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act by exchanging other particles that convey three forces: the electromagnetic force;
the weak nuclear force, which spawns
neutrinos; and the strong nuclear, which
binds quarks.
But theres a catch. At first blush, the
standard model appears to be a theory of
massless particles. Thats because
simply assigning masses to the
particles makes the theory go
haywire mathematically. So
mass must somehow emerge
from interactions of the otherwise massless particles
themselves.
Thats where the Higgs
comes in. Physicists assume
that empty space is lled with
a Higgs field, which is a bit
like an electric eld. Particles interact with the Higgs field to acquire energy
and, hence, mass, thanks to Albert Einsteins
famous equivalence of the two, encapsulated
in the equation E = mc2. Just as an electric eld
consists of particles called photons, the Higgs
eld consists of Higgs bosons woven into the
vacuum. Physicists have now blasted them out
of the vacuum and into brief existence.
That feat marks an intellectual, technological, and organizational triumph. To produce the

Pieced together. In this particle collision, it appears that

a Higgs boson decays into two
electrons and two positrons (red).

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21 DECEMBER 2012

Higgs, researchers at the European particle

physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, built
the $5.5 billion, 27-kilometer-long LHC. To
spot the Higgs, they built gargantuan particle
detectorsATLAS, which is 25 meters tall
and 45 meters long, and CMS, which weighs
12,500 tonnes. The ATLAS and CMS teams
boast 3000 members each. More
than 100 nations have a hand
in the LHC.
Perhaps most impressive
is the fact that theorists predicted the existence of the
new particle and laid out its
properties, right down to
the rates at which it should
decay into various combinations of other particles. (To
test whether the particle really
is the Higgs, researchers are measuring those rates now.) Physicists have made
such predictions before. In 1970, when only
three types of quarks were known, theorists
predicted the existence of a fourth, which was
discovered 4 years later. In 1967, they predicted the existence of particles that convey
the weak force, the W and Z bosons, which
were found in 1983.
Particle theorists offer various explanations of their knack for prognostication. Particle collisions are inherently reproducible and
free of contingency, theorists say. Whereas
no two galaxies are exactly the same, all
protons are identical. So when smashing them, physicists need not worry
about the peculiarities of this proton or that proton because there
are none. Moreover, theorists
say, in spite of its mathematical complexity, the
standard model is conceptually simplea
claim that nonphysicists might not buy.
The standard
model ultimately
owes its predictive
power to the fact that
the theory is based on
the notion of mathematical symmetry,
some theorists say.
Each of the three forces
in the standard model
is related to and, in some
sense, necessitated by a different symmetry. The Higgs
mechanism itself was invented
to preserve such symmetry while

VOL 338 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org

Published by AAAS

CREDIT: CERN/L. TAYLOR/T. MCCAULEY

NO RECENT SCIENTIFIC ADVANCE HAS

generated more hoopla than this one. On
4 July, researchers working with the worlds
biggest atom smasherthe Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) in Switzerlandannounced
that they had spotted a particle that appears
to be the long-sought Higgs boson, the
last missing piece in physicists standard
model of fundamental particles and forces.
The seminar at which the results were presented turned into a media circus, and the news
captured the imagination of people around the
world. [H]appy god particle day, tweeted
will.i.am, the singer for pop group The Black
Eyed Peas, to his 4 million Twitter followers.
Yet, for all the
hype, the discovery of
the Higgs boson eassciencemag.org
ily merits recognition
For an expanded
as the breakthrough
version of this sec- of the year. Hypothtion, with podcast, video,
links, and more, see www. esized more than
sciencemag.org/special/ 40 years ago, the Higgs
btoy2012 and scienceboson is the key to
careers.org.
physicists explanation
of how other fundamental particles get their mass. Its observation completes the standard model, perhaps
the most elaborate and precise theory in all of
science. In fact, the only big question hanging over the advance is whether it marks the
beginning of a new age of discovery in particle physics or the last hurrah for a eld
that has run its course.
The Higgs solves a basic problem in the standard model. The
theory describes the particles that make up ordinary matter: the electrons
that whiz around in
atoms, the up quarks
and down quarks that
make up the protons and neutrons
in atomic nuclei,
the neutrinos that
are emitted in a
type of radioactivity, and two sets
of heavier cousins of these particles that emerge in
particle collisions.
These particles inter-

Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on June 15, 2014

THE DISCOVERY OF THE Higgs Boson

BREAKTHROUGH OF THE YEAR 2012 | NEWSFOCUS

giving mass to force-carrying particles like
the W and the Z. Simply put, symmetry arguments are powerful predictive tools.
No matter the reason for particle physicists predictive prowess, with the Higgs
boson apparently in the bag, they have no similar prediction to test next. They have plenty
of reason to think the standard model is not
the nal word on fundamental physics. The

theory is obviously incomplete, as it doesnt

incorporate the force of gravity. And the theory itself suggests that interactions between
the Higgs and other particles ought to make
the Higgs hugely heavy. So physicists suspect
that new particles lurking in the vacuum may
counteract that effect. But those arguments
arent nearly as precise as the one necessitating the Higgs boson.

In fact, scientists have no guarantee that

any new physics lies within the reach of the
LHC or any conceivable collider. The standard model could be all of the inner workings
of the universe that nature is willing to reveal.
The discovery of the Higgs is a breakthrough.
Will particle physicists ever score a similar
breakthrough again?
ADRIAN CHO

CREDIT: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY

A HOMe RUn for ancient DNA

Two years ago, paleogeneticists made our
short list for Breakthrough of the Year for
publishing the complete sequence of the
nuclear genome of the Neandertals. In 2011,
the same lab shared our spotlight for piecing
together the genome of the Denisovans, an
archaic human that lived in Siberia at least
50,000 years ago. But those ancient DNA
sequences and others were blurry snapshots
next to the high-resolution genomes that
researchers can now sequence from living
people. Much of the fragile DNA from fossils is degraded into single strands that automatic sequencers cant copy. Researchers
were resigned to deciphering only parts of
the code of ancient genomes, whether from
archaic humans, animals, or pathogens.
This year, however, a persistent postdoc developed a remarkable new method
that enabled his team to revisit the Denisovan DNA and sequence it 31 times over.
The resulting genome, of a girl who lived
in Siberias Denisova Cave, reveals her
genetic material in the same sharp,
rich detail that researchers typically get
from the DNA of living people. This technological feat promises to give a major boost
to the eld of ancient DNA, as researchers
begin to apply the method to other samples
and species.
Ancient DNA researchers typically have
adapted the tools used to sequence DNA
from living humans, which start with samples of double-stranded DNA. But ancient
DNA usually breaks into single strands.
So postdoc Matthias Meyer at the Max
Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, set out to
sequence single-stranded ancient
DNA from scratch. He failed at
first, but then managed to bind
special molecules to the ends
of a single DNA strand, holding it in place for sequencing. As
a result, using only 6 milligrams of
bone from the Siberian girls pinky nger, Meyer and colleagues were able to copy
99.9% of her genome at least once and 92%

Single-minded. Postdoc Matthias Meyer (above) developed a new method to prepare single strands of ancient
DNA; the technique gave researchers an unprecedented view of an ancient girls genome.

of the genome 20 timesthe benchmark for

reliably identifying nucleotide positions.
The results conrmed that Denisovans
interbred with the ancestors of some living humans; people living in parts of island
Southeast Asia have inherited about 3% of
their nuclear DNA from Denisovans. The
genome literally offers a glimpse of the
girl, suggesting that she had brown
eyes, brown hair, and brown skin.
It also allowed the team to use
DNA to estimate that the girl died
between 74,000 and 82,000 years
agothe rst time researchers had
used genomic information to date
an archaic human. The high quality of the
genome gives researchers a powerful new
tool to fish for genes that have recently

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 338

Published by AAAS

evolved, providing a near-complete catalog of the handful of genetic changes that

separate us from Denisovans, who were
close kin to Neandertals.
These details are all the more remarkable because the Denisovans are so poorly
known from fossils: Only a tiny scrap of
finger bone and two molars have been
reliably assigned to them so far. In
contrast, the Neandertals are known from
hundreds of fossils but from a much less
complete genome.
Neandertal experts may catch up soon.
Meyer and colleagues have been trying
Matthiass method on fossil samples that
previously failed to yield much DNA. A
detailed Neandertal genome comparable to
the Denisovan one is expected in 2013.

21 DECEMBER 2012

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