YEAR IN REVIEW 1996: NOBEL-PRIZES

Prize for Chemistry The 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Paul Crutzen, a Dutch citizen with the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany; F. Sherwood Rowland of the University of California, Irvine; and Mario Molina of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The scientists' research alerted the world to the possibility that human-manufactured gaseous compounds could destroy the stratospheric ozone layer, which protects life on Earth from damaging solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation. By explaining the chemical mechanisms that affect the thickness of the ozone layer, the three researchers have contributed to our salvation from a global environmental problem that could have catastrophic consequences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its citation. The ozone layer is a region of the atmosphere, roughly 15-48 km (9-30 mi) in altitude, that contains small quantities of ozone. Ozone is a form of oxygen that comprises three atoms (O3) rather than the two atoms (O2) found in ordinary molecular oxygen. Despite its sparse distribution, ozone absorbs most of the Sun's UV light, which otherwise would cause severe sunburn and skin cancer in people and adversely affect other organisms. In 1970 Crutzen took some of the first steps in calling attention to the ozone layer's vulnerability. He showed that the nitrogen oxides NO and NO2 act as catalysts to speed decomposition of ozone. Those compounds form in the atmosphere from nitrous oxide (N2O) released naturally at the surface by soil bacteria. A year later the U.S. scientist Harold Johnston warned that a planned fleet of commercial supersonic transport (SST) aircraft would release nitrogen oxides directly into the ozone layer and thus could damage it. Crutzen's and Johnston's work sparked strong debate among scientists and decision makers and marked the beginning of intensive research into the chemistry of the atmosphere. The next major advance came in 1974, when Rowland and Molina published a study of the threat posed by chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases. They showed that CFCs, which were widely used as aerosol-spray propellants, air-conditioning refrigerants, and foaming agents in plastics manufacture, were transported to the ozone layer. There, under the influence of UV light, they participated in reactions that destroyed ozone molecules. Rowland and Molina wrote that continued use of CFCs would seriously deplete the ozone layer within decades. That prediction triggered strong scientific controversy. CFCs were a mainstay of modern society, and no substitutes were available. Chemists knew that CFCs were extremely nonreactive at the Earth's surface and thus believed that they posed no environmental threat. Many were critical of Molina and Rowland's calculations, but yet more were seriously concerned by the possibility of a depleted ozone layer, the Swedish Academy said. Today we know that they were right in all essentials. It was to turn out that they had even underestimated the risk. In 1985 concerns about ozone depletion intensified after English researchers detected the Antarctic ozone hole, a region of the atmosphere that becomes seriously depleted in ozone every austral spring. The work by Crutzen, Rowland, Molina, and other scientists led to a 1987 treaty, the Montreal Protocol, in which the industrialized countries agreed to phase out the production of CFCs. Crutzen was born Dec. 3, 1933, in Amsterdam and received a Ph.D. in 1973 from Stockholm University. Rowland was born June 28, 1927, in Delaware, Ohio, and earned a Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of Chicago. Molina, born March 19, 1943, in Mexico City, took his Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of California, Berkeley. (MICHAEL WOODS) Prize for Economics In 1995 the University of Chicago faculty added another Nobel laureate to its growing list of notables. For the fifth time in six years, one of its professors was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science. The latest recipient, Robert Emerson Lucas, Jr., was honoured for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations. Ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s, whenever the U.S. government wanted to correct the direction of the economy, it did so by raising or lowering taxes or interest rates. However, during the recession of the 1970s, lowering interest rates and infusing money into the economy resulted in higher, not lower, unemployment and excessive inflation. Lucas offered an explanation of this unexpected result based on a simple observation: that business and industry, workers, and consumers were too smart to be manipulated over and over again. According to his theory, people had learned to anticipate government policies to direct the economy and then adjusted their own course of action on the basis of those rational expectations. For example, during the recession the government had lowered taxes because in the past when businesses expected increased profits, they hired more workers and paid them higher wages. The government economists knew that this policy also caused prices to rise, but the increased inflation was viewed as a trade-off for higher employment. In the 1970s, though, the government's strategy backfired. Workers demanded even higher wages to offset rising prices, which caused inflation and unemployment to skyrocket. Despite interest in Lucas' early publications, such