Six Nobelmen

Five of the winners bring new honor to the U.S.

America's clean sweep of the Nobel prizes in 1976 was a hard act to follow. Last week, when seven 1977 prizewinners in the sciences were announced in Stockholm, five were again Americans. The awards, each worth $145,000:

Medicine. Through its myriad glands--and the hormones they secrete into the bloodstream--the endocrine system acts as a kind of bodily Mission Control, regulating a variety of functions, from growth to sexual activity. The three winners of the prize in physiology or medicine helped unravel the mysteries of that system--and pointed to dramatic new ways of controlling it when it goes awry.

Half of the prize will go to Rosalyn Yalow, 56, a nuclear physicist by training who decided early in her career to do medical research. In the 1950s, while working on the complex chemistry of diabetes at the Veterans Administration Hospital in The Bronx, N.Y., Yalow and her late collaborator, Dr. Solomon Berson, devised a sensitive new biological analytic technique called the radioimmunoassay (RIA). Using radioactive isotopes as tracers in the so-called immune reactions by which the body's antibodies combine with foreign antigens, the test was sensitive enough to detect exceedingly minute quantities of a substance.

There was an immediate--and surprising--payoff. Yalow and Berson found that most adult diabetics did not have a shortage of the hormone insulin in their blood. Rather, it was present in abundance; only its sugar-metabolizing action was somehow blocked. Subsequently, Yalow and others developed similar RIAS for detecting human growth hormone, hepatitis virus and other biological substances. Today the RIA technique is used by labs around the world.

The other half of the prize will be shared by two researchers who employed the new technique to solve a major puzzle in endocrinology. Scientists had learned by the 1960s that the body's master gland, the pituitary, was itself apparently controlled by the hypothalamus, a tiny neighboring area in the base of the brain. But how? Leading separate and often hotly competing teams, Polish-born Andrew Schally, 50, at Tulane University and the VA hospital in New Orleans, and French-born Roger Guillemin, 53, then at Baylor University and now at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., isolated, identified and synthesized three separate hormones--"releasing factors"--by which the hypothalamus directs the release of key hormones from the pituitary.

Doctors are beginning to use synthetic versions of these hormones to diagnose certain glandular disorders and to treat problems like infertility. Guillemin believes brain hormones may some day be found that influence behavior as well.

Physics. For laying some of the theoretical foundations of modern electronic circuitry--which make possible computers and other electronic marvels--and for paving the way for a new generation of less costly semiconductors, the prize for physics was equally apportioned among three men. John H. Van Vleck, 78, who retired as a professor of physics at Harvard University eight years ago, initiated the work half a century ago by developing a general theory of magnetism. His later explanation of the effect of a foreign atom on the structure and electrical properties of a crystal helped make possible the development of microcircuits.

Philip W. Anderson, 53, who is a researcher at Bell Laboratories and a professor of physics at Princeton University, first became interested in physics as a student of Van Vleck's. He extended the basic understanding of magnetism and explained the conducting properties of electrons in amorphous materials like glass, which do not have the patterned atomic structure of crystalline substances like silicon. Sir Nevill Mott, 72, former head of the famed Cavendish Laboratory at England's Cambridge University, provided the theoretical underpinnings of modern solid-state physics in the 1920s. His later work with amorphous materials led to development of the "Mott model," a theoretical framework for understanding the properties of semiconductors made from amorphous materials such as sulfur, selenium and tellurium, all of which are far more economical to produce than crystalline components.

Chemistry. A Russian-born professor at the Free University of Brussels, Ilya Prigogine, 60, is a poet of thermodynamics whose work helps explain how life could have come into being on earth in apparent defiance of some of the classic laws of physics. The second law of thermodynamics holds that energy tends to dissipate and that organized systems drift into disorder. But many biological processes, including the ones in which simple acids combine to form complex molecules or in which cells join together to form higher organisms, seem to contradict this rule. Prigogine has provided a method for including biological systems within the framework of thermodynamics. Some 20 years ago he developed mathematical models of a class of systems he termed "dissipative structures," which could dissipate energy at the same time they were organizing themselves and growing in size and complexity. Chemical confirmation of his theory did not come as a surprise to Prigogine, who is also director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics at the University of Texas, Austin. Nor did last week's prize. "The professor more or less expected this reward," said a colleague. "It was in the normal course of things."

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