Another Big U.S. Harvest

Americans win eight of eleven

The awards pay tribute to a mere fraction of man's achievements. Still, the six Nobel Prizes announced every autumn are the supreme status symbol, the most coveted and prestigious honors awarded anywhere in science and literature. The laureates, judged under the terms of Swedish Industrialist Alfred Nobel's will to "have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind," receive medals, money and the instant acclaim of peers and public alike. Ranked with the likes of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, W.B. Yeats and Albert Schweitzer, they are deluged with honorary degrees, speaking invitations and book contracts.

Last week four more Nobel Prizes were awarded--for economics, physics, chemistry and contributions to peace--to seven men. Together with the previous week's two awards--for literature and medicine--they brought the total number of this year's laureates to eleven. Each of the six prizes, some of which are shared, is worth $212,000, boosted by inflation from last year's $190,000. When the prizes were first given in 1901, they were worth $40,400.

Once again the 1980 honors list is dominated by Americans. Since World War II, the U.S. has won 131 prizes, nearly triple the number of its closest challenger, Britain, with 47. Two weeks ago, the literature prize went to Polish-born Poet Czeslaw Milosz, 69, now a U.S. citizen, and the medicine prize to three immunologists, Jean Dausset, 63 (France), George Snell, 76 (U.S.), and Baruj Benacerraf, 59 (U.S.). Last week Americans took five awards: two for physics, two for chemistry, one for economics. The other two went to a Briton and an Argentine.

ECONOMICS: THE MAN BEHIND THE MODELS. "I have a class at 10:30.1 don't think that this will be an occasion for missing class." That was the response of Economist Lawrence Klein, 60, last week when a reporter telephoned him asking for a comment on the news that he had just won the Nobel Prize. The University of Pennsylvania professor was cited for his contributions as "the leading research worker within the field of the economic science which deals with the construction and analysis of empirical models of business fluctuations."

Econometric models are a combination of economics, mathematics and statistics. Model builders usually set up several hundred mathematical equations that represent the variables in any economy. After these are fed into a computer, the model can provide a picture of how the economy might react to a change in one or more important factors. Economists can predict, for example, how a severe drought in the Middle West might affect not only food prices but also consumer purchases of everything else.

For years econometric models were largely ignored by Establishment economists, who preferred to predict business trends on the basis of their own intuition and a few blackboard calculations. But in 1946 Klein used an early model of the U.S. economy to forecast that the U.S. would not slip back into the Depression when the wartime buildup ended, as most economists then believed. Klein was right, of course, and econometric models began to win respectability. During the past three decades he has honed his forecasting tools through elaborate models of the U.S. economy. In 1969 he began Project LINK, a model that attempts to tie together the economies of the industrialized and developing nations of the world.

Ironically, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Klein just as econometric models are coming under attack for spewing out a series of wrong numbers over the past three or four years. The models, for example, have generally underestimated both inflation and the steep rise in interest rates. Quipped one of Klein's colleagues last week: "We are happy that they are giving the award to Larry this year because if they had waited, they would have had to give him the Nobel Prize for mythology."

Klein ventured out of academia and into politics during the 1976 campaign, when he became the chief economic adviser to Candidate Jimmy Carter. When the Carter Administration was being formed, however, Klein took himself out of the running for a top position to continue teaching, although some associates thought he feared that his fleeting affiliation with the Communist Party as a young man in the 1940s would cause too many problems. Klein now considers himself a "friendly critic" of the Carter Administration, and he grades its economic performance as only "fair," mainly because he thinks the President has bent too easily to political pressure.

Klein, incidentally, did not make that 10:30 class after all; he was besieged by reporters. At 1:30 sharp, though, he was on the podium at Penn's Dietrich Hall, ready to begin his usual Wednesday afternoon class in econometrics.

PHYSICS: ASYMMETRICAL WORLD.

"It's really quite arcane," sighed Princeton's Val Fitch, 57, when he was asked by reporters last week to explain the work that brought him and his former colleague, James Cronin, 49, now of the University of Chicago, the 1980 prize for physics. "I find it difficult to convey to my family just what it is I've been doing."

