2000

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Circuit Small Enough for a Fingertip

Zhores I. Alferov · Herbert Kroemer · Jack S. Kilby

By the late 1950s, transistors existed but were still discrete, fiddly, hand-soldered components; the idea of embedding thousands of them on a sliver of silicon was the kind of ambition that invites ridicule until the moment it doesn't. Jack Kilby, working at Texas Instruments in the summer of 1958 — when most of his colleagues were on holiday — wired together a germanium chip that became the world's first integrated circuit, a device small enough to rest on a fingertip and consequential enough to reshape civilisation. Meanwhile, Zhores Alferov in Leningrad and Herbert Kroemer in the United States independently worked out that sandwiching semiconductor layers of slightly different composition — heterostructures — could trap and guide electrons and photons with extraordinary precision, making possible laser diodes efficient enough to carry telephone calls down optical fibre and LEDs cheap enough to illuminate every room. These are the foundations on which mobile phones, laptops, fibre-optic broadband, and barcode scanners are built; without Kilby's chip and their heterostructures, the device on which you are reading this sentence does not exist.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Plastic Learns to Conduct Electricity

Alan J. Heeger · Alan G. MacDiarmid · Hideki Shirakawa

Plastics were, by chemical consensus, insulators — their electrons locked in place, their atoms uninterested in conducting anything except heat away from a cup of coffee. This was so thoroughly accepted that when Hideki Shirakawa accidentally synthesised a shimmering, metallic-looking film of polyacetylene in 1967 by using a thousandfold excess of catalyst, he assumed something had gone wrong. It had not. When Alan MacDiarmid and Alan Heeger, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1977, treated that same silvery film with iodine vapour — a process called doping, borrowed from silicon semiconductor physics — its electrical conductivity shot up by seven orders of magnitude, from insulator to near-metal in one step. The discovery shattered a foundational assumption of polymer chemistry, opened an entirely new branch of materials science, and ultimately led to the flexible organic LEDs now glowing in smartphone screens and the polymer solar cells increasingly draped across rooftops. A conducting plastic sounds like a contradiction in terms; it turned out to be an industry.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

How a Grandfather Buttons His Shirt Again

Arvid Carlsson · Paul Greengard · Eric Kandel

Before Arvid Carlsson's work in the 1950s, dopamine was considered merely a chemical precursor on the way to making adrenaline — a stepping stone, not a destination. Carlsson demonstrated that dopamine is itself a neurotransmitter, concentrated in specific brain regions, and that stripping it away produces the tremors and rigidity of Parkinson's disease; the insight led directly to L-DOPA therapy, which returned movement to patients who had been largely frozen. Paul Greengard then unravelled the molecular machinery by which dopamine and other slow-acting transmitters speak to their target cells — through cascading phosphorylation events that persist long after the chemical signal is gone, explaining how a brief signal can leave a lasting impression. Eric Kandel, working with the decidedly unglamorous sea slug Aplysia, traced the molecular changes that encode memories: short-term memory relying on modifications to existing proteins, long-term memory requiring the synthesis of new ones. The committee was, in effect, awarding three decades of the best neuroscience — the kind that begins with a wrong assumption, gets corrected by painstaking experiment, and ends with a pill that lets a grandfather button his own shirt.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Man Without a Country, Writing in Its Language

Gao Xingjian

Gao Xingjian began writing plays in Beijing in the early 1980s, during the brief window of cultural relaxation that followed the Cultural Revolution, and was promptly accused of 'spiritual pollution' when official sentiment tightened again. His novel Soul Mountain — written during a solitary fifteen-month walk through southwestern China after he was falsely informed he had lung cancer — is a meditation on exile, identity, and the self's restless argument with itself, written in three grammatical persons that shift without warning. He moved to France in 1987, was banned in China the following year, and continued writing in Chinese from Paris: a man without a country composing in a language his adopted country cannot read. The Swedish Academy praised his work of universal validity, written with bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity. He was the first Chinese-language writer to receive the prize. The People's Republic, with characteristic understatement, called the decision absurd.

