Nobelmen of 1954

Chemistry is one of the sciences that became important before it knew what it was doing. The old, half-magician alchemists of the Middle Ages were acquainted with many useful compounds and reactions, but they had no rational theories about them. Early chemists, dropping the magic, gradually developed general principles to explain what happened in their test tubes. The most useful of these was the concept of "chemical bonds": the forces that make atoms stick together as the molecules that form nearly everything on earth. Though the chemists learned a lot about the bonding forces and took skillful advantage of them, they did not understand their origin.

Then, in the 1930s, CalTech's Chemist Linus Carl Pauling attacked the useful but mysterious bonds from the new angle of quantum theory. He found that the "resonance" of the atoms (their internal vibration) is the source of the forces that hold molecules together. His book, The Nature of the Chemical Bond, is one of the classics of modern science.

Once the bonds had been explained, many baffling mysteries were solved, and many new weapons appeared in the lockers of the chemists. Now they could predict how a substance would react even when they had no sample of it. They could handle with new assurance the complex organic molecules, whose atoms are arranged like submicroscopic lace in chains, rings and branches. Out of the new techniques grew enormous industries --drugs, plastics and synthetic fibers.

Dr. Pauling has made his own theories yield far-reaching results. He has explained many properties of metals (e.g., their magnetism) by means of atomic behavior. His most telling work has been on proteins, the chemical basis of life. Patiently he took proteins apart and showed that their enormous molecules are made of twisted atom-chains, spiraling many layers deep like manila hawsers.

In recognition of these discoveries, both basic and practical, the Royal Swedish Academy last week awarded Dr. Pauling the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1954.

Born in Portland, Ore. in 1901, Pauling went to Oregon State College, then to CalTech, and did postgraduate research in Europe. He joined the CalTech faculty in 1927 and has been a full professor there since 1931. Though his interests have been almost purely scientific, softspoken, outspoken Dr. Pauling has not escaped political conflict. He served as vice president of the World Federation of Scientific Workers (which has Communist members), and this brought him to the attention of California and congressional investigating committees. Dr. Pauling has denied that he has ever been a Communist. He says, however, that he will continue to speak his mind and associate with anyone he pleases.* Says he: "Advisers to the Government, if they are to be valuable, must be free to express their opinions."

The Nobel Prize in Physics for 1954 was divided between two Germans: Drs. Max Born and Walther Bothe, who were leaders in the "new physics" that started with relativity and quantum theory and ended (so far) with the hydrogen bomb. Dr. Born, 72, who fled Germany in the mid-'30s is credited with much of the difficult mathematics that enabled physicists to understand the behavior of atoms.

Dr. Bothe, 63, was honored for "the coincidence method [a way of measuring time with extreme accuracy] and his discoveries made with this method." As chief of the Institute for Physics of the Max Planck (formerly Kaiser Wilhelm) Institute for Medical Research at Heidelberg, Dr. Bothe was active in Germany's wartime attempt to release atomic energy.

*Visiting Princeton last week, Dr. Pauling denounced the withdrawal of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance as "the worst case of national ingratitude I know. They had no need to pillory him publicly."

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