1988

Nobel Prize in Physics

Matter Comes in Two Flavours, Not One

Leon M. Lederman · Melvin Schwartz · Jack Steinberger

By the early 1960s, neutrinos were well established as the most unsociable particles in the universe — passing through the Earth as though it were politely not there — and the notion of fashioning them into a directed beam struck many physicists as ambitious to the point of comedy. Lederman, Schwartz, and Steinberger did it anyway at Brookhaven in 1962, generating the beam from proton collisions and firing it at a ten-ton spark chamber; the detection rates were modest to put it charitably, but the results were unambiguous. The neutrino that traveled with the muon was not the same particle as the one that traveled with the electron — two distinct neutrino flavours, not one, which meant that matter's fundamental constituents came in paired generations. That quiet discovery planted the seed of the Standard Model's generational structure, the pattern of three lepton families that still stands without a satisfying theoretical explanation, meaning the Brookhaven result handed physicists a fact they have not yet fully digested.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Portrait of the Machine That Runs the Biosphere

Johann Deisenhofer · Robert Huber · Hartmut Michel

The proteins lodged inside biological membranes are among the most important molecules in living cells, yet for decades they defeated crystallographers almost entirely: their hydrophobic exteriors loathe water, and crystallography needs water-based solution, producing a standoff that left an enormous swathe of biochemistry structurally dark. Hartmut Michel, working in the early 1980s, found a way around this impasse by developing detergents that could coax a membrane protein — the photosynthetic reaction centre from a purple bacterium — into crystal form, and Johann Deisenhofer and Robert Huber then solved its structure by X-ray crystallography to atomic resolution. What they revealed was the precise molecular machinery by which a living thing captures a photon and converts it to chemical energy: every cofactor, every chlorophyll-like pigment, every electron-transfer pathway mapped in three dimensions. The structure was the most complex ever determined at the time, and it was also, in a certain light, a portrait of the most consequential chemical reaction on Earth, since it is photosynthesis — in one form or another — that has been running the biosphere for three billion years.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Drug Design Traded Its Lottery Tickets for Blueprints

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

The standard approach to finding new drugs for most of the twentieth century was essentially systematic optimism: make a large number of compounds, test them all, and see what survives. James Black found this unsatisfying and instead reasoned from first principles about receptor pharmacology, asking what a molecule would have to look like to block a specific receptor — and then making it. His beta-blockers, targeting the receptors through which adrenaline accelerates the heart, transformed the management of angina and hypertension; his H2 receptor antagonists, targeting the stomach's acid-secretion pathway, made cimetidine the world's first billion-dollar drug and effectively abolished elective surgery for peptic ulcers. Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings, working in parallel at Burroughs Wellcome, applied a related logic to nucleoside chemistry, exploiting the metabolic differences between cancer cells and normal cells to produce drugs for childhood leukaemia, organ transplant rejection, gout, and herpes — a range that no random screening programme could plausibly have assembled. The three laureates between them demonstrated that pharmacology could be a rational science rather than an elaborate lottery, and the industry's subsequent turn toward structure-based drug design is their intellectual inheritance.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Sixty Years of Cairo, Written Before Work

Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz had been writing about Cairo since the 1930s — its crumbling tenements and its coffee-house philosophers, its low-level functionaries navigating the indignities of colonialism and then of their own governments, its ordinary families trying to hold a recognisable shape against the pressure of a century that refused to stay still. The Cairo Trilogy, his masterwork, follows three generations of a merchant family from 1917 to 1952, and carries the weight of an entire society's transformation within a domestic frame with the patience of Tolstoy and the precision of someone who walked those streets every day. When the Nobel committee announced him in October 1988 he was, as the committee noted, almost entirely untranslated into European languages; the prize created an instant global demand that translators spent years satisfying. His work remains the richest fictional account of modern Arab urban life in any language — and it was produced by a man who wrote every morning before his government job and never, in sixty years of writing, left Egypt.

Nobel Peace Prize

Careful Irrelevance, Forty Years Running

United Nations Peacekeeping Forces

The United Nations deployed its first armed peacekeeping force in 1956 to supervise the ceasefire following the Suez Crisis, though unarmed UN observers had been watching borders with limited enthusiasm since 1948. The logic of peacekeeping rests on a structural paradox: the force must be invited by the parties whose conflict it is there to contain, must remain strictly neutral between them, and must be lightly armed enough to signal that it has no intention of imposing a settlement — which means it can only work when the parties are already inclined to stop fighting, precisely the moment when they need it least. By 1988 the UN had deployed peacekeeping missions across four continents and was staffing a Sinai monitoring operation, a Cyprus buffer zone, and a Lebanese border mission simultaneously, each of them a study in careful irrelevance to anyone determined to resume hostilities. The Nobel committee's decision to recognise forty years of this particular vocation was perhaps an acknowledgement that keeping a lid on things, imperfectly and at considerable personal risk to the soldiers involved, is not nothing.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

