1997

Nobel Prize in Physics

Steven Chu · Claude Cohen-Tannoudji · William D. Phillips

Atoms in ordinary air move at hundreds of metres per second; the three laureates independently developed ways to slow them with laser light to speeds corresponding to temperatures within millionths of a degree of absolute zero. At those temperatures, atoms behave in ways that quantum mechanics predicts and classical physics cannot imagine.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Paul D. Boyer · John E. Walker · Jens C. Skou

Boyer and Walker showed that ATP synthase — the molecular machine that makes the energy currency of every living cell — works by rotation: a physical spinning motion drives the chemical reaction. Skou received the other half for discovering the sodium-potassium pump, the first ion-transporting enzyme ever identified. Two quite different molecular machines; one prize.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Stanley B. Prusiner

Prusiner proposed that certain brain diseases — including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and bovine spongiform encephalopathy — are caused by misfolded proteins that propagate by persuading neighbouring normal proteins to misfold as well, without any DNA or RNA involved. The claim was initially received with considerable scepticism, which did not turn out to be justified.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Dario Fo

Fo drew on commedia dell'arte, medieval jesters, and his own restless comic invention to produce plays — Accidental Death of an Anarchist, We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay! — that satirised authority with an irreverence that governments found uncomfortable. The committee called him an emulator of jesters who upholds the dignity of the downtrodden.

Nobel Peace Prize

International Campaign to Ban Landmines · Jody Williams

Williams coordinated a coalition of NGOs that in a few years of sustained campaigning brought 122 countries to sign the Ottawa Treaty, banning the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of anti-personnel mines. The speed of it was remarkable; the campaign had no state power behind it, only persistence.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Robert C. Merton · Myron S. Scholes

Building on Fischer Black's earlier work, Merton and Scholes produced a rigorous mathematical formula for pricing options — contracts that give the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell something at a future date. The Black-Scholes-Merton formula made a theoretical discipline practically indispensable to global finance, with consequences that were still being felt decades later.

Ig Nobel Prize in Astronomy

Richard C. Hoagland

Hoagland identified artificial structures on the Moon and Mars in NASA photographs, including a human face on Mars, and publicised these findings widely. Subsequent higher-resolution imagery showed the face to be a naturally eroded mesa. The committee recognised his contribution to the field of what could be imagined if the resolution was low enough.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

T. Yagyu · colleagues

The winners measured brainwave patterns in subjects chewing different flavours of gum and correlated EEG activity with what was in their mouths. That the brain responds to flavour is not, in itself, surprising. That someone designed an experiment around it, and measured it, and wrote it up, is.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Akihiro Yokoi · Aki Maita

Yokoi and Maita invented the Tamagotchi — a pocket-sized device simulating the lifecycle of a digital creature that required feeding, cleaning, and attention — and thereby diverted millions of person-hours worldwide into the husbandry of something that did not exist. The committee recognised this as an economic achievement of unusual scale.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Doron Witztum · Eliyahu Rips · Yoav Rosenberg · Michael Drosnin

For claiming to discover a hidden prophetic code embedded in the text of the Bible, and for the book The Bible Code that brought the claim to a mass audience. Later analysis showed that equally striking codes appear in Moby-Dick and the Hebrew translation of War and Peace, suggesting the method found patterns wherever it looked.

Ig Nobel Prize in Meteorology

Bernard Vonnegut

For his paper 'Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed,' which used the observation that tornado-force winds strip feathers from chickens to estimate wind velocities. Vonnegut was a serious atmospheric scientist; this was also a serious paper.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Douglas Engelbart

In his 1968 'Mother of All Demos,' Engelbart showed a live audience the computer mouse, hypertext linking, videoconferencing, and collaborative real-time editing — technologies that would take decades to become ordinary. By the time the award arrived, most of what he had demonstrated had been so thoroughly absorbed into everyday computing that people had stopped noticing it came from somewhere.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Mark S. Ptashne

Working with the lambda bacteriophage, Ptashne identified the molecular proteins that switch genes on and off and showed precisely how they bind DNA to control transcription. The discovery that gene regulation is carried out by specific proteins recognising specific sequences is now so basic to biology that it is taught in the first week of any genetics course.

Dolly the cloned sheep announced

On 22 February, Wilmut and colleagues announced Dolly, born the previous July at the Roslin Institute. As the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, she demonstrated that differentiated cells retain complete genetic potential — and sparked an immediate global debate about what that meant for the possibility of human cloning. Science named her its Breakthrough of the Year.

Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner rover land on Mars

On 4 July, the Pathfinder lander bounced to a stop on Ares Vallis inside airbags, deployed the 10.6-kilogram Sojourner rover, and both began sending back images. Over the following months they returned more than 17,000 photographs and chemical analyses of Martian rocks and soil before contact was lost in September — a mission that cost less and delivered more than almost anyone had predicted.

Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov

IBM's Deep Blue beat the reigning world chess champion in a six-game match in May, 3.5 to 2.5 — the first time a computer had beaten a sitting world champion under standard tournament conditions. Kasparov suspected foul play; the match was not replayed. The nature of chess, and of intelligence, were both discussed at some length afterward.

Comet Hale-Bopp reaches perihelion

Comet Hale-Bopp reached its closest approach to the Sun on 1 April and remained visible to the naked eye for a record 18 months — the brightest comet most people alive at the time had ever seen. Its dual tail and the first detection of cometary phosphorus compounds made it a major subject of study; it also, regrettably, prompted the Heaven's Gate mass suicide in late March.