1925 — The Year the Nobel Prize Took a Break

What You'll Learn in This Article

You'll understand why, in this year when the Nobel Prize was not awarded, the United States put evolutionary theory on trial, and why this trial became the precursor to the vaccine debates, climate debates, and GMO debates we face today.

The Nobel Prize Was Suspended, But Science Was on Trial

The 1925 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was suspended. The committee could not find a clear winner among the candidates. However, in this year, a pivotal event unfolded on a different stage of scientific history.

From July 10th to 21st, a schoolteacher was on trial in a courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee. His crime was teaching evolution in a public school. This was the famous Scopes Trial, also known as the "Monkey Trial."

Why is this trial important in the history of science? Because it was the event in which science first appeared on the stage of public politics. Before this, science was confined to debates within the academic world. After the Scopes Trial, science became the subject of public opinion. The conflict between religious education and secular education, fundamentalism and modernism, rural America and urban America – this is what politicized science.

The consequences of this trend continue to this day. Vaccine skepticism, climate change denial, opposition to GMOs, denial of evolution – all these scientific and social debates we face in the 21st century have their roots in the Dayton courtroom of 1925.

The Zeitgeist – The Peak of the Roaring Twenties

In 1925, the world was changing rapidly in several directions:

• The Locarno Treaties (October) – Mutual recognition of borders between European countries. A symbolic moment of peace after the war. Optimism, which would crumble five years later, was at its peak at this time.
• Publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby – A symbolic novel of the Roaring Twenties. A portrait of materialism and emptiness.
• Publication of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (July) – Published in the same month as the Scopes Trial, this book outlined the ideology that would shake the world in the future.
• Japan's universal male suffrage law – A part of the modernization trend in Asia.
• Reconstruction of the Great Kanto area underway – Following the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, Tokyo's reconstruction was underway.

In the history of medicine, this year marked the stabilization of large-scale insulin production. Insulin, developed in Toronto, was licensed to pharmaceutical companies around the world, and mass production began. Novo Nordisk, founded by Krøgh, dominated the European market, and Eli Lilly dominated the American market. An industry that didn't exist a few years ago was formed in this period.

This period also saw the popularization of medical devices. Electrocardiographs began to shrink from their initial size of 300 kg to a size that could be moved around hospitals, and X-ray machines spread to hospitals across the country. Medicine became a visible industry in this period.

When viewed in conjunction with Korean history, 1925 was the year of the founding of the Korean Communist Party. This organization, secretly founded in Seoul in April, was destroyed several times in subsequent crackdowns, but it remains the first organized attempt by intellectuals to address social issues in modern Korean history. While science was appearing on the stage of public politics in Europe and the United States, intellectuals in Korea began to approach social problems with new ideologies.

Nevertheless, Science Did Not Stop

The Scopes Trial: The Politicization of Science

John Scopes was a high school physics and biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee. While it is not certain whether he actually taught evolution, he was nominated as the defendant by local businessmen to make Dayton famous. The trial itself was designed as a symbolic confrontation between fundamentalism and modernism, rather than about Scopes as an individual.

• Prosecution: William Jennings Bryan (former Secretary of State, 3-time presidential candidate)
• Defense: Clarence Darrow (the greatest criminal defense lawyer of his time)

The 11-day court battle was broadcast nationwide on the radio. It was the first mass media trial in American history. Result: Scopes found guilty, fined $100 (later overturned on appeal for procedural reasons). Legally, it was a victory for fundamentalism, but culturally, it was a victory for modernism. A key moment in the trial was when Bryan, during cross-examination by Darrow, acknowledged the problems of literal interpretations of the Bible.

The Archetype of Science-Society Debate

Why is the Scopes Trial still a relevant archetype today? Because it already contained several patterns that today's science-society debates repeat:

1. The problem of public accessibility to science – Evolution is a complex theory; is the public qualified to judge it?
2. The boundary between religion and science – Are the two fields separate, or should they be within a single system of truth?
3. Decision-making in education – Who decides what to teach children: parents/the community, or experts?
4. The role of the media – Does the mass media exacerbate or distort the debate?

These four questions are exactly what appear in today's vaccine skeptics, climate change deniers, and platform information regulation debates. Even after 100 years, we are repeating the same structural debate.

If we summarize it as a CS analogy, the Scopes Trial is like a political decision moment about whether general users need system administrator privileges. In software systems, we often face the question of "what should be a user's decision and what should be enforced as a default setting." The Scopes Trial posed this question on a social scale.

The Globalization of Insulin

In the same year, insulin became a global commodity. This hormone, which was only accessible to a few children a few years ago, was mass-produced and distributed throughout Europe and North America. This industry became the archetype of the multinational pharmaceutical industry that would grow in the future.

This period of insulin distribution left several symbolic examples. If Banting and Macleod had not made the decision to transfer their patents to the university for $1, this globalization would have been much slower. This is a common archetype often cited in today's debates about patents and accessibility.

The Physical Seed of Magnetic Resonance

In 1925, Pauli established the Pauli Exclusion Principle. On the surface, this is pure physics, but it later became the theoretical basis for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). As the concept of spin began to be established in this period, it eventually made possible the MRI diagnostic equipment in hospitals half a century later. This is a typical trajectory of pure physics in the laboratory becoming diagnostic equipment in hospitals half a century later.

Connections

The events of 1925 were connected to the following:

• 1926 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Fibiger – But later proven to be an error. An example of the Nobel Committee's own judgment error.
• 1930 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Landsteiner – ABO blood group. Medicine that fits the era of mass production and mass distribution.
• 2020s Vaccine Skepticism – The structure of the Scopes Trial in 1925 is being exactly reproduced.

If we summarize it as a CS analogy, the peak of the Roaring Twenties in 1925 was the moment when system stabilization led to UX and politics becoming the focus of technology debates. From a software perspective, when a system stabilizes, the next debate is always about who will use it and how. After 1925, science was no longer just for academics. This change created the fundamental conditions for the science-society relationship that continues to this day.

The dark side of this analogy: Politicization is inevitable, but it often flows in a direction that undermines the credibility of science itself. The Scopes Trial was recorded as a victory for modernism, but the cultural conflict it triggered remains one of the major divisions in American society 100 years later. How we manage this division is the key challenge of science policy in the 21st century.

Summary of the 1925 reorganization of science-society relations: In this year, when the Nobel Prize was not awarded, the Scopes Trial brought science onto the stage of public politics. The structure of the science-society debates we face today was foreshadowed in this trial.

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