial for "social parasitism" in 1964 — the charge being, essentially, that he called himself a poet without official permission — and sentenced him to five years of hard labour in the Arctic, later commuted. He was expelled from the USSR in 1972; by 1987 he was US Poet Laureate and the Nobel was in hand.

Nobel Peace Prize

Oscar Arias Sánchez

As President of Costa Rica, Arias drafted a peace plan for Central America's ongoing civil wars and then spent considerable political capital persuading the region's other leaders to sign it. The Arias Peace Plan brought a ceasefire that most observers had not expected to be achievable; the Nobel committee awarded the prize in the same year he managed it.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Robert M. Solow

Solow's growth model, built in the 1950s, showed that capital accumulation alone cannot sustain long-run economic growth — that sustained increases in output per person require technological change. The implication was clarifying and slightly awkward: the engine of prosperity was something economists could measure only as a residual.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

John Cocke

Cocke's work at IBM on reducing the number of instructions a processor needs to execute — RISC architecture — contradicted the prevailing assumption that adding more instructions to a chip made it more capable. Stripping the instruction set down turned out to make processors faster. The chips in nearly every mobile device today are his intellectual descendants.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Leroy Hood · Philip Leder · Susumu Tonegawa

Hood's contribution was practical as well as theoretical: his automated DNA sequencer, introduced in 1986, could process sequences at a rate that made the Human Genome Project imaginable rather than merely aspirational. Leder and Tonegawa shared credit for illuminating the genetic mechanism that generates antibody diversity.

Supernova 1987A observed in the Large Magellanic Cloud

On 23 February 1987 Ian Shelton noticed a new star in the Large Magellanic Cloud while developing a photographic plate at Las Campanas Observatory — the closest observable supernova since Kepler's of 1604, only 168,000 light-years away. Three hours earlier, neutrino detectors in Japan and Ohio had recorded a burst of particles that had passed through the Earth as if it were not there; the neutrinos arrived before the light because they had escaped the collapsing core first.

Montreal Protocol signed to phase out ozone-depleting substances

On 16 September 1987, 46 nations signed the Montreal Protocol, committing to reduce and eventually eliminate production of chlorofluorocarbons and other chemicals known to destroy stratospheric ozone. It is the only environmental treaty to achieve universal ratification; the ozone layer has been slowly recovering as a result.

FDA approves AZT, the first antiretroviral drug for AIDS

On 19 March 1987 the FDA approved zidovudine — AZT — for AIDS treatment after a 20-month review, the fastest approval in the agency's history to that point. The drug extended survival and was proof that the disease could be attacked pharmacologically; it also cost $10,000 a year at launch, which concentrated activist attention on the pharmaceutical industry in ways that reshaped how drugs are developed and priced.