What Fitch and Cronin have been doing is to help overturn the so-called laws of symmetry. By these rules, physicists try to understand the behavior of matter at its most basic level, where nuclear particles are created and destroyed. The two scientists' work may also help explain how the universe could have survived its fiery birth in the Big Bang some 15 billion years ago.

In their groundbreaking experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., in 1964, the physicists examined two key laws of symmetry: 1) that in nuclear reactions all particles can be replaced by their antimatter opposites--for example, electrons by positrons; and 2) that nature does not distinguish between a reaction and its mirror image with respect to such processes as the decay (or breakup) of particles. Despite isolated variations, these rules taken together were presumed inviolable.

Fitch and Cronin discovered to their surprise that this is not always so. Experimenting with short-lived particles known as neutral K2-mesons, they found that in two of every 1,000 reactions these bits of matter would decay into a pair of u-mesons (called pions) instead of the three pions that would be predicted on the basis of the combined symmetry rules. Such results indicated a possible violation of another basic presumption of symmetry known as time reversal: that reactions can run either forward or backward, like film in a movie projector. In effect, Fitch and Cronin showed that the universe was not as symmetrical as had been expected, a turn of events so profoundly disturbing that, as one member of the Nobel committee explained, "it would take a new Einstein to say what it means."

Lately, Fitch and Cronin's work has been studied intensely by cosmologists seeking an answer to a perplexing question. In the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, the newborn universe was presumably symmetrical, consisting of equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But now it seems to be made largely of matter. Why? The Fitch-Cronin work suggests an answer: in those primordial moments, the production of ordinary matter slightly outpaced antimatter--by about one part in 10 billion. Then, as the universe cooled and particles collided, matter and antimatter largely annihilated each other. Just enough matter, however, was left over to keep the universe from destroying itself at birth.

CHEMISTRY: GENETIC ENGINEERS. The chemistry prize, in part, gives recognition to an experiment that almost did not take place. It was set up in 1971 by Biochemist Paul Berg of Stanford University, in an effort to understand why normal cells turn cancerous. He planned to insert the monkey virus SV40, which can cause tumorous growth in the cells of other animals, including laboratory cultures of human cells, into test tube versions of the common intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli. But the project was forestalled by the fears of Berg and some other scientists that it could accidentally plant a slow-ticking cancer time bomb in humans.

Last week's award made it clear that the Swedish Academy thought these fears were exaggerated. Berg, 54, who subsequently helped draw up federal guidelines for similar research, won half of the prize for this and other achievements in the fast-expanding field of genetic engineering. The other half was shared by Harvard's Walter Gilbert, 48, and Frederick Sanger, 62, of England's Cambridge University, for developing rapid methods of decoding genetic structure, a key tool in this biochemical revolution. It was Sanger's second Nobel in chemistry. His first prize came in 1958 for elucidating the structure of insulin, the body's molecule for breaking down sugar.

What proved most significant about Berg's experiment, and helped win the prize, were the steps that immediately preceded it. The virus he wanted to introduce into the bacterium was itself a hybrid. By ingenious use of enzymes that can cut, patch and join nucleic acids, he and his colleagues managed to splice DNA from a bacterial virus into SV40's genes, forming a single closed loop. That was the first time scientists had been able to link the genes of two distinctly different species, and thus created the prospect of producing entirely new life forms.

Gilbert and Sanger vastly advanced the new technology of recombinant DNA, as it has become known, with their different methods for determining the sequence of nucleotides, or chemical "letters," that carry the message in the long-chained DNA molecules. Gilbert's technique, devised with his Harvard colleague Allan Maxam, is essentially chemical: it uses reagents, or chemical markers, to test for different nucleotides along the molecule. Sanger's is more biological: it employs an enzyme to copy individual "letters" and thus identify them.

These techniques have eased the way for all sorts of gene splicing. By the insertion of appropriate new genes, bacteria have already been "taught" to produce interferon, the antiviral substance that helps the body ward off disease, as well as human insulin. In the offing: gene-replacement therapy for genetic ailments, the creation of new types of plants and industrial enzymes, possibly even an understanding of cancer.

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