Rx for Peace

Five years after forming the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the organization's U.S. and Soviet founders met last week in Geneva, the city of its birth, to plan future activities. They had barely begun to talk before they got exhilarating news: the IPPNW had been awarded the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.

The announcement from Oslo was a personal triumph for Bernard Lown of Boston and Yevgeni Chazov of Moscow, the cardiologists who have presided over the antiwar organization from its beginning. The two met in 1960 and got to know each other at international professional conferences over the next two decades. They launched IPPNW in hopes of slowing the arms race. With headquarters in Boston and a branch in London, it now claims the support of 135,000 physicians and health-care professionals in 41 nations (60,000 doctors in the Soviet Union alone, according to Chazov). The Nobel judges lauded the group for having "performed a considerable service to mankind by spreading authoritative information and by creating an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare."

The physicians' co-presidents differ markedly in political sophistication and influence. Lown, 64, long associated with Harvard's School of Public Health, is largely apolitical except for the subject of disarmament, on which he has strong opinions. Last week he stated that the unilateral Soviet ban on nuclear testing, announced in July, "should be reciprocated by the West" as an inducement for "enormous achievements" at the upcoming Reagan-Gorbachev summit. Chazov, 56, director of the vast U.S.S.R. Cardiology Research Center, is a member of the Communist Party Central Committee and head of the group that oversees medical care for members of the ruling Politburo. The two have become close personal friends during their years with the IPPNW, and at their press conference last week they accommodated newsmen by backslapping American-style and kissing Russian-style.