Nobelmen of 1958

Even as all Moscow reverberated with the volleys of invective loosed upon Boris Pasternak (see FOREIGN NEWS), the Nobel Prize committee announced that the prize in physics had been awarded to Russian Physicists Pavel A. Cherenkov, Igor I. Tamm and Ilya M. Frank. Without a trace of embarrassment over its inconsistency, Soviet officialdom beamed, and nobody charged (as they had with Pasternak) that it would amount to accepting a "handout" from "the enemy." All three Russians rank high in the esteem of,the outside world as well as in the Soviet scientific hierarchy. Dr. Tamm is often rated as the leading Soviet nuclear physicist, represented Russia at the recent Geneva conference on technical means for detecting atomic explosions.

The research that led to the award began in 1934, when Cherenkov. then 30, noticed a bluish glow where gamma rays from radium were striking through water in a flask. The glow was exceedingly faint, and a less curious man might have put it aside as ordinary fluorescence, which is given off by many materials when struck by gamma rays. But Cherenkov's mysterious light proved to be strongly polarized, had a continuous (rainbow-like) spectrum, and was given off predominantly in the direction of the gamma rays.

The Cherenkov radiation remained a tantalizing mystery until three years later. Two other Soviet physicists, Ilya M. Frank and his senior, Igor Tamm (who studied at Edinburgh and speaks English with a Scottish burr), became interested, worked out a strange but correct theory. When gamma rays pass through water, they hit electrons, and the impact bumps the electrons up to high velocities. The electrons do not move faster than light in a vacuum (186,000 m.p.sec., the Einsteinian speed limit of the universe), but they do move faster than light in water, 140,000 m.p.sec. For exceeding the local speed limit, the electrons are "fined" a part of their energy, which shows up as Cherenkov radiation. Something analogous happens when a ship moves on the sea's surface. If the ship's speed exceeds that of the waves, as it usually does, some of the ship's energy appears as a bow wave that resembles the light waves observed by Cherenkov.

This led to the development of an extremely important modern instrument: the Cherenkov counter. It is made of some transparent substance such as Lucite. When a proton, electron or other charged particle enters it at a speed that is greater than the speed of light in the material, Cherenkov radiation is given off. Its angle (like the angle of a ship's bow wave) depends on the speed of the particle. When the angle is measured by a photomultiplier tube, the speed of the particles can be determined.

Cherenkov counters are now among the leading tools of physics. They fly high in rockets and Sputniks to measure the energy of cosmic rays. They keep watch in cyclotron laboratories. The Russians are now building a monster Cherenkov counter two stories high.

Bacteria and Flies. The award in medicine went to three U.S. scientists working in genetics--a field that had not even been named when Dynamite Maker Alfred Nobel died in 1896.

Half of the $41,420 prize will go to the team of George Wells Beadle of Caltech (TIME, July 14), who is this year's George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford University, and Edward L. Tatum of Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute. Working together at Stanford University in 1940, they discarded the fruit flies traditionally used in studying heredity, employed instead a selected red bread mold, Neurospora crassa. The mold is easier to handle, its life chemistry is simpler, and yet it reproduces sexually.

Beadle and Tatum irradiated masses of mold with X rays and searched for mutations in the spores. On the 299th try they got a mold that would not grow unless it was fed vitamin B-6 (pyridoxine). The normal mold makes vitamin B-6 for itself. They traced this deficiency to an X-ray-damaged gene that failed to produce the necessary enzyme (organic catalyst) for producing B6. This provided a means of studying genetic changes by corresponding changes in the organism's ability or failure to produce specific chemicals--thus giving genetics a new exactness and turning it into a predominantly chemical science.

Sex & Transduction. The other half of the medicine prize was awarded to Professor Joshua Lederberg (33) of the University of Wisconsin, whom his colleagues unstintingly rate as a genius. When 22 and working under Tatum as a graduate student at Yale, Lederberg proved that bacteria have a sex life of a sort, i.e., reproduce by the union of two organisms, with a consequent exchange of genes. This discovery widely expanded the field of experiment, since bacteria are even handier than molds in genetic experiments.

Even more important was Lederberg's later discovery that viruses preying on bacteria can change the heredity of their victims. In this process, which is called transduction, a virus invades a bacterium, breaks it up and reorganizes its material into hundreds of new virus particles. If these particles in turn infect another bacterium and it survives, they sometimes change it into a new strain. Apparently the viruses, acting somewhat like submicroscopic spermatozoa, take hereditary material from the first bacterium and transfer it to the second.

Genetics does not seem at first glance to have much to do with medicine, but many human disabilities are based in genetics. The most baffling problem of medicine, cancer, is caused by a genetic change in human cells that makes them multiply irresponsibly. Increased knowledge of genetics may eventually cure or prevent cancer.

Secret of Insulin. Led by a man thumping a small drum, a joyful group gathered in a Cambridge University lab to celebrate with champagne when word came that this year's chemistry prize had gone to British Chemist Frederick Sanger. A fellow at King's College, Sanger is attacking the mystery of life from another chemical angle. In 1954 Sanger announced that after ten years of work, he and a small group of colleagues had determined the structure of the insulin molecule. Their achievement did not result in cheaper or better insulin for the world's diabetics, but it may ultimately prove more important. For insulin is a protein, and the active parts of all living organisms are made largely of proteins.

Proteins are enormously complicated molecules, and until Sanger's work on insulin, no one had ever been able to determine the structure of even the simplest of them. Chemists have known for many years that protein molecules are made of amino acids (nitrogen-containing organic acids) strung together in long chains or cables. By various kinds of rough treatment, the chemists could separate and count the amino acid building blocks. But this did not reveal their structural plan.

Dr. Sanger tried treating the insulin molecule gently, succeeded in breaking it into large chunks. He separated the fragments and labeled the amino acids on their ends by making them combine with a material called DNP (for dinitropheny). When he broke the fragments into smaller fragments, the amino acids that had been in the end positions were stained yellow with DNP. There are 51 amino acid units in insulin, a comparatively simple protein. But Sanger's patience and skill eventually found the place of each in the long chain. Then he reassembled the fragments and learned how the chain is folded over and locked together. At last he had the first full picture of one of the giant molecules that are the stuff of life.

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