Science: Nobel Dinner

When a dinner at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria on Dec. 10 replaced the annual Stockholm award of the Nobel prizes (discontinued since 1939), it was found that 28 laureates now live in the U.S., counting eleven who have recently arrived, most of them to escape Hitler. Eleven attended the dinner.

Germany, claiming racial superiority, likes to point to her wide lead in the number of Nobel awards:

Germany 40½

Britain 24½

France 21½

U.S 20

Sweden 11½

Switzerland 8½

Denmark 5½

Austria 5½

Belgium 5½

Italy 5½

Netherlands 5

But on the basis of population, Germany falls far down the list—as does the U.S. In number of prizes per ten million population, the list reads:

Sweden (home grounds) 17.2

Switzerland 16.7

Denmark 15.7

Austria 8.2

Netherlands 7.7

Germany 6.2

Britain 5.4

France 4.8

U.S 1.7

Italy1.1

The eleven European laureates who have arrived in the U.S. in recent years are: Maurice Maeterlinck, Sigrid Undset, Thomas Mann (literature); Sir Norman Angell (peace); Peter Joseph Wilhelm Debye (chemistry); Otto Meyerhof, Otto Loewi (physiology and medicine); Albert Einstein, James Franck, Victor Franz Hess, Enrico Fermi (physics).

The 20 prizes awarded to U.S. citizens were divided among 25 persons. Of these, one, Alexis Carrel (medicine), has returned to France. The first and second U.S. winners in science, Albert Abraham Michelson (physics) and Theodore Richards (chemistry), have died. Five U.S. winners of the peace prize have died: Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Woodrow Wilson, Frank Billings Kellogg, Jane Addams.

The 17 living U.S. winners have shared 12½ prizes. Three are in literature: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Pearl Buck. Two are for peace: Charles Gates Dawes, Nicholas Murray Butler.

The twelve prize-winning U.S. scientists:

> Irving Langmuir (1932), General Electric chemist, dour, hard-working student of high vacuums and surface tensions, largely responsible for modern electric lights.

> Harold Clayton Urey (1934), Columbia University professor of chemistry, deeply concerned with the social consequences of science, discoverer of “heavy hydrogen” and “tagged atoms.”

> Robert Andrews Millikan (1923), who at the University of Chicago first isolated and measured the exact electric charge of electrons; now executive head of the California Institute of Technology.

> Arthur Holly Compton (1927), keen, handsome successor to Millikan at the University of Chicago, who first showed experimentally that light is composed of discrete particles as well as waves; better known now for his study of cosmic rays.

> Carl David Anderson (1936), Caltech professor of physics, student of atomic structure and various atomic fragments, discoverer of the positron.

> Clinton Joseph Davisson (1937), thin, soft-spoken electrophysicist at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York, who first showed (complementing Compton) that electrons are not purely particles but have properties of very short waves.

> Ernest Orlando Lawrence (1939), University of California physicist, pioneer in atom smashing, father of the cyclotron.

> Karl Landsteiner (1930), Vienna-born, since 1922 brilliant physiological chemist at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Manhattan, discoverer of human blood groups, which made blood transfusion practical.

> Thomas Hunt Morgan (1933), Caltech zoologist, pioneer in the study of chromosomes and genes, lawgiver in heredity and genetics.

> George Hoyt Whipple, professor of pathology at the University of Rochester, George Richards Minot, professor of medicine at Harvard, William Parry Murphy, practicing physician in Boston and associate at Harvard—a trio who shared (1934) the prize in physiology and medicine for their discovery of liver therapy for anemia.