Bittersweet Honors

The myth is simple and satisfying: genius labors long and hard, achieves brilliant success, wins Nobel Prize, basks in glory. But prizewinners' stories are rarely so straightforward. This year's controversial Peace Prize, for example, which was shared by Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, has triggered as much controversy as celebration. And for some of the other laureates, there are, behind the Nobel Committee's glowing citations, tales of recognition too long deferred, of promise lost, of pain and tragedy.

ECONOMICS

Often the winner of a Nobel Prize is an obscure academic, noticed by few in his community until he is thrust into the spotlight. But when photographs of John Nash appeared in the press last week, a common reaction in and around Princeton, New Jersey, was a shock of recognition: "Oh, my gosh, it's him!" Nash, who shared the Economics Prize with John Harsanyi of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and Reinhard Selten of the University of Bonn, is a familiar eccentric in the university town -- a quiet, detached man who frequently spends his time riding the local "Dinky" train on its short hop between Princeton and Princeton Junction, reading newspapers discarded by other passengers. Some knew him as the author of the enormously complicated mathematical equations that appeared on classroom blackboards from time to time -- the product of a splendid but troubled mind working out his thoughts when no one was around.

The work that earned Nash his prize was largely completed by 1950 when, at ^ age 22, he submitted the Princeton Ph.D. thesis that has been described as the rock on which the mathematics of game theory is based. Game theory tries to explain economic behavior by analyzing the strategies "players" in the marketplace use to maximize their winnings. Nash, drawing on the dynamics of such games as poker and chess, introduced the distinction between cooperative games, in which players form binding agreements, and noncooperative ones, in which they don't. His "Nash Equilibrium" has been used by generations of corporate and military strategists to help decide when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.

Nash taught in the '50s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but his career there was reportedly interrupted by bouts of mental illness. He returned to Princeton, where he became increasingly withdrawn. Eventually, the mathematics department appointed him a "visiting research collaborator," a post that has allowed the man a university press officer describes as "incredibly brilliant and eccentric" to roam his beloved campus freely for the past 25 years, using its computers whenever he likes, and occasionally its blackboards.

MEDICINE

Recognition came a few months too late to save co-winner Martin Rodbell from the budget ax. He retired in June from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences after funding dried up for his research into how the billions of cells that make up the body communicate with one another. Working independently, Rodbell and Dr. Alfred G. Gilman of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas discovered that the cells employ a kind of molecular switchboard to sort out incoming chemical and hormonal messages. The switches in this biological telephone system, molecules called G proteins, have since been implicated in everything from diabetes to alcoholism to whooping cough.

PHYSICS

Shoot neutrons through a liquid or solid, and these subatomic particles will bounce off the atoms inside. The angles at which the quantum bullets ricochet tell scientists how the target atoms are arranged. That knowledge has already led to advances in semiconductors and may someday explain the bizarre phenomenon of high-temperature superconductivity. Clifford Shull, now retired from M.I.T., and Bertram Brockhouse from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, helped perfect neutron-scattering techniques in the 1940s and '50s. Today, nearly a half-century later, they have Nobels to show for it. Ironically, the man who did the pioneering work in the field, Shull's mentor Ernest Wollan, died in 1984. By Nobel rules, the prize is never awarded posthumously.

CHEMISTRY

Oil refining, coal liquefaction and other related industrial processes depend on chemists' being able to manipulate the complex molecules known as hydrocarbons. George Olah of the University of Southern California discovered in the 1960s how to slow down -- and thus control -- hydrocarbon reactions by supercooling them. His work led directly to the development of higher-octane gasoline -- and earned him this year's Chemistry Prize.

LITERATURE

Kenzaburo Oe was a child of 10 when World War II ended; occupying foreigners, ruins, humiliations and guilt filled the Japanese landscape of his adolescence. His early fiction and essays were unusually intense by Japanese standards, tinged with pessimism and despair. After 1963, when his first son was born brain damaged, Oe's work became even more personal; a helpless or deformed child figure recurs, suggesting both implacable fate and the possibility of redemption. Compared with the four previous laureates -- Octavio Paz, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison -- Oe is little known but, thanks to the Swedish Academy, not for long.