1989

Nobel Prize in Physics

Norman F. Ramsey · Hans G. Dehmelt · Wolfgang Paul

Ramsey invented a method of applying two brief pulses of oscillating fields to atoms, separated by a gap in which they precess undisturbed, producing an interference pattern sharp enough to build the most precise clocks in existence. Dehmelt and Paul developed ion traps — electromagnetic cages capable of holding a single charged particle in isolation for days — allowing atomic properties to be measured with equivalent precision.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Sidney Altman · Thomas R. Cech

The central dogma of molecular biology held that information flows from DNA to RNA to protein, and that only proteins act as catalysts. Cech found that an RNA intron in a single-celled pond organism could excise itself without any protein help; Altman independently showed that the catalytic part of a bacterial enzyme was its RNA component, not its protein. The RNA world hypothesis, which proposes RNA as the primordial molecule of life, found these discoveries very congenial.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

J. Michael Bishop · Harold E. Varmus

Retroviruses were known to carry genes that turn healthy cells cancerous — but where those genes came from was unclear. Bishop and Varmus showed that viral oncogenes are mutated versions of ordinary genes that cells already possess, called proto-oncogenes, whose normal job is to regulate growth. Cancer, in this view, is not invasion from outside but a corruption of something that was always there.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Camilo José Cela

Cela's 1942 novel La familia de Pascual Duarte described violence with a flat, matter-of-fact prose that became the defining tone of tremendismo, post-Civil War Spain's literary response to what it had witnessed. La colmena, published nine years later, watched a cross-section of Madrid's population in the hungry years after the war with the same cold patience.

Nobel Peace Prize

The 14th Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso)

The 14th Dalai Lama had been in exile since 1959, when he fled Tibet following the Chinese military crackdown. He had proposed a Five Point Peace Plan for Tibet in 1987 and consistently advocated negotiation over confrontation, a position that satisfied neither the Chinese government nor the more impatient wing of the Tibetan independence movement.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Trygve Haavelmo

Haavelmo's 1944 monograph argued that economic relationships should be treated as inherently stochastic — that observed data are drawn from a probability distribution, not generated by a deterministic mechanism — and set out the statistical framework for testing economic theories accordingly. The field of econometrics grew directly from that foundation.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

William Kahan

Before the IEEE 754 standard, the same floating-point calculation on two different computers could produce meaningfully different results — a situation that was inconvenient for scientists and catastrophic for anyone who needed to compare results across machines. Kahan was the primary architect of IEEE 754, adopted in 1985, which standardised floating-point arithmetic across all computing platforms.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Michael J. Berridge · Alfred G. Gilman · Edwin G. Krebs · Yasutomi Nishizuka

Cells receive instructions from hormones and other molecules that cannot pass through their membranes, and must therefore speak in a molecular relay. Berridge, Gilman, Krebs, and Nishizuka mapped several legs of that relay — IP3, cyclic AMP, protein kinase C — working out how a signal on the outside of a cell becomes an action on the inside.

Cold fusion claim by Pons and Fleischmann

On 23 March 1989 electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced at a press conference — before peer review, before replication — that they had produced nuclear fusion in a palladium electrode submerged in heavy water at room temperature. Laboratories around the world attempted to reproduce the excess heat they had claimed; most found nothing. By the end of the year the scientific consensus had moved firmly against them.

Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune

On 25 August 1989, Voyager 2 flew within 4,800 kilometres of Neptune's cloud tops, completing the first and so far only reconnaissance of all four outer planets. It discovered six new moons, a Great Dark Spot storm system, and active nitrogen geysers on the moon Triton — which, despite being the coldest measured body in the solar system at that point, was geologically restless.

Tim Berners-Lee proposes the World Wide Web at CERN

In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to CERN management describing a system in which documents stored on different computers could link to each other via hypertext — a way of organising information that required no central authority and no single machine. His supervisor Mike Sendall wrote "vague but exciting" on the cover page and approved it. By the end of 1990 the first web server and browser were running.

Magellan spacecraft launched toward Venus

On 4 May 1989 NASA launched Magellan from the payload bay of Shuttle Atlantis, the first interplanetary spacecraft to be carried into orbit by the shuttle. It arrived at Venus in August 1990 and spent four years mapping more than 98 percent of the surface with synthetic-aperture radar, producing images that revealed a planet recently resurfaced by volcanic activity on a massive scale.

COBE satellite launched to map the cosmic microwave background

On 18 November 1989 NASA launched the Cosmic Background Explorer to measure the spectrum and spatial variation of the radiation left over from the Big Bang. Its 1990 measurement of a near-perfect blackbody spectrum matched Big Bang predictions so precisely that one member of the team described it as "the most perfect blackbody spectrum ever measured"; the detection of temperature anisotropies in 1992 earned the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Death of Andrei Sakharov

Andrei Sakharov

Andrei Sakharov, who had been a principal designer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and spent the following decades as the Soviet Union's most prominent dissident, died of heart failure in Moscow on 14 December 1989, aged 68. He had been elected to the Congress of People's Deputies earlier that year and was still arguing, on the floor of that body, for democratic reform the day before he died.