Nobel Peace Prize

Sunshine, Attempted Anyway

Kim Dae-jung

Kim Dae-jung spent roughly three decades as the most dangerous man in South Korea — to the people who ran it, that is. He survived a kidnapping by Korean CIA agents in Tokyo in 1973, house arrest, imprisonment, a death sentence later commuted to life, and exile, all for the offence of believing that South Korea ought to be a democracy. He became president in 1998, the first peaceful transfer of power to an opposition candidate in the country's history, and immediately launched what he called the Sunshine Policy: not confrontation with the North but patient, persistent engagement. In June 2000 he flew to Pyongyang for the first inter-Korean summit since the peninsula was divided, shaking hands with Kim Jong-il on the tarmac in a moment that felt, briefly, like the beginning of something. The Nobel Committee recognised both what his convictions had cost him and what, at last, they had produced. Whether the Sunshine Policy ultimately worked is a question history has answered ambiguously; that it was worth attempting, the committee judged, was not in doubt.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Making Sense of Data That Won't Sit Still

James J. Heckman · Daniel L. McFadden

Most economic data are not collected by careful experimenters who have randomised their subjects; they are the sediment left by the choices people make, and people who choose to do a thing are almost never identical to people who choose not to. This inconvenient fact — selection bias — had been quietly corrupting empirical economics for generations when James Heckman developed his eponymous correction in the 1970s, a statistical procedure for recovering unbiased estimates from samples that are, as most samples are, anything but random. Daniel McFadden, meanwhile, built a rigorous theoretical framework for understanding how individuals choose among discrete alternatives — which bus route, which neighbourhood, which job — turning what had been rough intuition into formal, testable models. His methods became the backbone of transport economics, urban planning, and eventually the demand models used by technology companies to predict what you will click on next. Together, Heckman and McFadden gave economists the tools to study a world that stubbornly refuses to hold still for them.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

A Frog, Levitated and Unbothered

André Geim · Michael Berry

The experiment required a 16-tesla magnetic field — roughly 300,000 times the strength of Earth's magnetic field — a cooperative frog, and a willingness to look slightly ridiculous in pursuit of a genuinely interesting physics question. André Geim and colleagues at the Radboud University in Nijmegen demonstrated that water, which fills most of a living frog's body, is sufficiently diamagnetic — faintly repelled by magnetic fields — that an extraordinarily strong magnet can push against every water molecule at once and levitate the animal intact. The frog appeared unbothered. A decade later, Geim won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of graphene — a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon — making him the only person in recorded scientific history to hold both the Ig Nobel and the actual Nobel, a distinction he wears with visible amusement.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Unskilled, and Unaware of It

David Dunning · Justin Kruger

The paper was titled 'Unskilled and Unaware of It', which is perhaps the most concise summary of its own finding in the history of academic psychology. David Dunning and Justin Kruger, then at Cornell, ran a series of experiments in 1999 demonstrating that people who score in the bottom quartile on tests of logical reasoning, grammar, and humour consistently believe they have performed above average, while people who score near the top tend to assume, incorrectly, that everyone else did about as well as they did. The mechanism is almost elegant: the same skills needed to perform a task competently are the skills needed to recognise your own incompetence at it. The effect bears the researchers' names, was greeted with widespread recognition — and a suspicious degree of enthusiasm — by people entirely convinced it described someone else, and has since become one of the most cited findings in popular psychology, which says something.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Love Looks Like a Disorder, Chemically

Donatella Marazziti · colleagues

Donatella Marazziti and colleagues at the University of Pisa had the professionally courageous idea of measuring serotonin transporter levels in people who had recently fallen in love — people who, by self-report, thought about their new partner for more than four hours a day — and comparing them with two control groups: people in long-term stable relationships, and people diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The results were, in a word, suggestive: the serotonin profiles of the newly besotted were statistically indistinguishable from those of the OCD patients, and both were markedly different from the contentedly attached. Whether this finding is reassuring (love is a recognised neurological state) or alarming (love is a recognised neurological state) depends almost entirely on where you happen to be in the process.

Ig Nobel Prize in Computer Science

Software That Knows a Cat's Typing

Chris Niswander

The problem was specific, universal among a particular demographic, and had gone unsolved largely because no one had thought it worth formalising: cats, given access to a laptop keyboard, will walk across it. The resulting output — a dense burst of random keystrokes, often sent before the owner has time to intervene — can delete files, post messages, or (in one documented case) purchase things. Chris Niswander's solution was PawSense, software that recognised the characteristic typing signature of a cat — many keys pressed in rapid, irregular clusters, at a force and pace no human typist produces — and immediately locked the keyboard, demanding that a human type a short verification phrase to regain control. The software solved a problem its users had been treating as an act of God; it turned out to be an act of pattern recognition.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Anatomy, Imaged in the Act

