1996

Nobel Prize in Physics

David M. Lee · Douglas D. Osheroff · Robert C. Richardson

At Cornell in 1972, the three researchers cooled helium-3 to within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero and found it became superfluid — flowing without friction through a mechanism entirely different from the superfluidity of helium-4. The physics required to explain it was rich and strange in equal measure.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Robert F. Curl Jr. · Sir Harold Kroto · Richard E. Smalley

In 1985, Curl, Kroto, and Smalley vaporised graphite with a laser and found, in the resulting soot, a third stable form of carbon: sixty atoms arranged in a hollow sphere the shape of a soccer ball. They called it buckminsterfullerene, and it opened a branch of chemistry that nobody had expected to need.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Peter C. Doherty · Rolf M. Zinkernagel

Doherty and Zinkernagel showed that killer T cells recognise virus-infected cells only when they display a viral fragment alongside the body's own MHC molecules — a double requirement that explained why immune responses are specific to the individual and established the principle of MHC restriction at the heart of cellular immunology.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Wisława Szymborska

Szymborska wrote with ironic precision about the historical and biological context of being human, managing to be funny and profound at the same time — a combination the Nobel committee described, with unusual accuracy, as wit with philosophical depth.

Nobel Peace Prize

Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo · José Ramos-Horta

Bishop Belo and diplomat Ramos-Horta worked for decades to bring international attention to the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, using the limited tools available to people whose cause official channels preferred to ignore. The prize acknowledged both their persistence and what it had cost.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

James A. Mirrlees · William Vickrey

Mirrlees worked out how to design an income tax that is optimal when the government cannot observe how hard people work; Vickrey developed auction theory, including the second-price auction in which bidders reveal their true valuations. Vickrey died three days after the announcement, having never collected the prize.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Ellen Kleist · Harald Moi

For their published case report on the transmission of gonorrhoea via an inflatable doll, which appeared in Genitourinary Medicine. Medicine requires that unusual cases be documented; the committee felt this one merited additional recognition.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Robert Matthews

Matthews demonstrated that toast reliably lands buttered-side down, and that this is not bad luck but a consequence of the laws of physics — the height of tables and the rotational dynamics of falling slices conspire to produce exactly one and a half turns, ending face-down, essentially every time.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Anders Bærheim · Hogne Sandvik

Their paper 'Effect of Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches' appeared in the Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association. Leeches, it turned out, have preferences. Whether those preferences should influence clinical practice was left unaddressed.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

George Goble

Goble achieved a world-record barbecue-ignition time of three seconds by combining charcoal with liquid oxygen. The committee awarded the prize enthusiastically. Safety considerations were apparently not the primary objective.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

The editors of Social Text journal

The editors published physicist Alan Sokal's paper 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' — a document composed, by Sokal's own admission, of scientific-sounding nonsense — without noticing that it was a hoax. The peer-review process had not functioned as intended.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Amir Pnueli

Pnueli's 1977 paper introduced temporal logic — a way of reasoning about statements that are true at some times and not others — into computer science, creating the theoretical foundation for automatically verifying that software systems behave correctly. Computers checking that computer programs work correctly was a more powerful idea than it sounded.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Robert F. Furchgott · Ferid Murad

Their work showed that nitroglycerin — used as a heart medication for more than a century — acts by releasing nitric oxide, which relaxes blood vessels by stimulating cyclic GMP. A gas that had been considered a pollutant turned out to be a signalling molecule the cardiovascular system depends on.

Dolly the sheep cloned from an adult cell

On 5 July, Ian Wilmut and colleagues at the Roslin Institute produced a lamb by taking the nucleus from an adult mammary gland cell and inserting it into an enucleated egg. Dolly showed that a fully differentiated adult cell retains the complete genetic instructions to build an entire organism — something biologists had assumed was no longer possible. The result was kept secret until February 1997.

Yeast genome fully sequenced — first eukaryote

An international consortium completed the DNA sequence of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in April — the first eukaryotic organism to have its full genome read. The 12-million-base-pair sequence, with roughly 6,000 protein-coding genes, gave biologists a template for understanding gene function in organisms whose cells have nuclei, which included them.

Possible ancient Mars microfossils reported in ALH84001

In August, NASA scientists announced that the Martian meteorite Allan Hills 84001 contained microscopic structures, carbonate globules, and organic molecules they interpreted as possible evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars. The claim was met with equal parts excitement and scepticism; subsequent analysis attributed most features to non-biological processes, though the question was not definitively closed.

Mars Global Surveyor launched

NASA launched Mars Global Surveyor on 7 November; it reached Martian orbit in September 1997 and spent years producing the highest-resolution global maps of the Martian surface yet made, revealing gullies that suggested liquid water flow and a magnetic field record of unexpected complexity.

Combination antiretroviral therapy transforms HIV treatment

At the Vancouver AIDS Conference, results from triple-drug antiretroviral regimens showed that HIV could be suppressed to undetectable levels in blood. AIDS had killed hundreds of thousands; the treatment did not cure the infection, but for patients who could access it, it converted a death sentence into a chronic condition.

Death of Paul Erdős

Paul Erdős

Erdős died on 20 September in Warsaw, aged 83, while attending a mathematics conference — which was where he preferred to be. He wrote roughly 1,500 papers and collaborated with more than 500 coauthors; the 'Erdős number' remains in use as a measure of mathematical proximity to a man who seems, in retrospect, to have been everywhere at once.

Death of Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan died on 20 December in Seattle, aged 62, from complications of myelodysplasia. He co-founded the Planetary Society, led the Voyager Imaging Team, and with Cosmos reached more people with the idea that the universe is worth understanding than any scientist of his generation. The pale blue dot he described is still out there.