Magic, Matter and Money

Pioneers who have explored four aspects of reality

LITERATURE: A LATIN FAULKNER

Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda (a 1971 Nobel laureate) once honored his colleague's work as "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes." The Swedish Academy echoed that judgment when it awarded Colombian Author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 54, the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature last week. "His novels and short stories," reads the citation, combine the fantastic and the realistic "in a richly composed world of the imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts."

It was one of those fitting occasions when the award did not have overtones of geographical compensation or willful obscurity, even though Garcia Marquez is from a country with a modest literary tradition. The journalist and fiction writer has produced a series of enduring and popular works, including One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). In them, Garcia Marquez, a great admirer of William Faulkner, has created a kind of tropical Yoknapatawpha County, where "the silence was more ancient, and things were hard to see in the decrepit light." There, jungle folklore blends with Roman Catholicism, humor collides with myth, miracles kick up the dust of the commonplace. The actual and the surreal are like opposite sides of the peso: one lies directly underneath the other.

In Solitude, for example, the fictional village of Macondo, founded by the Buendia family, starts as a green Eden, then falls victim to collective amnesia, a Yanqui fruit company, catastrophic rains and inexplicable bouts of incest before being reclaimed by the jungle. When the beautiful and maddeningly virtuous Remedies Buendia is suddenly levitated heavenward while folding bedclothes, her sister-in-law merely grumbles that the sheets, which also rose, are lost forever. Central to all this is a compression of time, taut with comic invention, in which old tales and contemporary terrors are joined. The opening sentence of Solitude is typical: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

The son of a poverty-stricken provincial telegraph operator, Gabriel was raised in the great, gloomy house of his grandfather, a retired army colonel. He attended law classes at the University of Bogota, but journalism proved more enticing than jurisprudence. The self-exiled reporter, working for Latin American newspapers, moved restlessly through

Rome, Barcelona, Paris and Caracas, ending up in Cuba, where he befriended Fidel Castro and worked for his press agency in 1959.

Garcia Marquez has been a vocal irritant to rightist regimes from South Africa to Salvador, counts Socialist French President Franc,ois Mitterrand as a personal friend, and once donated the $22,000 proceeds of a 1972 literary prize to a small left-wing group in Venezuela. But the author refuses to be categorized. "I have never belonged to a Communist Party," he says, "and my only weapon is my typewriter." That weapon has proved to be a formidable capitalist tool. Solitude alone has 10 million copies in print in 32 languages, and has opened publishers' doors for many more Latin American authors. Garcia Marquez recently deserted his U.S. publisher of six books, Harper & Row, for a more lucrative royalty-and-rights deal with Knopf. His latest novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, is scheduled for publication next year.

Last Thursday in Mexico City, where Garcia Marquez resides in an elite suburb with his wife Mercedes, a flustered maid served coffee while the shy, stout author made plans to accept his award in Stockholm. He intends to wear the traditional Mexican guayabera, a lightweight shirt worn outside the trousers. Said he: "To avoid putting on a tuxedo, I'll stand the cold." The creator of fictional ice, amnesia and ascending bedsheets could hardly do otherwise.

PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY: PUZZLES

As physicists and chemists probe ever deeper into the basic structure and behavior of matter, their disciplines have become increasingly merged. Even the Nobel selection committees sometimes seem to have difficulty telling the two apart. Last week Physicist Kenneth G. Wilson, 46, of Cornell University took the 1982 Nobel in his discipline. Another physicist, Aaron Klug, 56, of England's Cambridge University, was named the laureate in chemistry.

Wilson, the only American in the physical sciences to join the elite Nobel circle this year, cracked a puzzle involving one of the most basic phenomena in the universe. At different pressures or temperatures, matter changes: water boils into steam, iron bars lose their magnetism, rock-hard metals melt into gooey paste. But as matter approaches these so-called critical points, its physical properties fluctuate so wildly that even the most powerful computers were unable to describe its behavior exactly.

Relying on a new organizational-mathematical tool with the formidable name of "renormalization group theory," Wilson in the early '70s was able to divide this seemingly insoluble problem into a number of smaller soluble ones. His esoteric work has far-ranging applications, from understanding the complex behavior of the atmosphere, which could help predict climate trends, to the workings of quarks, the elusive particles that are regarded as building blocks of matter.