Willibrord Weijmar Schultz · colleagues

Leonardo da Vinci drew cross-sections of human copulation in the fifteenth century, working from imagination because the alternative was not available to him. By 1999, MRI scanners were large, expensive, and designed for imaging pathology, but Willibrord Weijmar Schultz and colleagues at the University of Groningen observed that they could also, in principle, image anatomy during intercourse — yielding the first direct visualisation of the internal geometry of the act in living subjects. The technical challenge was considerable: the scanner bore is neither spacious nor acoustically forgiving. The published images, which appeared in the British Medical Journal, confirmed several anatomical assumptions and corrected at least one; they also confirmed that nothing about medical research is quite as strange as medicine itself when it is paying attention.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Three Hundred Sixty Thousand Weddings, One Day

Sun Myung Moon

Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, had by the 1990s elevated the mass wedding ceremony to something approaching an industrial process. The 1995 event at the Olympic Stadium in Seoul saw 35,000 couples married simultaneously — many of them matched by Moon himself, without prior acquaintance between the parties — in a ceremony broadcast by satellite to satellite venues around the world, bringing the total blessed that day to somewhere near 360,000. The Ig Nobel committee, with characteristic restraint, recognised this achievement in economics for its extraordinary contribution to the mass-marriage industry, and declined to examine the underlying business model in any further detail.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Shouting 'Bang!' to Save the Shells

The Royal Navy

In 1999, it emerged that the Royal Navy — one of the oldest and most battle-tested maritime forces in the world — had instructed certain sailors during training exercises to dispense with live ammunition and instead shout 'Bang!' when simulating cannon fire. The rationale was budgetary: shells are expensive, enthusiasm is not. The Ig Nobel committee, recognising the intersection of military precision and fiscal prudence, awarded the Peace Prize accordingly. The Navy, in fairness, had identified a genuine optimisation; the question of whether an enemy would find the arrangement equally satisfying was left as an exercise for the strategist.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Ranking Tadpoles by Taste, Personally

Richard Wassersug

Richard Wassersug, a biologist at Dalhousie University, addressed a question in evolutionary ecology that could really only be answered one way: whether tadpoles taste bad, and if so, which ones. Predators avoid unpalatable prey, so the palatability of a tadpole ought to correlate with its defences and its colouring — but palatability, in the end, is a judgement someone has to make. Wassersug and his colleagues made it personally, placing dry-season tadpoles from Costa Rica on the tongue and ranking them from mild to genuinely objectionable. The resulting paper is a serious contribution to the study of predator deterrence. The Ig Nobel committee recognised the willingness to gather the data at first hand, a form of scientific commitment that most palatability studies have the good sense to delegate to an animal.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Living on Light, Until Reality Objected

Jasmuheen

Jasmuheen, an Australian formerly known as Ellen Greve, taught that human beings do not need to eat, and that a sufficiently evolved person can subsist on 'living on light' — a cosmic nourishment drawn directly from the universe, food and often water being merely habits to be transcended. Her book of that title sold well, and her seminars flourished, notwithstanding the small matter of human metabolism, which continues to require calories regardless of one's spiritual attainment. When a television programme proposed to observe her going without food and water under supervision, the attempt was halted after a couple of days on medical advice. The Ig Nobel Prize for Literature honoured the book, and declined to test its central thesis any further than reality already had.

Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health

A Danger Nobody Was Willing to Name

Jonathan Wyatt · Gordon McNaughton · William Tullett

Jonathan Wyatt, Gordon McNaughton, and William Tullett, physicians in Glasgow, published a study titled 'The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow' — a clinical review of patients who had presented at hospital with injuries sustained when the ceramic lavatory beneath them gave way. The cases were real, the injuries occasionally serious, and the cause generally traced to old, cracked, or poorly mounted fixtures rather than to anything remarkable about the occupants. It is precisely the sort of hazard that safety literature overlooks because it is undignified to discuss. The Ig Nobel committee recognised the public-health value of documenting it — on the sound principle that a danger nobody is willing to name is a danger nobody thinks to fix.

