2009

Nobel Prize in Physics

Light Learned to Carry Numbers

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

In 1966, Charles Kao published a paper arguing that if you could make glass fibre pure enough — pure to a standard that no one had yet achieved, and that many engineers privately doubted was achievable — you could carry light signals over kilometres without catastrophic signal loss; at the time, existing glass fibres lost all their signal within twenty metres. The manufacturing tolerances he required seemed visionary to the charitable and delusional to everyone else, but within a decade the industry had met them, and fibre-optic cables now carry the overwhelming majority of the world's long-distance telecommunications. Meanwhile, at Bell Labs in 1969, Willard Boyle and George Smith invented the charge-coupled device — the CCD — in what their colleagues described as roughly an afternoon of whiteboard brainstorming, sketching out how photons could be converted to charge and the charge read off in sequence. The device became the sensor in virtually every digital camera made for the next four decades, which means that Boyle and Smith are responsible, at least in part, for the existence of an incomprehensible volume of holiday photographs. Half the prize went to Kao for turning glass into a communication medium; the other half to two men who gave light a way to become a number.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Factory Inside Every Cell, Mapped

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

The ribosome is, in a sense, the machine behind every other machine in biology — the cellular factory that reads the four-letter code of messenger RNA and assembles amino acids into the proteins that carry out essentially every function a living cell performs. That anything as complex as a ribosome could be crystallised and its three-dimensional structure resolved to atomic resolution was, for decades, a project that the field regarded with something between optimism and scepticism. Ada Yonath began the crystallographic work on bacterial ribosomes in the 1970s and was often alone in persisting with it; Thomas Steitz and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan each led groups that eventually produced high-resolution structures of the ribosome's two subunits. Together, the three laureates showed not just what the ribosome looks like but precisely where dozens of antibiotics latch onto it — exploiting structural differences between bacterial and human ribosomes to jam bacterial protein synthesis without touching our own. The practical consequence is a structural logic that now underlies the rational design of antibiotics at a moment when rational design has become rather urgent.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Why Chromosome Tips Don't Fray

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

The problem of how linear chromosomes survive repeated copying without simply fraying at the ends occupied biologists for years; the theoretical answer — some form of protective cap — was clear enough, but what the cap was made of, and how it was maintained, was not. Elizabeth Blackburn, studying a single-celled pond organism called Tetrahymena in the 1970s, identified the distinctive repetitive DNA sequences at chromosome ends that we now call telomeres. Jack Szostak then showed, in elegant experiments with artificial chromosomes, that these sequences actively protect the chromosome rather than merely sitting there decoratively. On Christmas Day 1984, Blackburn and her graduate student Carol Greider discovered the enzyme that extends telomeres — telomerase — a find that reframed the entire question of why cells age and why some refuse to. A cell that loses its telomeres eventually halts, which is ageing; a cell whose telomerase runs unchecked grows without stopping, which is cancer. The three laureates had found, in the chemistry of chromosome tips, one of the most consequential molecular switches in life.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Sentences Written Under Surveillance

Herta Müller

Herta Müller grew up in the German-speaking Banat minority in Romania, in a village shaped as much by the residue of wartime complicity as by Ceaușescu's surveillance apparatus, and she began writing under conditions where every sentence had to be considered not just for what it said but for what it might be taken to mean by the wrong reader. Her prose reflects this history in its texture: compressed, oblique, loaded with objects and images that carry far more than their weight, each sentence feeling as though it has been reduced to its most essential form after considerable pressure. When she was dismissed from her job in 1979 for refusing to collaborate with the Securitate and subsequently subjected to years of harassment, the experience did not so much enter her work as constitute it. The Swedish Academy described her writing as depicting the landscape of the dispossessed, which is accurate but perhaps understates the specificity — she is not writing about displacement in general but about a very particular kind of suffocation: the narrowing of the self under a regime that is both omnipresent and banal. The work rewards the reader who is willing to slow down and accept that not everything will resolve.

