1999

Nobel Prize in Physics

Gerardus 't Hooft · Martinus J.G. Veltman

In the early 1970s, 't Hooft and Veltman proved that the electroweak gauge theory — which unifies electromagnetism with the weak nuclear force — is renormalisable: its infinities can be systematically removed, and finite, physical predictions extracted. That proof placed the entire Standard Model on mathematical solid ground.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Ahmed Zewail

Chemical bonds break and form in femtoseconds — millionths of a billionth of a second — and Zewail built the laser equipment to photograph molecules in the act. Femtochemistry made it possible to observe transition states that had previously existed only as theoretical constructs, catching reactions in the instant between reactants and products.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Günter Blobel

Blobel showed in the late 1970s that newly made proteins carry embedded signal sequences — short stretches of amino acids that act as molecular addresses, directing each protein to the correct destination within the cell. The discovery of these intrinsic postal codes explained how a cell, using a single genome, manages to maintain the precise geography of thousands of different proteins.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Günter Grass

Grass's 1959 debut The Tin Drum — whose narrator refuses to grow up during the Nazi era — announced a writer who would treat the recent German past with a ferocity and absurdist invention the literary world had not anticipated. The committee called his works frolicsome black fables that portray the forgotten face of history.

Nobel Peace Prize

Doctors Without Borders

Médecins Sans Frontières, founded in 1971, won for providing emergency medical care in conflict zones across several continents and for its policy of témoignage — bearing witness and speaking publicly about the political conditions affecting the populations it serves. The committee recognised both the medicine and the willingness to say what was causing the need for it.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Robert Mundell

Mundell's 1960s work on optimum currency areas — the conditions under which a group of countries benefit from sharing a currency — was the theoretical foundation for the euro, which entered electronic circulation in 1999. Whether the countries that adopted it met those conditions was a question economists would still be arguing about twenty years later.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Len Fisher · Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck · Joseph Keller

Fisher applied fluid dynamics to calculate the optimal way to dunk a biscuit in tea — accounting for capillary action, biscuit porosity, and the speed of liquid uptake. Vanden-Broeck and Keller applied the same seriousness to calculating the geometry of a teapot spout that does not drip. Domestic science, performed with rigour.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Takeshi Makino

Makino developed S-Check, a spray that detects the presence of semen on fabric through a colorimetric reaction, marketed as a tool for wives suspicious of their husbands' fidelity. The chemistry is straightforward; the domestic application is more complex.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Paul Bosland

Bosland successfully bred a spiceless jalapeño chili pepper. The achievement divided the chili-pepper community between those who welcomed a milder option and those who felt he had missed the entire point of a jalapeño.

Ig Nobel Prize in Science Education

Kansas State Board of Education · Colorado State Board of Education

For mandating that students apply the same degree of scepticism to the theory of evolution as to the theory of gravity. The committee felt this showed a commendable commitment to thoroughness in doubt, if not in the selectivity that distinguishes productive scepticism from the other kind.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Arvid Vatle

Vatle published in the British Journal of General Practice a careful study of the containers his patients chose to bring their urine samples in — classifying, cataloguing, and meditating on the variety. He found it revealing. The committee agreed it merited attention.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Charl Fourie · Michelle Wong

Fourie and Wong invented the Blaster, an anti-carjacking device that mounts beneath a car and sprays flames outward to deter attackers. It went on sale in South Africa. The committee awarded the Peace Prize with its customary straight face.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Brooks managed the development of IBM's OS/360 and drew hard lessons from the experience in The Mythical Man-Month — a book whose central insight, that adding programmers to a late software project makes it later, is still described as Brooks's Law and still violated by everyone who hopes it will not apply to them this time.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Clay Armstrong · Bertil Hille · Roderick MacKinnon

Armstrong and Hille spent decades using electrophysiology to work out how ion channels gate their flow of ions; MacKinnon obtained the first atomic-resolution structure of a potassium channel, showing exactly what Armstrong and Hille had been measuring. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that structure in 2003.

First complete human chromosome sequenced

In December, an international consortium reported the complete DNA sequence of human chromosome 22 — 33.4 million base pairs, containing an estimated 545 genes. It was the first human chromosome to be fully decoded and a demonstration that reading the entire human genome was not merely ambitious but achievable.

Chandra X-ray Observatory launched

Chandra was deployed from Space Shuttle Columbia on 23 July and captured its first image — the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A — in August. Named for Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, whose Nobel-winning work on stellar collapse it would spend years studying in detail, the observatory's high-resolution X-ray optics revealed structures in galaxy clusters, supernova remnants, and black hole environments that no previous telescope could see.

Euro introduced as an electronic currency

On 1 January, eleven European Union member states fixed their exchange rates irrevocably to the euro, launching the common currency for financial markets and electronic transactions. Banknotes and coins followed in 2002. It was the largest monetary changeover in history, built on a theoretical foundation that its own architect had just won a Nobel Prize for.

Y2K remediation — global computing audit

Throughout the year, governments and companies worldwide spent an estimated $300-600 billion identifying and patching code that expressed years as two digits and would therefore misread 2000 as 1900. The work was unglamorous and largely invisible; its success was demonstrated by the absence of the failures that had been predicted, which made it easy to argue, afterward, that the whole thing had been unnecessary.