2001

Nobel Prize in Physics

Eric A. Cornell · Wolfgang Ketterle · Carl E. Wieman

Cornell and Wieman cooled rubidium atoms to within a whisker of absolute zero until the atoms lost their individual identities and merged into a single quantum object — a Bose-Einstein condensate, predicted seventy years earlier and finally visible. Ketterle, working separately with sodium, then made two of these ghostly puddles and watched them interfere with each other like waves.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

William S. Knowles · Ryoji Noyori · K. Barry Sharpless

Many molecules come in two mirror-image forms that a cell treats very differently — one version heals, the other may harm. Knowles, Noyori, and Sharpless each developed catalysts that build only the desired hand of a molecule, making it possible to synthesise drugs like the Parkinson's treatment L-DOPA without producing equal quantities of the wrong twin.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Leland H. Hartwell · Tim Hunt · Sir Paul M. Nurse

Every cell that divides does so under strict supervision — a molecular checkpoint system that decides when division may proceed and when it must pause. Hartwell, Hunt, and Nurse identified the key proteins running those checkpoints, cyclin-dependent kinases among them, and in doing so gave cancer researchers a clearer map of what goes wrong when division spirals out of control.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Sir V. S. Naipaul

Born in Trinidad of Indian descent, Naipaul spent a career probing the wounds of colonialism and its aftermath with a precision that made comfortable readers uncomfortable and uncomfortable ones feel, at last, seen. The academy cited his "perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny" and the suppressed histories his work forces into the open.

Nobel Peace Prize

United Nations · Kofi Annan

The prize went jointly to the United Nations and its Secretary-General in the organisation's centennial year. Annan was recognised for breathing new purpose into the institution and placing human rights, not just state sovereignty, at the centre of its work — an ambitious renegotiation of what the UN was actually for.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

George A. Akerlof · A. Michael Spence · Joseph E. Stiglitz

Akerlof's "market for lemons" showed how a used-car lot where sellers know more than buyers can hollow a market out entirely. Spence examined how better-informed parties signal their quality; Stiglitz studied how the uninformed try to screen for it. Together they mapped the awkward terrain of markets where one side always knows something the other doesn't.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Peter Barss

Barss documented, with clinical thoroughness, that falling coconuts cause a remarkable number of serious head injuries in Papua New Guinea — a hazard invisible to medical literature until someone thought to look up. The paper appeared in the Journal of Trauma, which is exactly where it belongs.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

David Schmidt

Schmidt applied computational fluid dynamics to a problem that has puzzled every shower-taker: why the curtain billows inward just when you least want it to. The spray creates a low-pressure zone, the curtain obliges. Physics is consistent even in the bathroom.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Buck Weimer

Weimer invented Under-Ease: airtight underwear fitted with a replaceable charcoal filter to remove odorous gases before they reach the wider world. A practical solution to a biological reality that polite society had long preferred to ignore.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Joel Slemrod · Wojciech Kopczuk

Their statistical analysis found that people are measurably more likely to die just after a major change in estate tax law rather than just before it, suggesting that mortality — up to a point — responds to financial incentives. Death, it turns out, is somewhat negotiable.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

John Richards

Richards founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in Boston, Lincolnshire, to defend the distinction between a plural and a possessive against the depredations of greengrocer's signage. He fought with dignity for twenty years before conceding, in 2019, that the battle was lost.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Lawrence W. Sherman

Sherman conducted a systematic field study of glee in small groups of preschool children — when it arises, how it spreads, what conditions sustain it. Science has spent considerable effort on misery; it is refreshing when someone turns the instruments on joy.

Ig Nobel Prize in Astrophysics

Jack Van Impe · Rexella Van Impe

The Van Impes of Jack Van Impe Ministries announced their discovery that black holes satisfy every technical requirement to serve as the location of Hell, drawing on both astrophysics and theology in roughly equal measure. Peer review was not forthcoming.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Viliumas Malinauskus

Malinauskus created Grūtas Park in Lithuania — a sculpture garden of Soviet-era statues, including Lenin and Stalin, relocated from their pedestals to a wooded theme park. Whether this counts as an act of peace or an exceptionally dry joke remains a matter of interpretation.

