Science: Nobelmen of 1946

It was Prize Day in Oslo and Stockholm. Last week one German-born Swiss and six Americans won a batch of Nobel Awards: for Literature, Physics, Chemistry, and Peace* (see INTERNATIONAL).

Conspicuously absent among the scientists honored were any connected with the atomic bomb, though many theoretical nuclear physicists had been en-Nobeled before. There might be a historical reason. In his will (1896), Alfred Nobel endowed the famous prizes (value of each this year: $34,000) as penance for inventing dynamite. It might be embarrassing now to single out the developers of atomic “super-dynamite.” Prizewinners:

Physics. To non-nuclear Professor Percy Williams Bridgman of Harvard, 64, authority on high-pressure phenomena. He proved that nearly all substances change profoundly if squeezed hard enough. Water existed as ice in Bridgman’s apparatus, even when its temperature was above the normal boiling point. Soft and slippery graphite (under 1,500,000 pounds of pressure per square inch) gets hard enough to make a dent in steel.

Chemistry. To three biochemists, explorers of the intricate reactions within living organisms. Half went to Professor James Batcheller Sumner of Cornell, first to isolate an enzyme (urease) in crystalline form. Enzymes are “organic catalysts” which influence the chemical behavior of substances concerned with life. Said Dr. Sumner: “Living cells contain hundreds if not thousands of enzymes, and one definition of life is action by those enzymes, wherein such phenomena occur as growth, reproduction and other biological changes.”

One quarter of the prize went to skeet-shooting Dr. John Howard Northrop of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research at Princeton, N.J. He worked on enzymes too, probing into the complexities of their molecules, proved them to be a kind of protein. Now he is trying to find out their ultimate intimate structure.

The prize’s final quarter went to Dr. Wendell Meredith Stanley, also of Rockefeller-at-Princeton. Stanley was the man who threw a bomb into science (and philosophy and religion) by finding a Thing which acted like an inanimate chemical and also like a living, growing organism. It was the virus which causes the “mosaic disease” in tobacco plants. It can spread from plant to plant, multiplying within the living cells, apparently living itself. Dr. Stanley tricked it into a test tube, where it quieted down, the “living” molecules stacking together into protein crystals. But within this seemingly dead chemical, the spirit of life remained. When injected into a tobacco plant, its molecules awoke, became deadly germs again, reproduced after their kind.

During the war, Dr. Stanley worked on vaccines to use against influenza and Japanese encephalitis. (He handled the deadly encephalitis virus himself, rarely letting others touch it.) Now he is back at basic virus research, trying to find out how these living-dead things reproduce. There, he believes, lies the secret of life.

*Another American, Geneticist Hermann J. Muller, had already won the Medicine Prize (TIME, Nov. 11).