1987

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Ceramic Broke the Cold Rule

J. Georg Bednorz · K. Alex Müller

For most of the twentieth century, superconductivity — the vanishing of electrical resistance — was understood to be a low-temperature phenomenon, a trick that only worked when matter was cooled to within spitting distance of absolute zero using liquid helium, which is expensive, fiddly, and not a thing you find lying around. The theoretical consensus held that superconductors could not function above about 30 Kelvin; so when Bednorz and Müller published results in 1986 showing that a copper-oxide ceramic, not a metal, lost its resistance at 35 K, breaking the record by a margin that should not have been possible, other physicists assumed they had made an error. They had not. The Nobel committee awarded the prize in 1987, less than a year after the paper — one of the fastest turnarounds in the prize's history, a reliable sign that someone had done something genuinely unexpected. Without this discovery, the subsequent race toward room-temperature superconductivity — with all its implications for lossless power transmission and magnetically levitated trains — would never have known which chemical families were worth trying.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Byproduct Grew Molecular Hands

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

Charles Pedersen was trying to synthesize something else entirely in 1967 when he noticed that a byproduct — a ring-shaped molecule he called a crown ether — had a peculiar talent: it could seize metal ions and hold them snugly, as if the molecule had grown hands specifically shaped for the task. This accident turned out to be the seed of something large. Cram and Lehn took the idea and developed it into supramolecular chemistry, a discipline concerned not with what atoms are but with how molecules recognise and bind to each other — a kind of molecular sociology. Lehn coined the phrase "host-guest chemistry" to describe structures designed to receive particular guests and refuse all others. The wit of the whole enterprise is that it mimics what enzymes and antibodies do in living cells, but built from scratch, on the bench, by chemists who had decided that designing molecules to fit together was at least as interesting as understanding the ones that already did. Drug delivery, molecular machines, and sensors that detect specific ions in solution all trace a direct line back to Pedersen's fortunate mistake.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Billion Shapes From a Small Deck

Susumu Tonegawa

The human immune system can recognise something on the order of a billion distinct molecular shapes — viruses, bacteria, synthetic compounds never found in nature — and manufacture a precisely tailored antibody for each. The genome, however, contains only around 20,000 genes, which is nowhere near enough to keep a blueprint for every possible antibody on file. This apparent impossibility nagged at immunologists for years, until Susumu Tonegawa showed in the 1970s that the genome does not bother keeping blueprints: instead, immune cells carry a modest library of gene segments and, as they mature, shuffle and recombine them, generating an enormous variety of antibody blueprints from a relatively small deck of cards. The trick is combinatorial. It is, in retrospect, an elegant economy — the immune system building its vast repertoire not by remembering everything but by being prepared to improvise. Understanding this mechanism underpins the rational design of vaccines and therapeutic antibodies, and explains why the immune system sometimes misfires at the body's own tissues when the shuffling goes wrong.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Parasite, the Court Called Him

Joseph Brodsky

In 1964 a Leningrad court tried Joseph Brodsky for "social parasitism" — the charge being, with admirable Soviet directness, that he had declared himself a poet without possessing a union card that certified him as one. The judge reportedly asked what had authorised him to call himself a poet; he answered that he thought it came from God. He was sentenced to five years of hard labour in the Arkhangelsk region, a punishment so evidently disproportionate that it caused an international outcry and was commuted after less than two years. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and eventually settled in the United States, where he taught at Mount Holyoke and Michigan, became US Poet Laureate in 1991, and wrote essays in English that read as though the language had always belonged to him. By the time the Nobel came in 1987, Brodsky had made a considerable career out of being precisely the thing the Soviet state could not extinguish: a poet who worked entirely on the strength of the poems. The Nobel committee called him one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century; the Leningrad court had called him a parasite. Both assessments, in their way, confirmed his stature.

Nobel Peace Prize

No Army, Five Signatures Anyway

Oscar Arias Sánchez

Central America in the mid-1980s was a region in which civil wars overlapped and fed each other: Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras each carried conflicts partly sustained by outside powers treating the region as a proxy theatre. Oscar Arias Sánchez, who took office as Costa Rica's president in 1986, had no army — Costa Rica abolished its military in 1948 — and accordingly no leverage of the conventional kind, only the persuasive variety. He drafted a peace plan, spent months flying between capitals to secure signatures from leaders who had no particular reason to trust each other, and in August 1987 achieved the Esquipulas II Accords, which committed all five Central American governments to ceasefires and dialogue. The Nobel committee awarded the prize in October of that same year, which is unusually prompt; they evidently judged the achievement sufficiently concrete not to wait. The agreements were imperfect, and the wars did not end immediately, but the diplomatic framework Arias created gave the region a path that force alone had not.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

The Measure of Our Ignorance

Robert M. Solow

In 1956 Robert Solow published a growth model that reframed how economists thought about prosperity. The prevailing view had been that economies grew because they accumulated capital — factories, machines, infrastructure — but Solow showed mathematically that capital accumulation alone leads to diminishing returns and eventually to a steady state where output per person stops rising. Sustained growth, in his model, required a third factor beyond capital and labour: technological progress, which he defined rigorously enough to measure. The catch was that when economists actually measured it, they found that technological progress accounted for the majority of American growth in the first half of the twentieth century, and yet the model treated it as exogenous — something that arrived from outside the system, unexplained. This residual, sometimes called the Solow residual and sometimes, with forensic understatement, the measure of our ignorance, motivated decades of subsequent work trying to explain where the engine of prosperity actually came from. Solow received the prize in 1987, three decades after the paper; growth theory had spent much of the intervening time trying, usefully, to explain away his finding.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Fewer Instructions, Run Them Faster

