1915: The Year the Nobel Prize Was Put on Hold
What You Will Learn in This Article
You will understand that the absence of a Nobel Prize does not mean that scientific progress stopped, and why the chemical warfare that began in this year fundamentally changed the face of 20th-century medicine.
The Year of System Downtime
The 1915 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was not awarded. It wasn't because the Nobel Committee couldn't decide on a candidate, but because the very routine of nominating, reviewing, and awarding prizes was disrupted as all of Europe plunged into a bloody, full-scale war.
According to the Nobel Prize regulations, if the committee deems that there are "not enough qualified candidates," the prize for that year is suspended and the prize money is carried over to the next year. 1915 was one of the first years this regulation was applied on a large scale. The same pattern would repeat during the periods of World War I (1915, 1916, 1917, 1918) and World War II (1940, 1941, 1942).
From a systems perspective, this is a fascinating phenomenon. In peacetime, a standard request-response cycle operates, but when full-scale war breaks out, that cycle itself stops. However, "stopping" does not mean that the system actually comes to a complete halt. The Nobel Prize, as a recognition system, was suspended, but beneath it, science and medicine were moving at an even more dynamic pace. The surface is in downtime, while the depths are in explosive activity β understanding this is the key to understanding 1915.
The Landscape of the Era: The Dawn of Chemical Warfare
April 22, 1915. Around 5:00 PM. On the Western Front near Ypres, Belgium, German forces release 168 tons of chlorine gas from 5,730 gas cylinders. A yellow-green cloud drifts westward on the breeze, engulfing the French and Algerian trenches.
This was the first large-scale chemical warfare attack in human history. That evening, approximately 1,000 people died and 4,000 were injured. However, more significant than the numbers is the fact that this event fundamentally changed the relationship between medicine and chemistry.
Chlorine gas reacts with the water in lung tissue to create hydrochloric acid, destroying the alveoli. This results in pulmonary edema, a condition in which the lungs fill with fluid, leading to drowning. Until this point, medicine had never encountered injuries of this type. Clinicians lacked the theory or the tools to respond.
What this event initiated was an arms race between chemical warfare defense and chemical warfare offense. Within months of Ypres, various nations developed gas masks and began researching the chemistry of filter technology. This research would later form a significant part of pulmonary medicine. The principles behind the oxygen masks, inhalers, and ventilators we use today can be traced back to the research conducted during this period.
When viewed in conjunction with Korean history, 1915 was the year that the Japanese colonial government completed its foundational work for cultural rule in Korea. The trench warfare and chemical warfare taking place in Europe were largely unknown to the Korean people. However, the medical advancements made in response to these conflicts β including blood transfusions, sterilization techniques, and principles of wound care β would eventually reach Korean soil decades later, during the Pacific War.
Nevertheless, Science Did Not Stop
While the Nobel Prize was suspended, there were several significant advancements made in that year.
Storable Blood: The Birth of Blood Banks
In 1915, Richard Lewisohn at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, established a method for preventing blood coagulation using sodium citrate. Previously, blood transfusions were limited to direct transfusions, where the donor and recipient were directly connected by tubes. With the citrate treatment, blood could be stored in bottles.
This discovery was quickly put to use on the front lines. In 1917, citrate-treated, stored blood was used on a large scale on the Western Front, saving countless wounded soldiers. The concept of blood banks, which we now take for granted in hospitals, was established during this period.
Trench Fever and Infection Control
From the early days of the war, trench fever, a disease transmitted by lice, was rampant in the trenches. Over a million soldiers were infected with this mysterious fever. The cause of the disease would not be identified as Bartonella quintana until 30 years later, but the clinical observations and infection control records made after 1915 laid the foundation for the medical field dealing with vector-borne diseases.
Around the same time, tetanus broke out explosively in the trenches. This was a disaster caused by tetanus spores, which had accumulated in the soil of European farmland over many years, entering wound sites. In response, various nations created protocols for routinely administering tetanus antitoxin to wounded soldiers. This protocol is the root of the practice of receiving a tetanus booster shot when we have a wound today.
The Birth of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery
Trench warfare created new types of injuries. Soldiers, with only their heads exposed above the trenches, were increasingly suffering facial wounds. British surgeon Harold Gillies, originally from New Zealand, established reconstructive plastic surgery to treat these injuries. The field of plastic surgery that we know today originated not in cosmetic procedures, but in these reconstructive surgeries.
Connections
The developments that began in 1915 would later lead to several Nobel Prizes.
- 1919 Nobel Prize β Jules Bordet was awarded for his discoveries in immunology. The background knowledge gained from responding to infectious diseases during the war helped in understanding the significance of his discoveries.
- 1930 Nobel Prize β Karl Landsteiner was awarded for his discovery of human blood groups. While the discovery itself was made in 1901, the surge in blood transfusions during World War I cemented the clinical value of his discovery worldwide.
- 1945 Nobel Prize β Alexander Fleming, Ernst Chain, and Howard Florey were awarded for their discovery of penicillin. If not for the trench infections of World War I, the need for antibiotics would not have been recognized so urgently.
From a systems perspective, 1915 is an interesting case study of downtime. The upper-level recognition system (the Nobel Prize) was suspended, but at the lower levels, the infrastructure for the next generation of discoveries was being explosively built. This infrastructure would pave the way for the medical boom of the 1920s and 1930s.
Using a computer science analogy, 1915 was like a time when major services were shut down in order to perform a large-scale migration of the backend. The user-facing website is a maintenance page, but in the backend, the database is being restructured, the infrastructure is being upgraded, and the next-generation architecture is being deployed. Downtime is preparation.
However, this analogy breaks down here. Software downtime is planned and controllable, but World War I was an unforeseen catastrophe. The fact that medicine advanced as a result of this catastrophe reminds us of the cruelty of the concept of progress. Progress often occurs at the cost of death.
Things that grew under the 1915 downtime: Under the suspension of the Nobel Prize, trench medicine, chemical warfare defense, reconstructive plastic surgery, and stored blood all experienced explosive development. This infrastructure would become the foundation for medical advancements over the next half-century.
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