Nobel Peace Prize

An Award for Hope, Nine Months In

Barack H. Obama

Barack Obama had been president of the United States for less than nine months when the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced his prize in October 2009, which surprised a number of people, including, apparently, Obama himself. The committee cited his efforts to strengthen international diplomacy, his stated commitment to reducing nuclear arsenals, and a general shift in the tone of American engagement with the world following the preceding eight years. Obama accepted with a degree of candour that was itself rather striking — acknowledging in his Oslo lecture that he was receiving an award for peace while simultaneously commanding military forces in two wars, and mounting a careful argument for why military force and moral aspirations are not always separable. Whether the prize was a recognition of what had been done or an expression of hope for what might be done was a question the committee's own citation left artfully open, and the debate was still running when he left office.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

The Commons Nobody Ruined

Elinor Ostrom · Oliver E. Williamson

The standard economic treatment of shared resources — fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, common grazing land — predicted one of two outcomes: privatise them or subject them to government control, because without one or the other the users would inevitably deplete them in a collective race to the bottom that Garrett Hardin had named, in 1968, the tragedy of the commons. Elinor Ostrom spent decades studying actual communities managing actual shared resources and found that the tragedy was far from inevitable: fishing villages in Maine, Swiss alpine farmers, irrigation communities in Spain had all developed elaborate, self-enforced, locally negotiated rules that allowed sustainable management without either market or state. It was the kind of finding that sounds obvious after the fact and was largely invisible before it. Ostrom became the first woman to receive the economics Nobel, which was, if anything, a comment on how long that had taken. Oliver Williamson shared the prize for a related puzzle about economic organisation: why firms exist as bounded entities rather than simply as networks of contracts, and how their internal structure follows from the costs of transacting in an uncertain world.

Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health

A Bra That Becomes Two Gas Masks

Elena Bodnar · Raphael Lee · Sandra Marijan

Elena Bodnar, who trained as a physician in Ukraine before emigrating to the United States, held the patent on a brassiere that could be unclipped in seconds and separated into two functioning respiratory filter masks, one for the wearer and one for a companion in distress. The inspiration was Chernobyl, where she had witnessed emergency responders without adequate protection, and the patent was entirely serious even if the object was, by most evaluations, inherently comic. The Ig Nobel committee awarded it the Public Health prize in a ceremony where Bodnar demonstrated the garment on several Nobel laureates who had the good grace to look bemused. When the Fukushima Daiichi disaster occurred in 2011 and emergency workers were again photographed improvising face coverings from available materials, the inventors were reported to find the renewed attention rather less amusing than before. The garment never entered mass production, which may simply reflect a gap in the market that nobody has yet thought carefully enough about.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Diamonds Distilled From Tequila

Javier Morales · Miguel Apátiga · Victor M. Castaño

Researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico established, through what must have been an agreeable set of experiments, that tequila — specifically the 40-percent ethanol, 60-percent water ratio that defines the spirit — can be vaporised, heated to around 800 degrees Celsius, and deposited as a thin film of diamond on a steel or silicon substrate. The chemistry is real: the carbon-to-oxygen ratio in the vapour happens to fall in the range that favours diamond formation over graphite, and diamonds did indeed appear on the substrate under electron microscopy. The method is not, however, a serious challenge to existing industrial diamond synthesis, since the ethanol-water ratio of tequila turns out not to be more efficient than purpose-made precursor gases, and sourcing your feedstock from a distillery introduces supply-chain considerations that materials scientists generally prefer to avoid. Still: diamonds from tequila. The result stands.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

A Country Ten Times Its Own Size

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

Iceland's banking sector entered the 2000s with the ambition, and briefly the apparent capacity, to transform a small island nation into a global financial powerhouse. At their peak, Iceland's three major banks had assets approaching ten times the country's entire GDP, having expanded through a combination of foreign borrowing, aggressive acquisition, and the sort of self-confidence that in retrospect is difficult to distinguish from a geological event. By late 2008, all three had collapsed in what remains one of the fastest and most complete banking failures in modern economic history, requiring an IMF bailout and leaving the country with a sovereign debt crisis and a population that, in surveys conducted afterward, reported something between fury and a dark communal amusement. The Ig Nobel committee awarded the executives the Economics prize for demonstrating with precision and commitment that the transformation of small banks into enormous ones can be achieved, and that the reverse process, while less planned, is equally thorough. The wording, as they noted, was diplomatic.

