1996

Nobel Prize in Physics

Two Kinks Nobody Meant to Find

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

In the winter of 1971–72, David Lee, Douglas Osheroff, and Robert Richardson were running an experiment at Cornell to study the magnetic properties of helium-3 — the rarer, lighter isotope of the element — when they noticed two anomalous kinks in their pressure readings, the kind of faint signals that lesser experimenters discard as noise. They hadn't found what they were looking for; they had found something stranger. Cooled to within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero, helium-3 was going superfluid: flowing without any friction or viscosity whatsoever, pooling in ways that defied ordinary intuition about what liquids are supposed to do. Unlike helium-4, whose superfluidity had been known since the 1930s, helium-3 pulled off the trick through the pairing of its nuclei into Cooper-pair-like states, obeying the same quantum mechanical logic that underlies superconductivity — except here the pairs are atoms, not electrons, and the physics is richer for it. The result required theorists, led by Anthony Leggett (who would later collect a Nobel of his own), to extend their most powerful frameworks into genuinely new territory. A world without helium-3 superfluidity research would be missing some of the cleanest experimental windows we have into quantum order at the largest scales nature will tolerate.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Soccer Ball Made of Soot

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

In September 1985, Harold Kroto — an astrophysicist curious about carbon chains in interstellar space — talked his way into the Rice University laser-vaporisation apparatus that Robert Curl and Richard Smalley had built for something else entirely. They fired pulses of laser light at a graphite disk, let the vapour cool, and sent the resulting clusters through a mass spectrometer. One peak, at sixty carbon atoms, kept appearing with suspicious insistence. After four days of frantic experiment, they proposed that sixty carbons arranged themselves into a closed cage of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons — the same geometry as a soccer ball, or as the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller, whose name they duly borrowed. It was a third allotrope of pure carbon, sitting there undiscovered between diamond and graphite, with a hollow interior that chemists could in principle fill with almost anything. The chemistry this unlocked — fullerenes, then carbon nanotubes, then graphene — amounts to an entirely new periodic-table row's worth of material properties, all hiding in ordinary soot.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Immune System's Double Handshake

Peter C. Doherty · Rolf M. Zinkernagel

Peter Doherty and Rolf Zinkernagel met at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra in the early 1970s, a pairing that turned out to be unexpectedly productive. They were studying how the immune system clears lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus from mice, and they found something that had been lurking in plain sight: killer T cells do not simply recognise foreign proteins on an infected cell's surface — they only attack when those foreign fragments are displayed alongside the cell's own MHC molecules, a specific self-marker that varies from individual to individual. The immune system, in other words, requires a double handshake: foreign antigen plus self. This principle of MHC restriction answered a puzzle that had baffled immunologists for years, namely why a transplant rejected by one animal would be accepted by a clone of that animal, and it laid the conceptual foundation for understanding why transplant rejection happens, why vaccines must be tailored, and why some people's immune systems miss some viruses while others catch them. Without this insight, immunotherapy — the practice of training or releasing the immune system against cancer — would not exist in its current form.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Finding the Infinite in an Onion

Wisława Szymborska

Wisława Szymborska had been publishing poetry in Polish since 1952, in a country where poets were expected either to serve the state or to suffer conspicuously for refusing to — and she managed, with quiet stubbornness, to do neither. Her poems are short, conversational, and devastating: they begin with an apparently simple observation — an onion, a photograph, a medieval painting of a tortured saint — and then, in the space of a few stanzas, tilt the reader's entire sense of perspective without ever raising their voice. The Nobel committee reached for 'ironic precision' and 'the art of poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality' — which is, as committee citations go, almost accurate. What they were reaching for is harder to say: a voice that finds the infinite in the domestic without making either smaller, and that treats philosophical seriousness as entirely compatible with the admission that people are also funny. She wrote about death, chance, and the strange fact of being alive at any particular moment in history rather than another. The poems remain.

