1988

Nobel Prize in Physics

Leon M. Lederman · Melvin Schwartz · Jack Steinberger

At Brookhaven in 1962, the three scientists produced the first focused beam of neutrinos — previously considered too shy to aim — and fired it at a detector. What they found was that the neutrino accompanying the muon is a different particle from the one accompanying the electron, establishing that leptons come in pairs: the first glimpse of what would become the Standard Model's generational structure.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Johann Deisenhofer · Robert Huber · Hartmut Michel

Membrane proteins — the molecules embedded in cell walls that regulate what passes in and out — had resisted crystallisation for decades because their hydrophobic surfaces are hostile to water-based solutions. Michel found a way to crystallise one anyway, and Deisenhofer and Huber solved its X-ray structure: the machinery of photosynthesis, resolved for the first time at atomic detail, the most complex structure yet determined.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Sir James W. Black · Gertrude B. Elion · George H. Hitchings

Black designed drugs by reasoning from receptor pharmacology rather than screening compounds at random: his beta-blockers (propranolol) and H2-receptor antagonists (cimetidine) transformed the treatment of heart disease and peptic ulcers. Elion and Hitchings applied a related logic to nucleoside chemistry, producing drugs for leukaemia, herpes, gout, and organ-transplant rejection — a remarkable range from a single theoretical starting point.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Naguib Mahfouz

Mahfouz spent his career writing about Cairo — its coffee houses, its streets, its complicated bureaucrats and idealists — in a body of work that made him the first Arabic-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was announced while he was still unknown to most of the world's bookshops.

Nobel Peace Prize

United Nations Peacekeeping Forces

The UN's blue-helmeted peacekeeping forces had been deployed in conflict zones since 1948, operating under the awkward constraint of requiring the consent of the parties they were separating. The Nobel recognised forty years of that particular difficulty, interposing lightly armed observers between people who were not always interested in being observed.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Maurice Allais

Allais had demonstrated in 1953 a systematic violation of expected utility theory — a set of choices that rational agents, by the theory's own rules, should not make but consistently do — which became known as the Allais paradox. The finding sat uncomfortably with mainstream economics for decades and eventually contributed to the field of behavioural economics.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

Ivan Sutherland

Sutherland's 1963 MIT dissertation introduced Sketchpad, a program that let a user draw directly on a screen with a light pen and manipulate the resulting shapes as geometric objects with constraints — the first interactive computer graphics system. He later worked on head-mounted displays and virtual reality; nearly every idea in computer graphics traces a line back to his work.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Thomas R. Cech · Phillip A. Sharp

Sharp discovered that the genes in higher organisms are interrupted by non-coding stretches that must be removed before a protein can be made — the spliceosome's unglamorous but essential editing work. Cech discovered that RNA can catalyse its own splicing without any protein assistance, which upended a foundational assumption about where catalysis lives in biology. Both eventually received Nobels.

TAT-8: first transatlantic fiber-optic cable enters service

TAT-8 entered commercial service on 14 December 1988, running between the United States, Britain, and France. It could carry 40,000 simultaneous telephone calls — ten times the capacity of the last copper cable — by encoding voices as pulses of light. The era of submarine fibre optics, which now carries the overwhelming majority of international internet traffic, began here.

Death of Richard Feynman

Richard P. Feynman

Feynman died on 15 February 1988 in Los Angeles, aged 69. He had invented quantum electrodynamics, devised the diagrams that made it teachable, contributed to the understanding of superfluidity and the partons inside protons, and identified the O-ring failure that destroyed Challenger by dipping a piece of rubber into a glass of ice water at a televised hearing. His lectures, delivered decades earlier, are still in print and still read.