Ig Nobel Prize in Veterinary Medicine

Cows Give More When Named

Catherine Douglas · Peter Rowlinson

Newcastle University researchers Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson surveyed dairy farmers across the United Kingdom and found that cows who had been given individual names by their owners produced, on average, about 250 more litres of milk per year than cows managed as anonymous members of the herd. The finding is, on reflection, less surprising than it first appears: giving a cow a name is not a magical act but an index of the kind of individualised attention and lower-stress handling that farmers who bother to name their animals tend to provide. The cow does not know its name; it knows whether it is handled calmly, whether it is approached without startling, whether the person coming toward it is someone it has reason to trust. Naming correlates with all of these things. The study is cited in animal welfare literature as evidence that the quality of the human-animal relationship has measurable physiological consequences — which is, when you consider it, either obvious or rather moving, depending on your disposition.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Sixty Years of Cracking One Hand

Donald L. Unger

Donald Unger's mother had warned him, as mothers do, that cracking his knuckles would give him arthritis, and Unger — a physician of empirical temperament — resolved to test the claim on the only subject readily to hand. For more than sixty years he cracked the knuckles of his left hand at least twice a day while leaving the right hand entirely uncracked, maintaining what may be the longest-running controlled experiment ever conducted on a single pair of hands. At the end of six decades he examined both and found no arthritis in either, and no detectable difference between them. He published the result as a short letter, noting with some feeling that he now questioned whether his mother had been right about anything at all. The committee awarded the Medicine prize for a study that no ethics board would have approved and no funding body would have financed, carried out entirely on the investigator's own knuckles.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Why Pregnant Bipeds Don't Tip Over

Katherine K. Whitcome · Daniel E. Lieberman · Liza J. Shapiro

A woman in the third trimester of pregnancy carries a substantial and growing mass well forward of her hips, a load that ought, by the ordinary logic of levers, to pitch her onto her face — and yet she does not tip over. Katherine Whitcome, Daniel Lieberman, and Liza Shapiro investigated why, and found the answer written into the spine itself: the lower vertebrae of women are subtly more wedge-shaped than men's, allowing the pregnant spine to curve backward and shift the centre of mass back over the hips without overstraining the joints. The adaptation, they showed, is visible in the fossil record of our upright ancestors, which means natural selection has been quietly solving this particular balance problem for around two million years. The committee awarded the Physics prize for demonstrating that the engineering required to keep a pregnant biped standing is both more elegant and considerably older than anyone had bothered to ask.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Empty Beer Bottles Break Harder

Stephan Bolliger · Steffen Ross · Lars Oesterhelweg · Michael Thali · Beat Kneubuehl

A recurring question in the forensic pathology of bar fights is whether a bottle does more damage full or empty, and Stephan Bolliger and colleagues at the University of Bern set out to answer it with a drop tower and a supply of standard half-litre beer bottles. Full bottles, they found, shatter at around 30 joules of impact; empty ones, having lost the mass and internal pressure that a liquid provides, survive to roughly 40 joules before breaking — meaning the empty bottle is the sturdier weapon, and both comfortably exceed the threshold required to fracture a human skull. The work was undertaken to give expert courtroom testimony a firmer empirical footing, which it now has. The committee awarded the Peace prize, presumably reasoning that anything clarifying the mechanics of a barroom assault might, in the aggregate, discourage the practice — or at least inform the sentencing.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Ireland's Most Cited Driver Never Existed

An Garda Síochána (Ireland's police service)

Over a period of years, officers of An Garda Síochána, the Irish police service, issued more than fifty traffic citations to a driver named Prawo Jazdy, who displayed an impressive disregard for the rules of the road across the length and breadth of the country and an even more impressive ability to supply a different address each time. He was never apprehended, for the excellent reason that he did not exist: prawo jazdy is Polish for 'driving licence,' and a succession of officers had been diligently copying the heading from the licences of Polish motorists into the field marked for a name. The confusion was eventually noticed and circulated in an internal memo. The committee awarded the Literature prize for what amounts to an accidental work of collaborative fiction, its protagonist assembled entirely from a translation error and sustained by the bureaucratic conviction that a form, once printed, must mean what it says.

Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics

A Hundred Trillion on One Banknote

Gideon Gono

As governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe during the hyperinflation of the late 2000s, Gideon Gono presided over a currency that was losing value faster than it could be printed, and responded by printing it in ever-larger denominations — a project that eventually spanned banknotes ranging from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars, very possibly the widest range of numbers ever committed to legal tender. The exercise gave the population daily practice in arithmetic of a scale normally reserved for astronomers, as prices doubled sometimes twice in a day and a wheelbarrow of notes might not buy a loaf of bread. The committee awarded the Mathematics prize for giving ordinary citizens an intimate acquaintance with very large and very small numbers simultaneously. The hundred-trillion-dollar note survives chiefly as a novelty item, which is a rather more stable store of value than it ever managed as money.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