Nobel Peace Prize

Bearing Witness for Two Decades

Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo · José Ramos-Horta

East Timor was invaded by Indonesia in December 1975, just nine days after declaring independence from Portugal, and what followed was an occupation conducted largely beyond international notice — the territory was remote, its people few, and its oil fields of considerable interest to parties whose attention was directed elsewhere. Bishop Carlos Belo chose to stay, serving as a moral witness in a place where bearing witness was the only protection the Church could offer, filing quiet reports and offering sanctuary while the killing continued. José Ramos-Horta went into exile and spent the next two decades in lobbying offices and conference halls, keeping the cause alive through the sheer monotony of diplomacy, year after year, before audiences who would have preferred to discuss something else. The Oslo prize in 1996 did what prizes sometimes do when the cause has been correct all along: it made it awkward to continue pretending. East Timor became independent in 2002. The cost, by then, had been tens of thousands of lives — a figure the oil field calculations had declined to include.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Paying What You Think It's Worth

James A. Mirrlees · William Vickrey

James Mirrlees, working in the early 1970s, addressed a problem that sounds bureaucratic but conceals genuine mathematical depth: how should a government design an income tax when it cannot observe how talented or hardworking its citizens actually are? His answer, developed through a formidably technical analysis of incentive-compatible mechanisms, changed how economists think about redistribution and the unavoidable trade-off between equality and the incentive to produce. William Vickrey had, over a longer career, worked on related problems of hidden information — most famously the second-price sealed-bid auction, in which you pay not what you offered but what the second-highest bidder offered, an elegant mechanism that makes it rational to bid exactly what you think something is worth. The two threads, optimal taxation and auction design, share a common ancestor in the economics of what happens when people know things you don't. Vickrey died of a heart attack on 11 October 1996, three days after the announcement, at the age of 82 — and so never collected the prize he had waited, patiently and apparently uncomplainingly, an entire career for.

Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health

A Case Study Nobody Requested

Ellen Kleist · Harald Moi

Medicine, as a discipline, requires that unusual cases be documented — partly because unusual cases sometimes turn out to be the leading edge of something important, and partly because the profession cannot function on anecdote alone. Ellen Kleist and Harald Moi, writing in the journal Genitourinary Medicine, dutifully documented a case of gonorrhoea transmission via an inflatable doll, adding it to the literature with the measured, non-sensational tone that the occasion both required and, frankly, made more entertaining than any other approach could have. The Ig Nobel committee, which concerns itself with research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think, recognised that this was exactly the kind of case study the canon needed: complete, properly sourced, and impossible to cite at conferences without losing the room. The serious point — that transmission vectors sometimes defy anticipation — was presumably noted.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Why Toast Lands Buttered-Side Down

Robert Matthews

Robert Matthews, a physicist and science journalist, took seriously the well-worn complaint that toast always falls buttered-side down and treated it as a question worth answering rather than a metaphor worth citing. His analysis, published in the European Journal of Physics, traced the tendency to two mundane but implacable facts: table height, which is roughly one metre across most of human civilisation because that is convenient for human arms, and rotational dynamics, whereby a piece of toast sliding off the edge of a surface gains angular momentum sufficient for almost exactly half a revolution before impact — which is to say, barely enough to go from buttered-side-up to buttered-side-down and then stop. The conclusion was bleak and precise: to improve your odds you would need either to eat from a table roughly three metres tall, or to stop buttering your toast. Murphy's Law, Matthews observed, is not a law about bad luck; it is a law about the uncomfortable coincidence of human anatomy and physics that has conspired, throughout all of recorded breakfast, to land the expensive side face-first.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

What Leeches Would Rather Not Drink

Anders Bærheim · Hogne Sandvik

Leeches have been pressed into medical service for most of recorded history — bloodletting, wound management, and microsurgical flap salvage among their duties — and yet almost nothing systematic was known about their dietary preferences when not attached to a patient. Anders Bærheim and Hogne Sandvik of the University of Bergen addressed this gap with what the Ig Nobel committee clearly felt was appropriate rigour, exposing leeches to ale, garlic, and soured cream and recording the effects on their appetitive behaviour. The results appeared in Tidsskrift for den Norske Laegeforening, the Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, under a title — 'Effect of Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches' — that requires no embellishment. Leeches, it emerged, have preferences; garlic appeared to discourage them, which is either a finding of mild clinical relevance or a confirmation that garlic wards off things that drain your blood, depending on how seriously you wish to take the vampire literature.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Charcoal Lit in Three Seconds Flat

George Goble

The problem George Goble set himself was a familiar one: how do you light a charcoal barbecue faster? The conventional answer, involving paper, lighter fluid, and a certain amount of patience, typically required fifteen to twenty minutes. Goble's answer involved liquid oxygen — approximately three litres of it, poured directly onto the charcoal pile and then ignited with a lit coal from a prior fire extended on a long wooden rod, which he presumably held at some distance. The result, captured on video, was ignition in three seconds, followed by a fireball of considerable enthusiasm, which he entered into the Ig Nobel record as a world record for charcoal-lighting speed. The Ig Nobel committee in Cambridge awarded the chemistry prize with what seems, in retrospect, like appropriate speed. The committee's citation did not address safety; neither, evidently, had Goble's planning process, though he survived to accept.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Nonsense That Sounded Correct

