More than 99 years of scientific progress has been tracked by the Nobel Prize, writes David Le Page
It is unlikely any scientist ever began research with an eye on the Stockholm academies administering the prizes founded by dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel. But their stature and heritage has come to make them an incontrovertible map of the era’s achievements.
While early prizes seem quite obvious, many more recent awards may seem obscure and useless.
Give them time. When, in 1901, Wilhelm Rntgen received the first Nobel Prize in physics for his work with X-rays, neither aeroplanes nor their hijackers had been invented. But X-rays are now employed everywhere from diagnostic medicine to the satellite-borne Chandra X-ray Observatory, viewing the depths of the universe.
In 1998, by contrast, the physics prize went to Robert Laughlin, Horst Strmer and Daniel Tsui for “their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations”. Everyone knows what an X-ray is, but this quantum fluid – a gas composed entirely of electrons, necessarily contained in a powerful magnetic field – may not enter daily nomenclature for another 100 years.
Perhaps one of the most extraordinary discoveries in low-temperature physics, which attracted many prizes, was that of J Georg Bednorz and K Alexander Mller (physics, 1987), who discovered super- conducting ceramics.
Of course, not only super-cooled materials can have their temperature taken. In the early 1960s, two physicists took the temperature of the universe. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson (physics 1978) discovered a 3K (-270_C) background radiation that is ubiquitous in the universe and uniform in all directions. It is physical evidence that there once was a big bang, from which sprang energy, particles and particle physicists.
Not surprisingly, Albert Einstein’s (physics, 1921) name is ubiquitous in the century’s work in physics. In 1926, Jean Perrin (physics) was honoured for confirming Einstein’s explanation of Brownian motion of particles in liquids, and hence the atomic nature of matter. He confirmed Einstein’s calculations of the jostling of such particles by water molecules.
To his eternal regret, Einstein’s work was to contribute to the eventual development of nuclear weapons. But he was by no means the only prize-winner whose name will forever be linked with developing evil.
Enrico Fermi (physics, 1938) was hon- oured for his discovery of the fission reaction unleashed over Hiroshima in 1945. The chain reaction Fermi first succeeded in creating in an atomic pile on a squash court at the University of Chicago, was powered by neutrons released as atoms split. Neutrons were discovered by Sir James Chadwick (physics, 1935).
Of course, there have proven to be many twists to the nature of fundamental particles. Louis de Broglie (physics, 1929) discovered the wave nature of electrons, which implies the wave nature of all matter, and possibly, since waves can be transmitted, the transporter room in Star Trek. Many Nobel laureates, including Niels Bohr (physics, 1922) and Werner Heisenberg (physics, 1932) have contributed to mapping the often bizarre and contradictory domain of quantum physics. Victor Hess and Carl Anderson (physics, 1936) discovered the positron, the latter being the anti-matter form of the electron. Anti-protons were discovered by Emilio Segre and Owen Chamberlain (physics, 1959).
Electrons, by nature and in science, are ubiquitous.
The electron microscope (Ernst Ruska, physics 1986) proved to be one of the most invaluable tools for probing the minute structure of life, mole- cules and even atoms.
At that level, Gnter Blobel (medicine, 1999) has discovered how newly-created proteins are directed within cells to their required destinations, identifying an intrinsic signal in such proteins that acts as a kind of “zip code” in moving them to the correct organelles. Proteins are created and transported within cells by the Golgi apparatus discovered by Camillo Golgi (medicine, 1904).
Actually predicting the shape of proteins is a task for which the most powerful super-computer in the world, IBM’s “Blue Gene”, has been planned.
British scientists recently reported completing the successful sequencing of a human chromosome, one of the 24 that constitute the human genome. Prizes for mapping the entire genome, cloning and genetic therapy may be expected within the next decades, as may the recognition of probable successes in tissue engineering – growing new organs from cells removed from the human body.
Nineteenth-century chemists calculated the composition of matter, but since the same elements can be combined in various forms at molecular level, 20th century chemistry was more about structure.
No molecular structure is more famous than the double-helix form of DNA, the structure of which was deduced by Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins (medicine, 1962), opening another of the century’s larger Pandora’s boxes.
Our notions of the universe’s immensity have advanced dramatically within the last 80 years, thanks largely to Edwin Hubble, who, in 1924, proved that certain celestial objects were other galaxies.
Hubble never won a prize, but Sir Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish (physics, 1974) pioneered radio astronomy, Hewish discovering the first pulsars. Pulsars are extremely dense stars rotating at high speed, producing regular radio pulses.
Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor (physics, 1993) later discovered the first known binary pulsar: two stars in the system PSR 1913 + 16 are rotating around each other in an increasingly tight orbit. But why is their orbit decaying? Probably because the system is losing energy in the form of gravity waves, the existence of which was predicted by Einstein.
Not only nuclear discoveries have been put to dubious ends. Sir William Ramsay (chemistry, 1904) and Sir Joseph Thomson (physics, 1906) discovered the “inert gaseous elements in air”, such as neon, and the conduct- ion of electricity by gases respectively, contributing to generations of headaches in strip-lit offices. Agriculture was benefited, or blighted, by the efforts of Paul Mller (medicine, 1948), who discovered the insecticidal properties of DDT.
The scientists of today are often peering into a weird and sometimes frightening world, where nature seems to defy the comfortable assumptions established by their predecessors.
Stanley Prusner (medicine, 1997) discovered prions, proteins that through a new “biological principle of infection” cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease.
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Masters of modern science
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Other discoveries are reminders of nature’s unceasing capacity to startle. Robert Curl, Sir Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley (chemistry, 1996) recently discovered buckminsterfullerenes, or “buckyballs”, extraordinary 60-atom carbon molecules of spherical shape. These molecules and their cousins, buckytubes, are being used for everything for lubricating nanomachines to making tiny sensors.
Some possibilities now seriously considered by contemporary science resemble the flakier ideas of early Nobel laureates. Svante Arrhenius (chemistry, 1903) was honoured for work in electrolysis, used industrially to electroplate metals and produce certain chemicals.
His theory that life is diffused in the universe by “spores” emitted by habitable planets, though, long resembled the worst kind of UFO claptrap. But since 1996, the possibility that very simple life forms could have been transferred from Mars to Earth aboard meterorites has been within the realm of respectable scientific debate.
Other early prizes show that scientific progress is never linear and predictable. Robert Koch (medicine, 1905) first isolated the tuberculosis bacillus, thus preparing the way for later researchers to discover treatments for the disease. Sadly, misuse of antibiotics, first discovered by Alexander Fleming (medicine, 1945), has set back progress in conquering the disease, which remains ubiquitious.
The prizes also point to a profound imbalance. Marie Curie (chemistry, 1911) and her daughter Ir>ne Joliot-Curie (chemistry, 1935) are among a handful of female prize-winners. Many argue that X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin should have been credited with Crick and Watson for the discovery of the DNA structure.
Hopefully, when in the 2000s scientists are honoured for the development of quantum computers, the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson and the design of “smart” molecules, the natural heirs to the Curies and and Franklin will be among them.