Science: New Provinces

Some vast new provinces may soon be added to the occupied territories of science. Last week, at the centennial celebration of Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School (see EDUCATION), two Nobel Prizewinners described exciting discoveries.

The Secret of Matter. Nobel Physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence, father of cyclotrons, told of the feats of his latest (4,000 ton) baby. The most important: it had uncovered evidence that might explain the mysterious “binding force” which keeps all matter from flying apart.

When the great new “synchrocyclotron” at the University of California was first turned on last fall, a powerful beam of unidentified radiation shot from its circular chamber. It slammed through a foot of lead, losing only half its strength. The physicists found that the beam was made up of high energy neutrons (nuclear particles with no electric charge). The neutrons were debris left over when speeding deuterons (nuclei of heavy hydrogen) hit a target inside the cyclotron.

For a while the California scientists played like small boys with their dangerous new toy. The neutron beam smashed almost any atom. It cooked up any number of radioactive isotopes. But there was more than fun & games afoot. The monstrous cyclotron was on the trail of something important.

All atomic nuclei (except those of hydrogen) contain two or more protons. These have positive charges, and so should repel each other violently. Instead, they are held together by a mysterious attraction. For a generation, physicists have wondered what the attraction is.

The Binding Force. Before World War II, Germany’s Werner Heisenberg theorized mathematically that the protons and neutrons in a nucleus might bat electric charges rapidly back & forth among themselves. While a particle had possession of a charge, it would be a proton. When it lost the charge, it would become a neutron. Heisenberg reasoned that such “charge exchange” might explain the binding force, but he couldn’t prove it.

Last week Nobelman Lawrence announced that California scientists had found evidence at last. When their highspeed neutrons hit the wall of an ionization chamber, protons bounced back. These were the neutrons themselves, said Lawrence, turned into protons. When a neutron came close to a proton, the proton’s electric charge oscillated rapidly between the two. When the neutron passed on, it sometimes carried the charge with it, and was thus a proton.

This observation supported Heisenberg’s theory of charge exchange. If it really explains the binding force, it will rank with science’s greatest discoveries.

The Secret of Life. Next day, Nobel Chemist Wendell Meredith Stanley, of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical

Research, told of another quickening offensive: man’s struggle to answer the question, “What is life?”

Dr. Stanley is a leading U.S. authority on viruses (which cause such diseases as influenza and infantile paralysis). Twelve years ago he discovered the flabbergasting fact that a certain virus (of tobacco mosaic disease) is “both living and dead”: it can reproduce like a living organism but can also form crystals like a lifeless chemical substance.

Stanley’s discovery put a pack of scientists hot on the trail of the viruses. Stanley kept well in the forefront; last week he summed up recent discoveries in the eerie world of the infinitely little and the half-alive.

Viruses, said Stanley, are too small to be seen with ordinary microscopes; but electron microscopes show them plainly. The tobacco mosaic virus, for instance, is a slender rod. The rods affect one another at a distance as if they were tiny bar-magnets. This “long-range force,” still unexplained, may prove the key to many deep life mysteries.

Stanley and his group discovered that a virus can be “inactivated” (apparently killed) by chemical processes. By a reversal of the process, the dead virus can be brought back to “life.” This is the closest that man has yet come to touching off life in a test tube.

Bigger Game. Viruses are proteins, and are therefore made chiefly of amino acids. By delicate chemical methods, Stanley’s group knocked out or added amino acids. Vigorous viruses became weak. Mild viruses turned into virulent killers. In one case a transformed virus transmitted its new character to its offspring. For the first time, man had succeeded in changing a virus’ heredity.

Dr. Stanley is stalking even bigger game. Viruses are very much like genes, the submicroscopic particles in living cells which control heredity. It is possible, Stanley suggested last week, that slight changes in a gene’s amino acids might cause changes in heredity. If so, could man control his own evolution by tinkering with his genes? Says Dr. Stanley: “Perhaps . . . knowledge of this type could affect the destiny of all living things.”