Awards: New Nobelmen

Even before he reached his teens, Lev Davidovic Landau was a mathematical prodigy. Before he graduated from the University of Leningrad, the youngster from Azerbaijan was publishing respected scientific papers. As he developed into one of the Soviet Union’s leading scientists, he became an expert in many of the far-ranging fields of physics. If he resented the fact that he was rarely trusted to go abroad unchaperoned to collect the numerous awards he won from admiring Western colleagues, he gave no indication. He went right on working, and last week he got his biggest prize yet. For his intricate theories that give man new insight into the strange behavior of matter at extremely low temperatures, Lev Landau, 54, was named 1962 Nobel Laureate in physics.

Only the fourth Russian ever to win a Nobel physics prize, Landau would almost surely have been allowed to go to Sweden for next month’s ceremonies. But the great physicist is in a Moscow hospital, his memory still partially gone, his health still seriously impaired by the skull fracture and the eleven other bone breaks he suffered in an automobile accident nine months ago. Canadian Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield was flown in to join physicians from Russia, France and Czechoslovakia in the effort to keep Landau alive. For the Soviets hardly needed the Nobel committee to tell them the value of the man who not only helped make their first atom bomb, but has been an important part of the growing Russian space effort.

Joining Landau as Nobel Laureates last week were British Scientists Dr. John Cowdery Kendrew, 45, and Dr. Max Ferdinand Perutz, 48, of Cambridge’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology, who shared the Nobel award for chemistry. After involved experiments using X rays, Perutz and Kendrew mapped the complex three-dimension architecture of two protein molecules—hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in the blood, and myoglobin, which delivers oxygen to muscles. This achievement is an important early step toward a more complete understanding of proteins, the building blocks of all life.