as Rational Expectations and Econometric Practice (1981; coauthored with colleague Thomas J. Sargent) and Studies in Business-Cycle Theory (1981), government economists during the 1980s persisted in trying to apply the old models. In its announcement of the 1995 prize, worth $1 million, the Swedish Academy said that Lucas, through his development and application of the rational expectations hypothesis, had transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy. (Macroeconomics is the study of an economic system as a whole, involving how various sectors of an economy interrelate.) Rational expectations had become a standard part of the macroeconomic toolbox, according to the Swedish Academy. Lucas' theory changed the way government policy makers around the world discussed and developed economic tactics. Lucas was born Sept. 15, 1937, in Yakima, Wash. He received a B.A. in history (1959) and a Ph.D. in economics (1964) from the University of Chicago, where he was a student of 1976 Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. Lucas taught economics from 1963 to 1974 at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa., after which he joined the department of economics faculty at his alma mater. Lucas' later publications, some coauthored by various colleagues, revealed his interest in other aspects of macroeconomics. (MARGARET BARLOW) Prize for Literature The Irish poet Seamus Heaney, long considered a chief contender for the award, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. The Swedish Academy praised Heaney for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past. It also commended his treatment, without political rhetoric, of the conflict in his native Northern Ireland. A highly popular poet and well-liked man, Heaney was the fourth Irish writer, after William Butler Yeats (1923), George Bernard Shaw (1925), and Samuel Beckett (1969), to win the Nobel. Many critics called Heaney the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. Given their different backgrounds and approaches to poetry, the two appeared to have little in common, yet they shared an experience that was deeply rooted both in the Western classics and in Irish myth and history. Too, their works were similarly rich with cadences unique to Irish speech. For his use of everyday language and rural imagery to frame universal themes, Heaney sometimes was also compared to the American poet Robert Frost and the English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy. Born on April 13, 1939, in County Londonderry, northwest of Belfast, Heaney was the eldest of nine children in a tight-knit Roman Catholic family. Their farm bordered a large Protestant estate, and from his childhood he felt symbolically placed between the two clashing cultures. Heaney studied and later lectured at Queen's University, Belfast. In his first major collection of poems, Death of a Naturalist (1966), he established his dual roots in the Irish soil and the literary realm. In one of his best-known poems, Digging, he endowed his father and grandfather's digging of peat with a universal richness that became a metaphor for his own writing of poetry. Indeed, much of Heaney's early work sprang from his happy childhood experiences and his life on a farm and from his home and family, including his wife and three children. In 1972 Heaney moved to the Irish republic. He later came to divide his time between Dublin, the University of Oxford, where he was professor of poetry from 1989 to 1994, and Harvard University, where from 1985 he was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory. Many of the poems published after his move, such as those in North (1975) and Field Work (1979), expressed the struggles of living in the political strife of Northern Ireland. The power of Heaney's words, never loud, never preaching, was in their subtlety, and the power of his images was in their familiarity. Again and again he referred to an individual's experience as the basis of poetry. As the translator of Sweeney Astray (1983), about a legendary Irish king who is cursed by a Christian cleric and wanders the land as a mad beast, half bird and half man, Heaney revitalized an ancient poem with contemporary themes. In the title poem of Station Island (1984), Heaney used a narrative form, influenced by the work of Dante, to describe a journey set against the agonizing background of Northern Ireland's politics. As a teacher Heaney also explored the role of poetry. In his lectures, recorded in volumes that include The Place of Writing (1989) and The Redress of Poetry (1995), he examined writing under every condition, from creative freedom to imprisonment. Underlying the lyricism of his work was a belief that poetry's purpose should be in the service of language, not of a narrow political philosophy. (MARGARET BARLOW) Prize for Peace Partly as a protest against nuclear testing by China and France, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Peace to the physicist and antinuclear activist Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs that he had headed for many years. A physicist who had helped develop the atomic bomb, Rotblat left the project to pursue peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Recognition of the efforts of these supporters of nuclear disarmament and arms limitations came in the year that marked the 50th anniversary of the bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Born on Nov. 4, 1908, in Warsaw and educated in Poland, Rotblat went to the University of