The new laureate is one of six children of the noted Harvard chemist E. Bright Wilson. At eight, he could calculate cube roots in his head. After graduating from Harvard in 1956, he studied for his doctorate at Caltech under Murray Gell-Mann, the 1969 Nobel laureate in physics. One of his favorite spare-time activities is folk dancing, in particular the rousing Swedish hambo.

Like Wilson, Klug began his scientific career in physics, which he still teaches undergraduates at Cambridge's Peter-house College. Indeed, his doctoral work at Cambridge involved the kind of problem that occupied Wilson: determining what happens to molten steel as it crystallizes into a solid. Klug soon turned his attention to biological systems, including the oxygen-carrying molecule hemoglobin, and the structure of viruses, those tiny, protein-cloaked bits of genetic material that invade cells. One of his major achievements: developing new techniques of electron microscopy that provide three-dimensional views of the world of biological molecules.

Beams of electrons have long been used to study the structural details of tiny organisms, but DNA and RNA, the molecules of the genes, do not lend themselves to such inspection. They consist mainly of light, simple atoms, which produce extremely faint images in an electron microscope. If they are subjected to extra-long exposures in the electron beams or are stained to improve contrast, their structure becomes distorted. Klug overcame this major obstacle by manipulating the images mathematically with the help of a computer. Among the viral structures discovered by his new method was that of a common plant blight: the tobacco mosaic virus, a tiny rod-shaped particle consisting of a single-stranded coil of RNA surrounded by a cover of protein that resembles a stack of discs.

Klug, an acutely modest and private man (his first thought was to buy a bicycle with his Nobel money), was born in Lithuania, grew up in South Africa, and has been with the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge since 1962. His most recent work has been on the structure of nucleosomes. These are the fundamental subunits of chromosomes, the repository of the genes in the heart of cells. Klug's structural studies have broad implications, possibly even for an understanding of cancer, which occurs when the genetic machinery goes awry.

ECONOMICS: FIGHTING REGULATIONS

During his 46 years as an economics professor, George Stigler, 71, developed a reputation as an entertaining lecturer and a tough grader. Also, along the way, he came to be regarded as perhaps his profession's most insightful student of the effects of government regulations on industrial organizations and prices.

For much of Stigler's quiet and unassuming professional life, however, his conservative views were largely ignored by academia's numerous Keynesian-oriented economists. But as often happens with original ideas, Stigler's seminal studies on the interplay between politics and economics have in recent years come more and more into the mainstream.

Stigler last week became the eleventh American (and the fifth economist to have been a member of the largely conservative faculty of the University of Chicago) to be named a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. At a press conference the witty professor was asked if he were more conservative in his outlook and opinions than his good friend and former faculty colleague Monetarist Milton Friedman, who received the Nobel Prize in 1976 and is now associated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The 6-ft. 3-in. Stigler brushed off the question: "I don't know if I'm behind Milton or ahead of him, but he's so short it's easy to look over him." (Friedman is 5-ft. 3-in.)

Born in Renton, Wash., in 1911, the son of a Bavarian immigrant whose various jobs included managing apartment buildings, Stigler graduated from the University of Washington in 1931. Seeing little if any chance to land a paying job in the depths of the Great Depression, he decided to try his hand at graduate school. The fateful decision took Stigler first to Northwestern University in Chicago for a master's degree, and thereafter to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. His first teaching post was an assistant professorship at Iowa State University. In 1941 Stigler published his first work, Production and Distribution Theories, a survey of late 19th and early 20th century scholarship in the field. Then, a year later, he published The Theory of Price, a free-market-oriented economics text that is still regularly used in graduate schools around the country.

One of Stigler's more widely read and certainly most controversial works, Roofs or Ceilings, enraged liberals when it was first published in 1964. Since then, however, the book has become must reading for economists of all political perspectives and has gained additional popularity as government deregulation of business has grown to be an increasingly important political issue.

Written in collaboration with Friedman, Roofs or Ceilings argued, among other things, that rent controls on housing had the inevitable effect of distorting rental markets, thereby eventually leading to severe apartment shortages. Said Stigler of his findings: "When rent control is enacted, the original tenants benefit in the short run, but in the long run, property values decline, the tax base is eroded, and the losers wind up losing more than the winners gain. In the end, national income itself is reduced."

Among the many people who telephoned Stigler to offer congratulations was another enthusiastic critic of over-regulation by government. Said a grinning Stigler of his early-morning telephone chat with Ronald Reagan: "I told him he was a good President, and not to quit."

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