IT was 11:30 a.m. on the Eastern Seaboard--the hour of shopping at the supermarket or of getting ready for a business lunch--when word flashed from Rome that a new Pope had been chosen. It was 9:07 a.m. on the West Coast--time to make breakfast or to drive to work--when the flickering radio signal carried the voice of Cardinal Canali announcing, in his soft, Italianate Latin: "Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum--habemus papam." The press, whose attention for days had been focused on the smoke signals from the Sistine Chapel, promptly provided both great clouds and small wisps of facts about the man who would henceforth be known as John XXIII. TIME'S task was to organize the mass of facts--which reached the U.S. haphazardly morning and night for a week--into a coherent, intelligible story. TIME'S cover story on the new Pope strives to 1) give a complete account of the man's life, personality and accomplishments; 2) explain the circumstances of his election; 3) state the problems he faces against the background of the papacy's history. See RELIGION, "I Choose John . . ."

TIME Cover Artist Boris Chaliapin set something of a speed record with his portrait of John XXIII. He began painting the minute he heard the news, worked through the night, finished the next morning, in good time for the picture to be flown from his Connecticut studio to the engraving and printing plant in Chicago.

WITH its own kind of mathematics and a menagerie of strange-looking symbols, the young science of genetics was for years no more meaningful to the general public than the cuneiform inscriptions of ancient Babylonia. Hiroshima changed that. The possible genetic effects of radioactive fallout--monstrous malformations of the human form brought about by exposure of human genes to radioactivity--were easily, and chillingly, imaginable. Genetics became a matter of immediate concern to all men. Last summer TIME'S editors explored this mysterious area at the root of life in a cover story on Geneticist George Wells Beadle of Caltech (TIME, July 14). Last week the Nobel Prize committee chose Coverman Beadle and his partner Edward L. Tatum to share 1958's award for Medicine (see SCIENCE). The other half of the award went to Dr. Joshua Lederberg, 33, whom TIME'S story singled out as "probably the world's greatest young geneticist."

EARLY descriptions of radioactive fallout's effect on future generations were subject to exaggeration. Now, an M.I.T. study shows that the human capacity to absorb radium may exceed the previous medical estimates by as much as 25 times. For the sobering story, see MEDICINE, Radium Hangovers.

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