If you stepped into the TIME & LIFE building here in Manhattan during any working week and asked for TIME'S Science editor, chances are you would find him out. Of all TIME'S editors, he comes closest to having his office in his hat--and his hat has hardly been off his head since The Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

The news of it was announced on Monday, TIME'S press day. In the next issue, Jonathan Norton Leonard was advised by his managing editor, a special Atomic Age section (TIME, Aug. 20, 1945) would try to tell the significance of the atomic bomb and Science's share of it would be to explain "how it works." Leonard got hold of the now famous Smyth report, sat up until 4 a.m. digesting it and wrote his story, which, checked by an atomic physicist, turned out to be correct in every detail. The Smyth report later proved to be the real news of atomic fission.

Since that time America's appetite for scientific news has been virtually unquenchable, and Leonard and his researcher, Dorothy Slavin Potts, have been busy as bird dogs trying to satisfy it. Their department has always operated on the belief that its readers are intelligently interested in informed reports of what is going on in the field of science, and they try to report and write that news clearly and accurately, without oversimplifying or sensationalizing it.

As a result, they get most of their stories themselves by going directly to the source. That means a crowded schedule of interviewing and travel--as well as keeping an eye on U.S. scientific journals for new developments. It is the kind of work that, to be done well, has to be done by experts.

Leonard, who is frequently away on one scientific venture or another, attended one recently that was difficult to separate from its unscientific trappings: Howard Hughes' demonstration of Trans World Airline's new "terrain avoidance" radar (TIME, May 12). It was a junket complete with movie starlets, sirens (the shrilling, not the rock-sitting variety), motorcycle cops, a "Miss Arizona Aviation," parties, and all the familiar Hollywood accessories. During the actual demonstration Leonard was not surprised to find himself seated next to Gossip Columnist Hedda Hopper, who, he reports, "didn't turn a hair during all this mountain-leaping."

By inclination and training Leonard is amply equipped to be TIME'S Science editor. Until he went to Harvard, where he studied three years with the intention of becoming a chemist and then switched to English literature, he had been educated irregularly, mostly by his father, Jonathan Leonard, who taught English literature at Harvard and the University of North Carolina and tried unsuccessfully to bring young Leonard up speaking classical Greek as well as English.

Leonard's first and only salaried job -- until he came to TIME in 1943 -- was with the classified ad department of the New York Times where, he says, "my duty was to keep the humble back pages of the paper fit to print. When I detected a Position Wanted Female ad worded 'Young girl, inexperienced, will do anything,' I would call up that young girl and tell her that she might be misunderstood." For the next ten years Leonard free-lanced, writing books (Enjoyment of Science, etc.), articles & fiction for slick paper magazines.

Now married (to a daughter of the late Isaac Alzamora, onetime vice president and foreign minister of Peru) and the father of a young son named Jonathan, Leonard is the owner of a growing stack of trophies. His prize, a packet of lead-wrapped fragments of fused soil from the crater of the first atomic bomb explosion in New Mexico, reposes in a Manhattan safe deposit box together with some government bonds. Planning to visit the vault some day with a Geiger counter to see whether the fragments are still radioactive, Leonard is prepared for anything -- even the possibility of seeing remnants of his bonds fly out of the box like a swarm of moths.

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