A Panda's Gut Eats the Garbage

Fumiaki Taguchi · Song Guofu · Zhang Guanglei

Fumiaki Taguchi and colleagues isolated a strain of bacteria from the faeces of a giant panda and set it to work on the problem of kitchen waste, finding that the microbes — evolved to break down the tough bamboo fibre that constitutes almost the entirety of a panda's diet — could reduce the mass of discarded food scraps by more than ninety percent over the course of a few weeks. The panda's gut, it turns out, hosts an unusually capable cellulose-digesting community, a necessity for an animal that has committed evolutionarily to eating one of the least nutritious plants available. The committee awarded the Biology prize for demonstrating that the same bacteria could be redirected from bamboo to leftovers with little apparent loss of enthusiasm. That the world's most photogenic endangered species might also hold a solution to municipal composting is the kind of connection that only becomes obvious once someone has thought to examine the dung.

Turing Award

The Machine That Previewed the Desktop

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Charles P. Thacker

In 1973, Charles Thacker led the engineering effort at Xerox PARC that produced the Alto, a machine that was not quite a personal computer in the commercial sense but was, in its essentials, everything a personal computer would eventually become. The Alto had a bitmapped display — meaning the computer controlled each individual pixel rather than producing only text in fixed positions — a mouse for pointing at things on the screen, overlapping windows, a local disk, and a connection to a network. Thacker designed the Alto's hardware with an ingenuity that produced a machine far more capable than the minicomputers of the era at a fraction of the cost, and the resulting object sat in the labs of PARC for years while Xerox contemplated what to do with it and other companies, after various visits to PARC, drew conclusions of their own. Every graphical interface on every desktop and laptop computer descended from the Alto's architecture, which makes Thacker responsible, in a lineage that is direct and traceable, for the visual language most of the world now uses to interact with machines.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

A Cell Remembers What It Could Have Been

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

John B. Gurdon · Shinya Yamanaka

The consensus biology of the mid-twentieth century held that cellular differentiation was essentially a one-way street: an embryonic cell commits to becoming a liver cell or a neuron, and in doing so gives up the genetic potential to be anything else. In 1962, John Gurdon took the nucleus from an intestinal cell of a fully developed frog and transplanted it into an egg cell whose own nucleus had been removed; the egg developed into a normal tadpole, which meant the intestinal cell's nucleus still contained everything necessary to build a complete organism, and that differentiation had not erased that potential but merely suppressed it. The finding was sufficiently counterintuitive that Gurdon's doctoral supervisor told him the result was probably wrong. Four decades later, Shinya Yamanaka found the key: by introducing just four transcription factors into an adult mouse cell, he could coax it back into a pluripotent state capable of becoming almost any cell type — what became known as induced pluripotent stem cells. Gurdon and Yamanaka shared the Lasker in 2009 and the Nobel Prize in 2012, forty years of insight compressed into a single joint award.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

A Pill That Outwitted One Cancer's Switch

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

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

Chronic myelogenous leukaemia, before the late 1990s, was a disease managed but rarely cured: the Philadelphia chromosome translocation that causes it produces a constitutively active kinase called BCR-ABL, which drives uncontrolled proliferation, and conventional chemotherapy could slow the disease but the only cure was bone-marrow transplantation, which was itself dangerous and often unavailable. Brian Druker had spent years arguing that a small molecule designed to fit the BCR-ABL kinase's active site could block the signalling cascade without the broad toxicity of conventional cytotoxics; Nicholas Lydon's medicinal chemistry team at Ciba-Geigy synthesised the compound, and Charles Sawyers's group helped establish the clinical case for it. The drug that emerged, imatinib — sold as Gleevec — converted a disease that killed most patients within a few years into one that the great majority now survive indefinitely, with manageable side effects, simply by taking a daily pill. Its significance went beyond any single patient: it demonstrated that the logic of targeted molecular therapy was sound, and every kinase inhibitor developed since carries that proof of principle in its history.

Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton announced

Ardi Walked Before Chimps Knuckled

On 1 October 2009, a collaboration of forty-seven researchers published eleven papers simultaneously in Science describing Ardipithecus ramidus, a partial skeleton recovered from the Afar region of Ethiopia and dated to approximately 4.4 million years ago — at the time the oldest known skeleton of any hominin, pushing the fossil record of our lineage back by more than a million years beyond the famous Lucy. The bones told a story that cut against one of palaeontology's comfortable assumptions: that the common ancestor of humans and modern chimpanzees would have looked and moved much like a modern chimpanzee. Ardi, as she was quickly named, had feet with grasping toes suited to moving through trees, and also a pelvis that allowed upright walking on the ground — a combination suggesting that bipedalism did not evolve from knuckle-walking but from a more generalised ancestor that was already capable of upright movement. The implications for how and why human walking evolved are still being worked through, and the skeleton continues to generate debate about exactly where Ardipithecus sits in the branching of the hominin lineage. Fifteen years of analysis preceded the announcement, which is either admirable caution or the geological pace at which our origins prefer to yield their secrets.

