The U.S. Nobelmen

Six American scientists last week made a clean sweep of the 1972 Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry. One of them, Physicist John Bardeen, 64, who shared the physics award, became the first person ever to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field; in 1956 he was awarded his first Nobel Prize as co-inventor of the transistor.

Bardeen shared this year's physics prize (worth $98,100) with his former University of Illinois colleagues, Leon N. Cooper, 42, now of Brown University, and John R. Schrieffer, 41, of the University of Pennsylvania. They were honored for their fundamental work on superconductivity, a phenomenon that occurs in certain metals when they are chilled close to absolute zero (minus 459.7DEG F.). In that state, they lose all resistance to the flow of electric current.

Although superconductivity was discovered in 1911, it was not really explained until Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer offered their now-famous "BCS theory" (from their initials) in 1957. At extremely low temperatures, they said, electrons are coupled with one another (in so-called Cooper pairs), cease their random collisions and flow unhindered. Superconductivity may lead to more efficient transmission of electrical power, better transportation systems, and even harnessing the energy of thermonuclear fusion.

The chemistry prize, also worth $98,100, went to Christian Anfinsen, 56, of the National Institutes of Health, and Rockefeller University's Stanford Moore, 59, and William H. Stein, 61, for their work on enzymes. Made up of long, folded chains of amino acids, these proteins are essential intermediaries, or catalysts, in the body's vital chemical reactions. Anfinsen showed how the three-dimensional shape of an enzyme--critical to its role in those reactions--is dictated by the order in which its amino acids occur. Moore and Stein, studying the same enzyme--ribonuclease --ingeniously unraveled its sequence of 124 amino acids. Such work has far-reaching implications in medicine and industry, which uses enzymes to speed up the chemical reactions in the manufacturing of paper, textiles, drugs and other common products.

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