Liverpool, England, as a lecturer in 1939. He then became a member of the British team that joined U.S. scientists at Los Alamos, N.M., to work on the Manhattan Project. Although he was uncomfortable about participating in the creation of an atomic bomb, Rotblat initially believed that the weapon would be used only to deter a German threat. After learning in 1944 that it would be used to contain the Soviet Union, a World War II ally, he left the project and returned to Liverpool. After the war Rotblat became a British citizen, and he dedicated himself to peaceful applications of physics, primarily in nuclear medicine. He directed research in nuclear physics at the University of Liverpool (1945-49) and was a professor at the University of London's St. Bartholemew's Hospital Medical College (1950-76). In 1955 Rotblat joined a group of scientists in signing a manifesto advanced by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein that urged an end to nuclear arms. Such weapons, it said, threaten the continued existence of mankind. No fewer than 10 of the signatories were past or future Nobel laureates. From the group's commitment came the first of the annual Pugwash Conferences, named for the village in Nova Scotia where the first meeting was held in 1957. Some 25 invited participants, mostly scientists, met each year to hear and read papers and to discuss critical issues on arms control. They were encouraged to take the antinuclear message home with the hope of influencing policy changes in their respective countries. Hiroshima was the site of the 1995 meeting. Rotblat served as secretary-general of the London-based organization from 1957 to 1973 and as president after 1988. One purpose of the conferences was to foster a dialogue between opposing sides in the arms race, and the speakers often included scientists and government officials in charge of the nuclear arms programs in their own countries. During the Cold War years, some U.S. officials criticized the Pugwash Conferences as dupes of the Soviet Union. While there was no clear evidence that the conferences directly led to arms reduction, it was thought that the discussions were not without influence. There was evidence that contacts made in the meetings contributed to the resolution of events such as the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Rotblat's published works include Science and World Affairs (1962), Pugwash (1967), Scientists in the Quest for Peace (1972), Scientists, the Arms Race and Disarmament (1982), Coexistence, Co-operation and Common Security (1989), Building Global Security Through Co-operation (1990), Towards a Secure World in the 21st Century (1991), and A World at the Crossroads (1994). Many of the works reflected his commitment to engaging scientists of all nations to work for world peace. (MARGARET BARLOW) Prize for Physics Frederick Reines of the University of California, Irvine, and Martin L. Perl of Stanford University shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physics for their respective discoveries of the neutrino and the tau lepton, members of the family of fundamental subatomic particles that make up all matter in the universe. Reines worked with the late Clyde L. Cowan, Jr., at Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory in the 1950s to confirm the existence of the neutrino. Perl and collaborators at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) identified the tau lepton in the 1970s. Reines and Perl discovered what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences termed in its citation two of nature's most remarkable fundamental particles. Both discoveries were critical in developing the so-called standard model that physicists used to describe the subatomic particles that make up the cosmos and the interactions, or forces, between them. The standard model maintained that all matter consists of 12 kinds of particles. Six are leptons, a group that includes electrons--the negatively charged particles that orbit the central nucleus of atoms--as well as the muon, three kinds of neutrinos, and the tau lepton. Six others are quarks, which combine to make up the protons and neutrons in the nucleus. The 12 particles are divided into three families, each of which contains two leptons and two quarks. The work by Reines and Cowan in making the first definitive detection of neutrinos was critical for initial development of the standard model. Physicists first invoked the existence of the neutrino in the 1930s in order to uphold the law of conservation of energy, one of the most sacrosanct principles in physics. Although the law states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, energy did seem to disappear in a certain form of radioactive decay called beta decay. To preserve the law, the Austrian-born physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed that the missing energy is carried off by a particle that has no electric charge and rarely interacts with matter. The Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi named the ghostly particle the neutrino, for little neutral one. Although physicists quickly accepted the neutrino as reality, the detection of a particle that seems to shun interactions was a formidable challenge. In 1956 Reines and Cowan succeeded in a feat considered to border on the impossible and raised the neutrino from its status as a figure of the imagination to an existence as a free particle, according to the Swedish Academy. Reines and Cowan built a simple detector that identified