Turing Award

John Cocke

The conventional wisdom of computer architecture in the 1970s held that a processor should have as many instructions as possible — complex ones that could do more work per command — because this made programs shorter and, supposedly, faster. John Cocke at IBM was unconvinced. Working on the 801 project in the mid-1970s, he developed what became known as RISC — Reduced Instruction Set Computing — which held that a processor given a smaller, simpler set of instructions could execute each one faster, often outrunning the complex alternatives even when the programs themselves required more steps. This was, to put it gently, the opposite of what most architects expected, and it took some years to convince the field. The vindication arrived as microprocessors became small enough to put in portable devices, where simplicity, speed, and low power consumption mattered most. The ARM architecture — derived directly from RISC principles — is now found in essentially every smartphone and tablet on earth, which is perhaps the most extensive posthumous compliment any computer scientist has received.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

One Found the Trick, One Built the Tool

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Leroy Hood · Philip Leder · Susumu Tonegawa

The 1987 Lasker for basic medical research recognised work that stood at the intersection of the practical and the theoretical: Tonegawa and Leder shared credit for illuminating the gene-shuffling mechanism by which immune cells manufacture antibody diversity — the same work that earned Tonegawa the Nobel in Physiology that same year — while Leroy Hood was recognised for something without which the full implications of that mechanism could hardly have been explored. Hood had developed the first automated DNA sequencer, introduced in 1986 in a collaboration with Applied Biosystems, which could read genetic sequences at a rate orders of magnitude beyond what human hands and gel electrophoresis could manage. Before Hood's machine, sequencing was laborious enough that imagining the Human Genome Project felt approximately like imagining a census by hand-counting. After it, the project became a question of funding and logistics rather than feasibility. The three awards sat neatly together: Tonegawa and Leder had found what to look for in the genome; Hood had built the tool to look.

Supernova 1987A observed in the Large Magellanic Cloud

The Neutrinos Arrived Three Hours Early

On the night of 23 February 1987, Ian Shelton was developing a photographic plate at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile when he noticed a bright new object in the Large Magellanic Cloud — a dwarf galaxy close enough to the Milky Way to be visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere. He went outside and confirmed it was there, making SN 1987A the closest observable supernova since Kepler's in 1604 and the first in the modern era of telescopes, neutrino detectors, and space observatories. What made the event scientifically extraordinary was what had happened three hours earlier: neutrino detectors in Japan (Kamiokande II) and Ohio (IMB) had registered a brief, sharp burst of two-dozen particles — a minuscule fraction of the ten-second flood that theory predicted — from a collapsing stellar core 168,000 light-years distant. The neutrinos preceded the light because they had escaped the dying star's core before the shockwave punched outward; they passed through the entire planet as though it were a light mist. This was the first detection of neutrinos from an astrophysical source other than the sun, confirming in a single night the broad outlines of core-collapse supernova theory that had been built on pen and paper for decades.

Montreal Protocol signed to phase out ozone-depleting substances

Forty-Six Nations Gave Up a Product Line

By the mid-1980s it was established beyond reasonable doubt that chlorofluorocarbons — the propellants and refrigerants found in aerosol cans, air conditioners, and refrigerators across the industrialised world — were destroying the stratospheric ozone layer that shields the surface from ultraviolet radiation. The Antarctic ozone hole had been confirmed in 1985. On 16 September 1987, 46 nations signed the Montreal Protocol, committing to halve and then eliminate production of CFCs and related substances. The political achievement was as notable as the scientific one: this was a treaty that asked industries to abandon profitable, well-established product lines on the basis of atmospheric chemistry that had only recently been worked out, and it held. The Montreal Protocol remains the only environmental treaty to achieve universal ratification by all members of the United Nations — a distinction that reflects both the clarity of the science and the relative manageability of the substitution costs. The ozone layer has since been measurably recovering, demonstrating, with uncommon directness, that collective action on atmospheric chemistry is possible when the problem is specific enough and the alternatives are within reach.

FDA approves AZT, the first antiretroviral drug for AIDS

A Shelved Cancer Drug Bought Time

In the first years of the AIDS epidemic the disease had no approved treatment; the diagnosis was, with very few exceptions, a sentence. Zidovudine — AZT, originally synthesised in 1964 as a possible cancer drug and then shelved — was identified in 1984 as having activity against HIV and moved into clinical trials with unusual speed under intense public pressure. The FDA approved it on 19 March 1987, after a review of just 20 months, the fastest approval in the agency's history to that point, a record that reflected both the urgency and the extent to which activist groups had reshaped the relationship between patients, pharmaceutical companies, and regulators. AZT extended survival and demonstrated that HIV could be pharmacologically attacked — proofs of concept that mattered enormously when neither was obvious. The drug's price at launch was approximately $10,000 a year, which concentrated the attention of patient advocacy organisations on pharmaceutical pricing in ways that have not since relaxed, and which helped create the framework of accelerated approval pathways and community consultation that now governs how HIV drugs and others in urgent need reach patients. AZT was not a cure, and its side effects were significant; it was, rather, evidence that the disease had a pharmacology, and that pharmacologies can be interrupted.