Ig Nobel Prize in Technology

John Keogh

Keogh, an Australian, successfully obtained a patent for the wheel from the Australian Patent Office in 2001. The patent was subsequently certified as an innovation patent. This said something important about the patent system, though opinions differed on exactly what.

Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health

Chittaranjan Andrade · B. S. Srihari

Working at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, Andrade and Srihari surveyed the prevalence of nose-picking among adolescents and found it nearly universal — with most practitioners considering it harmless. Medical literature, one hopes, is the richer for it.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Ole-Johan Dahl · Kristen Nygaard

Every time a programmer writes a class, instantiates an object, or reaches for inheritance, they are using ideas that Dahl and Nygaard worked out in the 1960s while designing Simula. The concepts felt abstract then; they are now so universal as to seem inevitable.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Mario Capecchi · Martin Evans · Oliver Smithies

Capecchi, Evans, and Smithies developed a way to knock out or precisely alter any gene in the mouse genome, turning the animal into a versatile model of human disease. The technique generated thousands of mouse strains and, eventually, the 2007 Nobel Prize — which was awarded for the same work.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Robert Edwards

Edwards spent two decades perfecting in vitro fertilisation before Louise Brown arrived in 1978 — the world's first IVF baby — and millions more in the decades that followed. He received his Lasker in 2001 and his Nobel, for the same achievement, in 2010.

Draft human genome sequence published

On consecutive days in February 2001, Nature and Science carried analyses of the draft human genome from two competing teams — the public consortium and Celera Genomics — covering more than 90 percent of the sequence. The surprise was the gene count: roughly 30,000 protein-coding genes, far fewer than expected, and far fewer than the nematode worm relative to its complexity.

Sodium detected in an exoplanet atmosphere

Hubble's spectrograph caught sodium absorbing starlight as the planet HD 209458 b passed in front of its host star — the first atom detected in the atmosphere of any world beyond our own. The technique of transmission spectroscopy, proven here, would go on to read the chemistry of dozens of other distant skies.

Light brought to a standstill in the laboratory

Physicists at Harvard slowed a light pulse inside laser-cooled rubidium gas until it stopped, storing the optical information as a pattern in the atoms' spins, then released it on demand. Light travels at 300,000 kilometres per second; here it travelled at zero.

NEAR Shoemaker lands on asteroid Eros

After a year in orbit around the asteroid 433 Eros, NEAR Shoemaker descended and touched down at walking pace on 12 February — the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid. It transmitted data for another two weeks from the surface, an unplanned bonus from a craft that had never been designed to survive the landing.

2001 Mars Odyssey enters orbit

Launched in April, Mars Odyssey arrived in October and began the slow aerobraking manoeuvres to settle into its science orbit. It went on to produce the most detailed global map of Martian surface mineralogy ever made and, as of writing, remains the longest-serving spacecraft at Mars.

First space tourist reaches the ISS

Dennis Tito, an American businessman, launched aboard a Russian Soyuz on 28 April and spent nearly eight days aboard the International Space Station, having reportedly paid around twenty million dollars for the privilege. NASA had opposed the visit; the Russians were more pragmatic about it.

First self-contained artificial heart implanted

On 2 July, surgeons in Louisville implanted the AbioCor artificial heart in Robert Tools — a device with no external power lines breaching the skin, the first of its kind. Tools lived 151 days, longer than the device's designers had originally hoped, and died on 30 November.

Wikipedia launches

Wikipedia began on 15 January as a scrappy complement to the expert-edited Nupedia, where articles were taking months to appear. By year's end it had tens of thousands of entries and was doubling roughly every few months, apparently unstoppable.

Death of Claude Shannon

Claude E. Shannon

Shannon died on 24 February in Medford, Massachusetts, at 84, after years with Alzheimer's disease. His 1948 paper had invented information theory from scratch — the bit, entropy, channel capacity — and every piece of digital communication since has worked inside the framework he built.

Death of Fred Hoyle

Sir Fred Hoyle

Hoyle died on 20 August in Bournemouth at 86, a man who had explained where almost every atom in your body came from — forged in stellar interiors, as the 1957 B2FH paper showed — while spending decades rejecting the cosmological theory he had christened, with some derision, the Big Bang.