Kepler space telescope launched

A Camera Fixed on 150,000 Stars

Kepler launched on 6 March 2009 aboard a Delta II rocket and settled into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit, its single 1.4-metre mirror fixed on a patch of sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra containing roughly 150,000 stars. The method was patient and statistical: stare at the same field continuously, measure each star's brightness to extraordinary precision, and note any tiny periodic dimming that might indicate a planet crossing in front of it — a transit lasting a few hours, dimming the star by a fraction of a percent. The telescope carried the largest camera ever sent to space, a 95-megapixel array of charge-coupled devices, and its principal investigator Bill Borucki had been trying to get the mission funded since the late 1980s. By the time Kepler exhausted its fuel and was retired in October 2018, it had confirmed more than 2,600 planets around other stars and revealed that planets are not the exception in this galaxy but the overwhelming rule — that small, rocky worlds at moderate distances from their stars are, if anything, commoner than we had dared to suppose. The universe that Kepler returned to us was more populated than the one we launched it into.

LCROSS confirms water in permanently shadowed lunar craters

Two Billion Years of Lunar Dark, Broken Open

On 9 October 2009, NASA's LCROSS mission executed its primary objective by driving a spent Centaur rocket stage — 2,300 kilograms of hardware moving at roughly 2.5 kilometres per second — directly into Cabeus, a crater near the Moon's south pole whose floor has not seen sunlight for perhaps two billion years. A shepherding spacecraft followed through the resulting plume, analysing the debris with infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers before itself impacting the surface four minutes later. The spectroscopic data confirmed the presence of water ice, along with hydroxyl, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and a range of other volatile compounds; subsequent analysis found water made up roughly 5.6 percent by mass of the excavated material. The permanently shadowed regions of the lunar poles had been proposed as cold traps for volatile ices since the 1960s, and the Apollo missions had found tantalising but inconclusive hints; LCROSS settled the question with an approach that was, to its credit, both scientifically decisive and extremely visible. Water on the Moon is not just an interesting fact — it is the difference between a destination that must carry every kilogram of hydrogen and oxygen from Earth and one that can, in principle, supply its own.

H1N1 influenza pandemic declared by WHO

A Virus Assembled From Four Lineages

In the spring of 2009, a novel reassortant influenza A virus — carrying genetic segments from North American swine, Eurasian swine, human, and avian influenza strains — emerged in Mexico and spread with the unsettling efficiency of a virus meeting a population with essentially no pre-existing immunity. By June, it had reached every continent, and on 11 June the WHO raised its pandemic alert to Phase 6, the highest level, marking the first pandemic declaration since the Hong Kong flu of 1968. The early case-fatality estimates triggered modelling scenarios that alarmed governments into stockpiling antivirals and accelerating vaccine production; the virus proved, in the end, considerably less lethal than seasonal influenza in older adults, because those born before 1957 retained partial immunity from exposure to distantly related strains. Still, it infected an estimated 1.4 billion people in its first year and killed between 151,000 and 575,000, with the burden falling unusually on younger adults and pregnant women. The episode was a rehearsal for pandemic response systems that, it was widely noted at the time, would benefit from further refinement.

International Year of Astronomy

Four Hundred Years Since Galileo Looked Up

The United Nations and UNESCO designated 2009 the International Year of Astronomy, timed to the four-hundredth anniversary of 1609, when Galileo Galilei turned an improved version of the Dutch spyglass toward the sky and began making the observations that would, within a few months, produce the Sidereus Nuncius: four moons orbiting Jupiter rather than the Earth, mountains on the Moon's supposedly perfect spherical surface, and vastly more stars than the naked eye can count. The occasion was marked by events in 148 countries, including the 100 Hours of Astronomy global star-party and a project to give members of the public access to robotic telescopes. Whether such anniversaries accomplish more than confirming that institutions are comfortable celebrating the safe past rather than funding the uncertain present is a question that recurs with some predictability; still, four hundred years of looking upward with lenses is a milestone not entirely unworthy of acknowledgment, particularly given what the first year yielded.