2009

Nobel Prize in Physics

Charles K. Kao · Willard S. Boyle · George E. Smith

Kao showed in 1966 that glass fibre could carry light over kilometres if only it were pure enough, which seemed at the time like wishful thinking about manufacturing tolerances. Boyle and Smith invented the charge-coupled device in a single afternoon brainstorming session at Bell Labs in 1969, and the CCD became the sensor in every digital camera ever made.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan · Thomas A. Steitz · Ada E. Yonath

The ribosome — the machine that reads messenger RNA and builds every protein in every living cell — had resisted structural determination for years. Ramakrishnan, Steitz, and Yonath each mapped it to atomic resolution using X-ray crystallography, showing exactly where antibiotics bind to jam the machinery in bacterial ribosomes without touching the human equivalents.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Elizabeth H. Blackburn · Carol W. Greider · Jack W. Szostak

Chromosomes end in protective caps of repetitive DNA — telomeres — that shorten with each cell division until, when they are gone, the cell stops dividing. Blackburn and Szostak worked out what telomeres are; Blackburn and Greider discovered telomerase, the enzyme that extends them. The connection between telomere length, ageing, and cancer has been argued over productively ever since.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Herta Müller

Müller grew up in a Romanian-German minority community under Ceaușescu, an experience of surveillance, intimidation, and constriction that suffuses all her writing. Her prose is compressed and strange, each sentence carrying the particular weight of someone who has learned to say as little as possible in public.

Nobel Peace Prize

Barack H. Obama

Obama received the prize less than nine months into his presidency, for efforts toward nuclear disarmament and a new tone in international relations. He accepted with considerable candour about the irony of a sitting commander-in-chief giving a Nobel Peace Prize lecture, and the committee's reasoning remained a subject of debate for years.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Elinor Ostrom · Oliver E. Williamson

Ostrom spent decades studying fishing communities, irrigation systems, and forests where people share resources without either privatisation or government control — and finding that the communities often manage them sustainably, through their own negotiated rules. She was the first woman to receive the economics Nobel; Williamson shared it for his analysis of why firms exist and where their boundaries should be drawn.

Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health

Elena Bodnar · Raphael Lee · Sandra Marijan

Bodnar, Lee, and Marijan patented a brassiere that converts in seconds into two face masks, one for the wearer and one for a bystander. The device attracted gentle mockery until the Fukushima disaster in 2011, after which the inventors were notably less amused by their detractors.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Javier Morales · Miguel Apátiga · Victor M. Castaño

Morales, Apátiga, and Castaño discovered that heating tequila under the right conditions produces a thin film of diamond on a steel substrate — a process that works chemically and is useless industrially, since the ethanol–water ratio of tequila is simply not the most efficient route to synthetic diamonds.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Richard Stephens · John Atkins · Andrew Kingston

Stephens, Atkins, and Kingston confirmed experimentally that swearing provides genuine pain relief. Subjects who repeated a profanity while submerging their hands in ice water endured significantly longer than those using a neutral word — an effect attributed to a stress-induced spike in adrenaline. The study also confirmed something most people had already suspected.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

The directors and executives of Iceland's Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland

The Ig Nobel committee recognised Iceland's banking executives for demonstrating that it is possible to transform small banks into enormous ones and an entire national economy into a cautionary tale in a remarkably short time, and that the process can be reversed. The wording was diplomatic, given the circumstances.

Ig Nobel Prize in Veterinary Medicine

Catherine Douglas · Peter Rowlinson

Cows that had been given names by their owners produced significantly more milk than cows treated as anonymous members of the herd. Naming a cow, it appears, is not merely a matter of sentiment; it reflects a quality of attention that the cow can detect and that affects its physiology.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Charles P. Thacker

Thacker designed the Alto at Xerox PARC in 1973 — the first computer to use a bitmapped display, a mouse, overlapping windows, and a personal storage disk. Every desktop and laptop computer since is, in its fundamental architecture, an Alto with different components.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

John B. Gurdon · Shinya Yamanaka

Gurdon showed in 1962 that a frog's intestinal cell nucleus, transplanted into an enucleated egg, could generate a complete tadpole — meaning that differentiated cells retain all the genetic information needed to make any other cell. Yamanaka showed in 2006 how to coax them into using it, by introducing just four genes. Both received the 2012 Nobel for the same insight, forty years apart.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Brian J. Druker · Nicholas B. Lydon · Charles L. Sawyers

Chronic myelogenous leukemia is driven by a single misfolded kinase protein, BCR-ABL. Druker, Lydon, and Sawyers designed a small molecule that fits into the kinase's active site and blocks it — imatinib, sold as Gleevec — converting a disease that killed most patients within a few years into one that most now survive indefinitely. It was the proof of principle for targeted cancer therapy.

Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton announced

On 1 October, 47 researchers published eleven papers in Science describing Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominin from Ethiopia dated to 4.4 million years ago — then the oldest known skeleton of our lineage. Ardi had feet adapted for grasping branches and a pelvis allowing upright walking, a combination suggesting that the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees did not look much like a modern chimpanzee.

Kepler space telescope launched

Kepler launched on 6 March carrying the largest camera ever sent to space, its single fixed gaze aimed at a patch of sky containing 150,000 stars. Its method was patience: watch each star for years, note every tiny dimming, infer the planet causing it. By the time it ran out of fuel in 2018 it had confirmed more than 2,600 planets.

LCROSS confirms water in permanently shadowed lunar craters

On 9 October, NASA's LCROSS mission fired a spent rocket stage into the permanently shadowed Cabeus crater at the lunar south pole, then flew a shepherding spacecraft through the resulting plume to analyse it. Spectroscopic data confirmed water ice — about 5.6 percent by mass of the excavated material, more than some estimates of Martian ice content.

H1N1 influenza pandemic declared by WHO

A novel H1N1 influenza strain emerged in Mexico in early 2009 and spread to every continent within weeks. The WHO raised its pandemic phase to the maximum on 11 June — the first such declaration since 1968. The virus proved less lethal than early modelling feared, but infected an estimated 1.4 billion people in its first year and killed between 151,000 and 575,000.

International Year of Astronomy

The UN and UNESCO designated 2009 the International Year of Astronomy to mark 400 years since Galileo pointed a telescope at the sky and discovered that Jupiter had moons, the Moon had mountains, and the universe was considerably larger than the one described in the available texts. Events ran in 148 countries.