Turing Award

Mapping the Hard Problems, Then Solving Them

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao

Theoretical computer science concerns itself with what computation can and cannot do in principle, and Andrew Yao spent the latter decades of the twentieth century mapping that territory with unusual range. His minimax theorem provided a rigorous method for proving lower bounds on randomised algorithms — establishing, formally, that no matter how clever your random choices, certain problems cannot be solved faster than a provable minimum. His development of communication complexity theory asked how much information two parties must exchange to jointly compute a function, a question with deep connections to circuit design and cryptography. His circuit complexity results placed hard limits on the power of restricted models of computation. The breadth of problems Yao addressed, and the depth to which he took each of them, was unusual even by the demanding standards of previous Turing laureates; he essentially defined what the field's hard problems were, and then worked on them.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

A Molecular Label That Reads 'Destroy This'

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Aaron Ciechanover · Avram Hershko · Alexander Varshavsky

Cells make proteins constantly and, equally constantly, need to destroy them — misfolded ones, damaged ones, proteins whose moment has passed and whose continued presence would send the wrong signals. The question of how a cell identifies and disposes of these specifically, without accidentally shredding everything else, was answered largely by the work of Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko, and Alexander Varshavsky: cells tag condemned proteins by attaching chains of a small molecule called ubiquitin, like a molecular 'destroy this' label, and the tagged proteins are then threaded into a cellular barrel called the proteasome, where they are ground apart and their amino acids recycled. The pathway regulates the cell cycle, the immune response, DNA repair, and the response to stress; its disruption underlies several cancers and neurodegenerative diseases. The three would go on to share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004, but the Lasker arrived first, as it so often does.

Working draft of the human genome announced

Twenty Thousand Genes, Not a Hundred Thousand

On 26 June 2000, President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair appeared together, via satellite, to announce that two teams — the publicly funded Human Genome Project consortium, coordinated across twenty institutions on three continents, and Craig Venter's private company Celera Genomics, which had entered the race several years later and pursued it with rather more swagger — had each independently assembled a working draft covering roughly 85 percent of the human genome. The completed analyses, published simultaneously in Nature and Science in February 2001, found approximately 20,000–25,000 protein-coding genes, far fewer than the 100,000 many researchers had confidently predicted; the human genome turned out to be not so different in gene count from a roundworm, which was humbling, and interesting, in equal measure. What mattered was not the number but the sequence: a reference against which every mutation, every disease variant, every inherited trait could now be mapped. Medicine has been working through the implications ever since.

First permanent crew aboard the International Space Station

The Lights Come On, and Stay On

The International Space Station had been under construction in orbit since 1998, assembled module by module by American Space Shuttles and Russian Proton rockets in a collaboration that would have seemed implausible to anyone alive during the Apollo era, when the two nations were racing each other to the Moon with undisguised antagonism. On 2 November 2000, Expedition 1 — American commander William Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev — docked with the station and moved in, switching on the lights in what was then a largely empty pair of modules with the water recycler not yet working. They stayed for nearly five months. No crew has left since: from that day to this, the station has been continuously occupied, a small, improbable outpost where the defining political rivalry of the twentieth century became, at least in microgravity, a shared maintenance problem.

Y2K rollover passes without major incident

A Disaster Prevented, Then Doubted

The problem had been known for decades: many older computer systems stored years as two digits, meaning that when 1999 became 2000, '99' would roll to '00' — which the programs might interpret as 1900, or simply refuse to process at all. The potential for failure cascades in banking, power grids, air traffic control, and hospital systems was real and, by the late 1990s, had generated a response of considerable scale: an estimated $300–600 billion was spent worldwide auditing code, replacing systems, and patching software in the years before the deadline. When midnight arrived and the clocks ticked over without incident, the reaction was split between relief and a suspicion — voiced loudly in the aftermath — that the whole thing had been a confected panic. This was, as a matter of logic, unfair: the absence of a disaster that was expensively prevented is not evidence the disaster would never have happened. The engineers who fixed it simply had no way to demonstrate a counterfactual, and that silence was interpreted, as silences often are, against them.

Arabidopsis thaliana genome sequenced — first plant

A Rosetta Stone Disguised as a Weed

Arabidopsis thaliana is, by any aesthetic standard, an unremarkable plant: a small flowering weed in the mustard family, found on roadsides and disturbed ground across Europe and Asia, with no economic value whatsoever. Plant biologists have loved it for precisely that reason since the 1980s, because it is tiny, fast-reproducing, genetically tractable, and asks nothing more of the experimenter than a grow lamp and a bit of patience. In December 2000, an international consortium published the complete sequence of its 125-million-base-pair genome, revealing roughly 25,000 protein-coding genes and making it the first plant — and only the third multicellular organism, after the roundworm and the fruit fly — to have its genome fully sequenced. The publication opened plant biology to the full arsenal of genomic and molecular tools already transforming medicine, enabling the detailed study of flowering time, drought tolerance, disease resistance, and every other trait that determines whether a crop thrives or fails. Agricultural science, in other words, gained a Rosetta Stone disguised as a weed.