A Physicist Catches Economics Contradicting Itself

Maurice Allais

Maurice Allais was a French physicist by training who turned to economics after the Second World War partly because he felt the discipline needed people who understood what a rigorous argument looked like. He made fundamental contributions to general equilibrium theory and to the analysis of capital markets, but he is best remembered for a thought experiment published in 1953, in which he presented a series of choices between gambles and demonstrated that people systematically preferred combinations that, according to expected utility theory, no rational agent should prefer. The Allais paradox was deeply unwelcome in a discipline that had built much of its theoretical scaffolding on that theory, and it was largely ignored by mainstream economists for two decades before gaining traction among psychologists and heterodox economists who had been quietly noticing similar things. It eventually contributed to the foundations of behavioural economics — the field that won a Nobel of its own in 2002 for Daniel Kahneman. Allais himself was awarded his prize thirty-five years after the paradox was published, at which point he had long concluded that economics had not listened to him with the attention the subject deserved, a view he held with undimmed French clarity until his death in 2010.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

A Circle That Knew It Was a Circle

Turing Award

Ivan Sutherland

In 1963, Ivan Sutherland submitted a doctoral dissertation at MIT that made most of the computer graphics field's founding assumptions as a side effect of trying to do something else. Sketchpad, his thesis project, allowed a user to draw lines and shapes directly on a cathode-ray screen using a light pen, then manipulate those shapes as geometric objects with defined constraints — a circle that knew it was a circle, a right angle that insisted on remaining one even when its arms were moved. Nothing like it had existed before, and virtually everything in interactive computing since has descended from it: the concept of the graphical object, the manipulation handle, the constraint system, the structured representation of a drawing. Sutherland went on to co-found a computer graphics company and to build early head-mounted display systems for virtual reality research, but Sketchpad is the achievement for which he is remembered, and rightly so — it remains one of those rare doctoral dissertations that one can read today and find oneself thinking, with genuine puzzlement, how a single student arrived at so much at once.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

RNA Turns Out to Be Its Own Editor

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Thomas R. Cech · Phillip A. Sharp

For most of the twentieth century, the cell's division of labour seemed settled: DNA stores information, RNA ferries it around, proteins do the chemistry. Phillip Sharp's discovery in 1977 that genes in higher organisms are broken into coding segments separated by long non-coding introns — stretches of DNA that must be edited out before the messenger RNA is usable — was surprising enough on its own, requiring an elaborate molecular machinery called the spliceosome to do the cutting and pasting. Thomas Cech's discovery, published in 1982, was stranger still: he found that certain RNA molecules could catalyse their own splicing reactions without any protein involvement whatsoever, which meant that RNA could act as both information carrier and enzyme, overturning a decades-old assumption that catalysis was exclusively the domain of proteins. The implications were considerable and immediate: if RNA could both store information and do chemistry, it became possible to imagine — and then to argue seriously for — an early 'RNA world' in which life began without DNA or protein at all. Both men received Nobels shortly after the Lasker, Sharp in 1993 and Cech in 1989, in the pleasing order of things.

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

A Continent's Voices, Recast as Light

The transatlantic telephone cable business had run for three decades on copper coaxial lines, each one laboriously laid from ships at roughly one cable-length per decade, each one a little more capable than the last but limited ultimately by the physics of electrons dissipating their energy into wire. TAT-8 entered commercial service on 14 December 1988, running 6,700 kilometres from New Jersey to Cornwall and then on to France, and it worked on a different principle entirely: voices encoded as pulses of infrared light, carried by glass fibres thinner than a human hair and repeated by undersea regenerators every fifty kilometres or so. Its capacity — 40,000 simultaneous telephone calls — was roughly ten times that of the last copper cable, and it was made obsolete within a few years by fibre cables with vastly higher capacity still. The technology it demonstrated now carries something in the region of ninety-five per cent of all international internet traffic, encoded on wavelengths of light passing through the same ocean floor that once seemed the final obstacle to connecting the world.

Death of Richard Feynman

Ice Water, and an O-Ring Explained

Richard P. Feynman

Richard Feynman died in Los Angeles on 15 February 1988, aged 69, of kidney cancer, reportedly remarking that dying was boring and he would prefer not to do it twice. He had won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for quantum electrodynamics — the theory that describes how light and matter interact — and had devised the diagrammatic notation, now known universally as Feynman diagrams, that made calculations in the theory practicable rather than merely possible in principle; without them, quantum field theory would have remained the possession of a small group of people willing to perform prodigious feats of algebra for modest rewards. He also contributed substantially to the understanding of liquid helium's superfluidity, proposed the quark-parton model of the proton's interior structure, and, in his final public act, demonstrated at a televised hearing on the Challenger disaster that the O-ring sealing a solid rocket booster became dangerously brittle in cold weather by dropping a piece of one into his glass of ice water. His three-volume undergraduate lectures, delivered at Caltech in the early 1960s, remain in continuous print and continuous use — a monument to the belief that clarity and depth are the same thing, properly pursued.