The editors of Social Text journal

In the spring of 1996, the cultural-studies journal Social Text published a paper by NYU physicist Alan Sokal titled 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,' which argued, among other things, that physical reality is a social and linguistic construct and that quantum gravity has progressive political implications. On the day of publication, Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the paper was a deliberate hoax, assembled from fashionable jargon, unsupported assertions, and quotations from cultural theorists that he had deployed in ways their authors had not intended — a test of whether a leading journal of post-modern cultural studies would publish something that sounded correct but was, by his own description, nonsense. The editors of Social Text received the Ig Nobel Prize in Literature for their contributions to the experiment, which they accepted with rather less good humour than the committee had hoped. The episode — known thereafter simply as the Sokal Affair — has not yet finished generating academic papers about itself.

Ig Nobel Prize in Art

A Bird That Never Migrated

Don Featherstone

Don Featherstone was awarded the Art prize for the plastic pink flamingo, the lawn ornament he designed in 1957 as a young sculptor at Union Products — modelling it, the living article being scarce in Massachusetts, from a National Geographic photograph — and thereby loosing upon the suburban front garden a bird that has stood, on its two thin wire legs, as a monument to a certain kind of American taste ever since. Featherstone was the first Ig Nobel laureate to travel to the ceremony and accept his prize in person, a graciousness that helped establish the tradition of winners turning up to share the joke. He wore, by many accounts, a great deal of pink. The committee honoured his ornamentally evolutionary contribution to the landscape, which has outlasted a great deal of art that took itself considerably more seriously.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biodiversity

A Menagerie Seen Only in Stone

Chonosuke Okamura

Chonosuke Okamura, a Japanese researcher, was awarded the Biodiversity prize for discovering, in the polished surfaces of limestone from his local quarry, the fossils of miniature dinosaurs, horses, dragons, and more than a thousand other extinct 'mini-species,' each of them smaller than a quarter of a millimetre and none of them, as it happens, real. What Okamura had found were ordinary microscopic mineral structures, which he interpreted through a microscope and a powerful imagination as a lost fauna of tiny beasts that had once teemed at a scale invisible to the naked eye. He published his findings across many volumes with unflagging seriousness. The committee honoured the vision. It is a genuinely poignant kind of error: the world he saw in the stone was far more populous, and far more charming, than the world that was actually there.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Your Gums Keep the Books Too

Robert J. Genco

Robert J. Genco, a periodontist at the University of Buffalo, was awarded the Economics prize for his finding that financial strain is a measurable risk factor for destructive gum disease — that people under money pressure are, by his data, meaningfully more likely to suffer the inflammation and bone loss of advanced periodontitis. The mechanism is not mysterious: stress alters the immune response, encourages the neglect of brushing and flossing, and disposes people toward the habits that gum tissue least appreciates. The committee filed the work under Economics rather than Medicine, presumably delighted by the image of one's bank balance being legible in one's gums. The finding is entirely real, and slightly unsettling: the body keeps its own accounts, and the mouth, it turns out, has been quietly auditing the wallet.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Seven Hands Raised, Under Oath

James Johnston · Joseph Taddeo · Andrew Tisch · William Campbell · Edward A. Horrigan · Donald S. Johnston · Thomas E. Sandefur Jr.

The Medicine prize was awarded jointly to the chief executives of the seven largest American tobacco companies, who had appeared before a congressional committee in 1994 and testified, each in turn, under oath, and with the cameras running, that nicotine is not addictive. Their own companies' internal research, much of it later disclosed, took a rather different view, as did essentially every independent scientist who had studied the matter, as did, one suspects, a good number of the executives themselves. The committee honoured the seven for their unanimity. The testimony did not age well: the image of seven men raising their hands to affirm the same implausible proposition became one of the defining tableaux of the tobacco reckoning that followed.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Marking an Anniversary With More Bombs

Jacques Chirac

Jacques Chirac, the president of France, was awarded the Peace prize for commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by resuming French nuclear weapons testing at Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific — a series of underground detonations conducted in 1995 and 1996 over the strenuous objections of France's Pacific neighbours and much of the rest of the world. The committee's citation drew the obvious and painful connection: that to mark the anniversary of a nuclear catastrophe by setting off more nuclear weapons required a sense of occasion all its own. Chirac halted the tests in early 1996 and signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty later that year, which suggests the objections — the Ig Nobel's among them, if only faintly — were eventually heard. Mururoa's coral, thoroughly fractured, was not consulted.