the interactions of neutrinos emanating from a nuclear reactor as they passed through a tank containing 400 litres (105 gallons) of water. The interactions were visible as faint flashes of light that registered on electronic devices monitoring the water. Their small neutrino detector was the forerunner of the huge detectors of the 1980s and '90s, which attempted to catch the elusive neutrinos that emanate from the Sun and other stars in huge water tanks, large volumes of the sea, and even Antarctic ice. Before Perl and his colleagues discovered the tau lepton in experiments carried out between 1974 and 1977, physicists thought that there were only two families of fundamental particles. The tau was the first evidence for a third family, which proved essential for completing the standard model. Perl and co-workers discovered the signature of the new lepton in particle debris produced when electrons were smashed into their antimatter counterparts, positrons, in a particle collider at SLAC. They named it tau, the first letter of the Greek word tritos, which means third. Reines, born March 16, 1918, in Paterson, N.J., received a Ph.D. degree from New York University in 1944. Perl was born June 24, 1927, in New York City and received a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University, New York City, in 1955. (MICHAEL WOODS) Prize for Physiology or Medicine Three developmental biologists--the Americans Edward B. Lewis and Eric F. Wieschaus and the German Christiane Nsslein-Volhard--won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. They were honoured for their discoveries about a family of master genes that determine body architecture early in an embryo's development. The work, done between the 1940s and the 1970s, showed that a small number of critical genes map out the body's form. The biologists also identified genes that determine which organs form inside individual body segments, telling an insect embryo, for instance, where to grow wings, a fish where to build gills, or a human embryo to form eyes in the head rather than in the abdomen. The experiments cited by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm involved the vinegar fly, or fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. It was the first Nobel Prize honouring basic research in developmental biology since 1935. The Nobel Committee remarked in its announcement of the award that the decision of Nsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus to join forces on this project was a brave decision by two young scientists at the beginning of their scientific careers. Nobody before had done anything similar and the chances of success were very uncertain. Wieschaus responded at a press conference in Princeton by saying, We were young and foolish, and it was worth trying. Lewis, of the California Institute of Technology, did his research independently at that institution in the 1940s. Wieschaus, of Princeton University, and Nsslein-Volhard, of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tbingen, Germany, collaborated on their research as young scientists in the 1970s. Others researchers later determined that what Lewis, Wieschaus, and Nsslein-Volhard had discovered in Drosophila also applies to humans. Lewis studied genetic mutations that cause sections of a fly's body to develop abnormally. One such mutation, for instance, resulted in adult flies with an extra set of wings. By collecting and crossbreeding flies with other mutations and altered segments, he discovered a cluster of genes that control how individual body segments develop. The genes were arranged in head-to-tail fashion on the chromosomes, in the same order as the body segments they controlled. First came genes that controlled the development of the head region, next those that determined the architecture of the thorax, and, finally, those for the posterior. Lewis identified a family of such genes, which later were named homeotic selector genes. Wieschaus and Nsslein-Volhard focused on earlier developmental stages in their research, which began in the late 1970s at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, West Germany. Because Lewis' research did not explain the key genetic events that cause an embryo to begin dividing into body segments and activate the homeotic genes, they set out to determine how a newly fertilized Drosophila egg developed into a segmented embryo. They treated flies with mutagens, chemicals that cause changes in genes. The mutated genes, in turn, caused the formation of abnormal body segments. Using a microscope with which two people could simultaneously study the same embryo, Wieschaus and Nsslein-Volhard spent more than a year examining and classifying defects caused by the mutations. They eventually identified a small number of genes--out of the fly's 20,000--that are critical for determining the body plan. It was believed that the work of the three biologists would eventually help explain certain types of congenital malformations in humans. Lewis was born on May 20, 1918, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and received his Ph.D. degree from the California Institute of Technology, where he remained active in research. Wieschaus was born on June 8, 1947, in South Bend, Ind., and received a Ph.D. from Yale University, where he became professor of biology. Nsslein-Volhard, who was born on Oct. 20, 1942, in Magdeburg, Germany, and received her Ph.D. from the University of Tbingen, was affiliated with that city's Max Planck Institute. (MICHAEL WOODS)