Ten More Nobelmen for 1975

Continuing the roll call of the 1975 Nobel Prizes, Sweden's Karolinska Institutet and Royal Academy of Sciences last week named ten winners (left to right, below), four of them Americans, in four different areas of science. Prizes in each category total $143,000.

PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE: Renato Dulbecco, 61, Howard Temin, 40, and David Baltimore, 37.

Before discoveries made by this trio, doctors knew that viruses could enter a cell, seize control of its machinery and force it to reproduce copies of the viral invaders. Dulbecco, an Italian now working in London, demonstrated that the invaded cell's descendants showed the influence of the viral genes as well as its own. Temin, of the University of Wisconsin, and Baltimore, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shattered what had been the central dogma of genetics: the belief that the master molecule DNA always passed information along to the messenger molecule RNA. The two researchers proved that the process could also work in reverse, and identified the enzyme responsible for the reversal. Their work and that of Dulbecco--has helped establish viruses --which contain either RNA or DNA--as a prime suspect in human cancer, and could point the way to eventual control of the disease.

PHYSICS: Aage Bohr, 53, Benjamin Mottelson, 49, and James Rainwater, 57.

Bohr and his Chicago-born collaborator Mottelson (also a Danish citizen), both associated with Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute, *and Rainwater, of Columbia University, were cited for their 1940s and 1950s research on the inner structure of the atom. They helped explain oddities in the nucleus' behavior by showing that its myriad components spun and vibrated so as to distort the nucleus into an unexpected ellipsoid, rather than a sphere. These new insights helped set the stage for many of the important advances in particle physics during the past two decades of experimentation.

CHEMISTRY: John Warcup Cornforth, 58, and Vladimir Prelog, 69.

Cornforth, an Australian-born researcher now at the University of Sussex, and Yugoslav-born Prelog, of Zurich's Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, helped define the three-dimensional structure of organic molecules. Cornforth, who has been deaf since boyhood, concentrated on enzymes--the catalysts for chemical reactions in living things--while Prelog studied other organic molecules, including antibiotics.

ECONOMICS: Tjalling Koopmans, 65, and Leonid Kantorovich, 63.

Koopmans, a Dutch-born American at Yale University, and Kantorovich, of Moscow's Institute for Management of the People's Economy, were honored for developing "linear programming" or "activity analysis," techniques that are part of the computerization of the "dismal science." They enable capitalists and commissars alike to make the most efficient use of workers, machines and raw materials, and to determine how fast production should grow.

*Founded by Bohr's father, a Nobel laureate himself and a founder of modern atomic theory.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.