Turing Award

Teaching Logic to Watch Time Pass

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Amir Pnueli

In 1977, Amir Pnueli published a paper proposing that temporal logic — a branch of modal logic developed by philosophers to reason about statements that vary in truth value over time, such as 'it will eventually rain' or 'it has always been true that' — could be used to specify and verify the behaviour of computer programs. The insight was deceptively simple: programs are not static objects but processes that evolve through states over time, and a logic that could express properties like 'the system will eventually respond' or 'the lock will never be held by two processes simultaneously' was exactly what was needed to say, with mathematical precision, what a correct program is supposed to do. From this seed grew model checking, the discipline of having computers automatically verify that a program satisfies its specification — which is to say, computers checking that computer programs work, a recursion with obvious appeal. The Turing Award recognised that Pnueli had, in a single paper, created the language that the next half-century of software verification would speak.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

A Pollutant the Body Uses as a Messenger

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Robert F. Furchgott · Ferid Murad

Nitroglycerin had been used as a heart medication since the 1870s — it relieves angina reliably, within minutes, in a way that impressed clinicians long before anyone understood why. Robert Furchgott, working in the late 1970s and early 1980s, showed that the relaxation of blood vessel walls required an intact layer of endothelial cells, and that those cells produced a short-lived signalling molecule he called endothelium-derived relaxing factor. Ferid Murad had independently shown that nitroglycerin and similar compounds work by releasing nitric oxide, which activates an enzyme that raises cyclic GMP and relaxes smooth muscle. The two findings clicked together: EDRF was nitric oxide, a gas that chemists had classified as an atmospheric pollutant and biologists had largely ignored, and yet the cardiovascular system had been using it as a molecular messenger all along. A world without this understanding would lack modern treatments for erectile dysfunction, septic shock management, and the targeted vascular drugs that followed — and would still be asking why, exactly, nitroglycerin works.

Dolly the sheep cloned from an adult cell

The Genome Does Not Forget

On 5 July 1996, in a laboratory at the Roslin Institute outside Edinburgh, a lamb was born by a method that most biologists had considered, if not impossible, at least not yet achievable in mammals. Ian Wilmut and his team had taken a cell from the mammary gland of a six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe, starved it of nutrients until it entered a quiescent state, fused its nucleus with an enucleated egg cell, and implanted the resulting embryo into a surrogate mother. The lamb, named Dolly after Dolly Parton — the mammary gland cell having inspired the reference — was a genetically exact copy of the donor ewe, and she demonstrated something biologists had long debated: that the nucleus of a fully differentiated adult cell still carries the complete genetic instructions for building an entire organism, and that this programme can be restarted. The result was kept secret for eight months, announced in February 1997, and received with a mixture of wonder and alarm that has not entirely subsided. Whatever one makes of the ethics, the biology was clear: the genome does not forget.

Yeast genome fully sequenced — first eukaryote

Six Hundred Scientists Read One Cell

Saccharomyces cerevisiae — brewer's yeast, baker's yeast, the organism that has been persuaded to ferment human beverages since at least ancient Egypt — became, in April 1996, the first eukaryote to have its complete DNA sequence read. The effort was a genuinely international one: roughly six hundred scientists from ninety-six laboratories across Europe, North America, and Japan spent nearly a decade working through the yeast's sixteen chromosomes, producing a final sequence of some twelve million base pairs encoding around six thousand protein-coding genes. The choice of yeast was not just convenient; it was strategic. Yeast cells have nuclei, organelles, and much of the internal machinery that human cells have, in a package small enough to work with, fast enough to grow overnight, and amenable to every genetic trick available. With the full sequence in hand, biologists could now, for the first time, ask what every gene in a eukaryote does — simultaneously, systematically, rather than one gene at a time — and the answers were immediately generalisable upward toward organisms considerably more complicated than yeast, including the people drinking the beer.

