POSTED 18 OCTOBER 2000
The
dynamite prize
The pre-dawn phone calls from Stockholm. The sleepy grins, the champagne
before lunch, the pestiferous reporters. Yes, folks, it's Nobel time.
Hate your computer? Then you loathe the first integrated circuit, invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958. Simply a group of electronic components on a slice of germanium, Kilby's clunky, 7/16-by-1/16-inch invention was primitive by today's standards. It's fair to say that integrated circuits -- now able to hold millions of electronic devices in the same area -- revolutionized electronics and society. Courtesy Texas Instruments
Just as the movie industry shifts nervously to the edge of its gilt-edged
seats for the Oscars, the science biz bates its breath each fall, as the
steamroller scientific awards are announced. Since their origin in 1901,
the
Nobels have recognized a slew of critical discoveries and inventions.
For example, they honored
Albert Einstein -- but for work on the production of electricity by light,
rather than his epochal theory of
relativity.
What are they recognizing today? Let's sample the 2000 menu:
Messages travel by chemical transmitters across the synapses between nerve cells. The transmitter dopamine is formed from tyrosine and L-dopa, then stored in vesicles in the nerve endings. When a nerve impulse causes the vesicles to empty, dopamine receptors in the membrane of the receiving cell help carry the message further into that cell. Courtesy Nobel
Physiology
or medicine:
Like teenagers, nerve cells
must gab with each other. Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel
won the Nobel for figuring out how dopamine carries signals across synapses
-- gaps -- between neurons. The research was key to understanding and
treating Parkinson's disease -- a movement disorder caused by the death
of nerve cells in the brain that make dopamine.
Physics
Jack Kilby shared the physics award for the invention that makes all
computers tick -- the integrated circuit. A new hire at Texas Instruments
in 1958, Kilby
wanted a way to make complex devices without thousands of solder joints.
Kilby's notes and sketches for the integrated circuit. Courtesy University Communications
Chemistry:
Alan Heeger, Alan
MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa won the Chemistry prize for work on
conducting polymers -- plastics that carry electricity. You achieve
this trick by "doping" plastics with elements to make them, like metals,
able to sustain the flow of electrons -- electric current. The polymers
could produce flexible computer screens, luminescent wallpaper, or new
light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
For the rest of us...
We Whyfilers, who work for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, take a
brief flush of pride that both Kilby and MacDiarmid are UW grads. But
we don't figure to win any Nobels -- or even an Ignobel
-- anytime soon.
Then again, neither will the vast majority of scientists.
So here's the question: What separates the big-league players from us mortals? What, in personal and organizational terms, fosters scientific creativity?
They won it. Why can't we?
Megan Anderson, project assistant; Terry Devitt, editor; S.V. Medaris, designer/illustrator; David Tenenbaum, feature writer; Amy Toburen, content development executive