Possible ancient Mars microfossils reported in ALH84001

One Meteorite, Considerable Doubt

The meteorite designated ALH84001 had been sitting in the Antarctic ice since it fell, roughly thirteen thousand years ago, having been blasted off the surface of Mars some sixteen million years before that by an impact large enough to accelerate chunks of rock to escape velocity. It was recovered in 1984 by a team from the ANSMET Antarctic search program, and it sat in a Johnson Space Center collection until a team of NASA scientists, examining it with electron microscopes and mass spectrometers, found polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carbonate globules with chemical characteristics unusual in non-biological systems, and — most provocatively — tiny elongated structures that resembled, at high magnification, fossilised bacteria. On 7 August 1996, NASA held a press conference; President Clinton made a statement; the world spent a memorable news cycle contemplating whether it had just learned it was not alone. The sceptics, numerous and not obviously wrong, pointed out that each of the features had a plausible non-biological explanation, and subsequent analysis leaned heavily in their direction. The question remains technically open, which is to say the evidence for ancient Martian life is still, after three decades, one meteorite and considerable doubt.

Mars Global Surveyor launched

Mars Gets a Sense of History

NASA launched Mars Global Surveyor on 7 November 1996, at a cost and schedule that reflected the agency's post-Mars Observer determination to do things faster, cheaper, and better — which, on this occasion, more or less worked. The spacecraft reached Martian orbit in September 1997 and, after an extended aerobraking manoeuvre that took longer than planned because a solar panel had not fully deployed, settled into a near-polar mapping orbit and began what would become nearly a decade of observation. The high-resolution camera aboard produced global maps of the Martian surface at a level of detail that made previous images look like sketches: ancient gullies on crater walls that appeared, unexpectedly, to have been carved by liquid water in the geologically recent past; a southern hemisphere ancient crust whose remnant magnetism suggested Mars had once possessed a global magnetic field, and had lost it; and thousands of images that, accumulated over years, gave planetary scientists something they had never quite had before — a sense of Mars as a place that has a history, rather than merely a surface.

Combination antiretroviral therapy transforms HIV treatment

From a Death Sentence to a Life Sentence

At the XI International AIDS Conference in Vancouver in July 1996, David Ho and others presented results that reframed what HIV infection meant as a clinical matter. The new triple-drug regimens — a protease inhibitor combined with two reverse transcriptase inhibitors — could suppress viral replication so completely that HIV became undetectable in blood plasma; in many patients, CD4 cell counts rebounded, and the cascade of opportunistic infections that had defined AIDS since 1981 simply did not occur. The drugs were expensive, the pill burden formidable, and the long-term side effects then unknown, and the treatment reached the developing world only slowly and incompletely in the years that followed, a disparity that caused a great deal of entirely justified anger. But for patients in wealthy countries who could access it, the Vancouver data transformed AIDS from a disease that reliably killed in years into one that could be managed across decades. The shift was not cure — the virus persists in reservoirs that current drugs cannot touch — but it was the difference between a death sentence and a life sentence, and an enormous number of people are alive today who would not otherwise be.

Death of Paul Erdős

A Suitcase, and My Brain Is Open

Paul Erdős

Paul Erdős had, by his own description, no home, no possessions of significance, no fixed address, and no particular desire for any of these things. He lived out of a single suitcase, arriving at colleagues' houses unannounced with the greeting 'my brain is open,' and departing when the mathematics was done. Over a career spanning six decades, he published approximately 1,500 papers — more than any mathematician in history — and collaborated with more than 500 co-authors across nearly every field of discrete mathematics, leaving behind a trail of conjectures and solved problems so extensive that the community had to invent a metric just to track proximity to him. The 'Erdős number' — one if you published directly with Erdős, two if you published with someone who did, and so on — remains in informal use among mathematicians today, partly as a measure of combinatorial separation and partly as a way of acknowledging that this one Hungarian eccentric, who died on 20 September 1996 in Warsaw while attending yet another conference, managed to be almost everywhere mathematics was happening, for almost fifty years, without ever quite settling down.

Death of Carl Sagan

A Pale Blue Dot, Requested on Purpose

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan had been diagnosed with myelodysplasia in 1994, underwent three bone marrow transplants from his sister, and continued working throughout, completing his last book — The Demon-Haunted World, a defence of scientific thinking against credulity — while his health declined. He died on 20 December 1996 in Seattle, at sixty-two, which was too young for someone who had spent a career making the case that the universe is large, old, largely empty, and worth every effort of understanding. He had co-founded the Planetary Society, led the Voyager Imaging Team, authored or co-authored more than six hundred scientific papers, and with the television series Cosmos reached an audience of six hundred million people with the proposition that science is not a collection of facts but a way of thinking — one that requires honest admission of uncertainty, which most television does not reward. He also described the Earth, seen from the edge of the solar system in a Voyager photograph he had specifically requested, as a pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam, and wrote about it with a composure that makes the passage harder to read as the years go on.