Honors for Seven Achievers

In naming seven recipients of its coveted prizes last week, the Nobel Committee remained faithful to tradition. The judges honored the 13th American in 17 years with the economics award. As usual, U.S. researchers dominated the sciences. In literature, the gold medal went to a French experimental writer, whose murky novels are no longer in vogue. The winners and their credentials:

The theory seems at first to be blatantly obvious. It holds that people tend to save when they are young to create a nest egg for their old age. Basic though it may be, that notion ranks among the most powerful and widely used concepts in modern economics. It was also the work for which M.I.T.'s Franco Modigliani, 67, the theory's principal author, was named the 1985 Nobel laureate in economic science. "With many people, the Nobel Prize is a question of if," said Paul Samuelson, an M.I.T. colleague and the 1970 economics laureate. "With Franco, it was only a question of when." The Italian-born Modigliani is the 13th American to win or share the prize since it was first given in 1969 and the fifth to receive it in the past six years.

Modigliani's insights have influenced generations of students and policymakers. His "life-cycle" savings theory, developed in the 1950s with Richard Brumberg, is accepted by nearly all experts as a key to understanding thrift. Among other uses, the work offers a yardstick for gauging the impact of different pension systems. The theory suggests, for example, that people will tuck away less when they are guaranteed retirement income. That prediction has been borne out by the experience of Sweden, where savings rates plummeted from 7% to virtually zero after the government embarked in the 1960s on a sweeping pension program.

Modigliani's wide-ranging achievements have proved valuable to investors and corporate officers too. In bestowing the prize, the Nobel Committee cited a pathbreaking Modigliani study of the value of stocks. Written in 1958 with Merton Miller of the University of Chicago, the paper showed that investors look mainly at a firm's prospect for future profits when deciding what its shares may be worth. Those findings are now second nature to executives and securities analysts.

An ardent Keynesian, the silver-haired Modigliani advocates using flexible taxing and spending programs to steer the economy. He took the occasion of his new celebrity last week to attack the runaway budget deficit and the Reagan Administration's economic policies.

While Modigliani's award seemed entirely fitting to his colleagues, the economist himself was a bit surprised. Said he: "As a main-line economist, I haven't regarded it as something worth thinking about, since more esoteric economists have been winning it."

Friends fondly describe Modigliani, who emigrated from Italy in 1938 to escape anti-Jewish persecution, as a man filled with energy and enthusiasm. An indifferent dresser who fits the mold of the absentminded professor, Modigliani is known for grasping complex issues with amazing speed. For relaxation he turns to sailing, skiing and tennis, but his mind is never far from economics. He once developed an idea for a paper during a fierce tennis match against Samuelson.

Modigliani's wife Serena handles the family finances. "I give the general ideas," he quipped, "and she makes better specific decisions." Asked what he plans to do with the $225,000 Nobel Prize money, Modigliani said he will abide by his theories and spread the spending over the rest of his life.

To scientists attending the annual Whitehead Institute Symposium at M.I.T. last week, one keynote address was a rare display of virtuosity. Michael Brown of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Dallas vividly described the twelve years of work that he and Colleague Joseph Goldstein had carried out on the low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptor, a molecule that ferries cholesterol-rich particles from the bloodstream into the cell. His explanations were crisply organized, and his slides went beyond standard diagrams to include photographs of patients. Said one listener of Brown and Goldstein: "Their work is dazzling."

Next morning, to the accompaniment of popping champagne corks, a dazed- looking Brown and Goldstein stepped in front of the same audience. Said Whitehead Director David Baltimore: "Last night, as we listened to the keynote speech, our thoughts were instantly transmitted to a committee in Stockholm. That committee responded--by awarding Mike Brown and Joe Goldstein the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine."

Their prize had been predicted for some time, and with good reason: the discovery of the LDL receptor has revolutionized scientists' knowledge of cholesterol metabolism and certain cardiovascular diseases. Says Goldstein: "We now understand the mechanism through which diet and exercise can help prevent a heart attack."

Brown and Goldstein began their pioneering work while investigating severe familial hypercholesterolemia, a rare inherited disorder. Children with the disease have blood-cholesterol levels six to ten times normal and can suffer heart attacks as early as age two. By comparing skin cells from victims with those of healthy people, the two scientists traced the problem to an absence or deficiency of LDL receptors, proteins that stud the outer membranes of most cells, particularly those of the liver. Then they decoded the complex minuet that takes place between the receptor and its LDL particle. Says Baltimore: "That was important for understanding how cells communicate with their environment."

Although cholesterol is popularly regarded as an enemy, the body needs it to manufacture new cell membranes, steroid hormones and bile acids. Made primarily in the liver and also obtained through food, cholesterol travels through the bloodstream in round bundles of fat and protein called lipoproteins. Like Venus's-flytraps, vacant LDL receptors snare the passing packets. The lipoproteins are rapidly broken down in the cell, and the cholesterol is freed for use, while the receptor returns to the membrane, ready for prey.

If a person eats too many saturated fats, however, liver cells suppress the production of LDL receptors. Cholesterol then collects in artery walls in plaques, the hallmark of atherosclerosis. Conversely, a low-cholesterol diet stimulates the output of new receptors, thereby preventing heart disease.

Brown, 44, is from New York City and married; Goldstein, 45, was born in Sumter, S.C., and is single. The two scientists are close friends. "We've seen each other just about every day for the past twelve years," says Brown. "We had better get along." -- By Natalie Angier. Reported by Bill Bancroft/Dallas

At first, scientists insisted it could not possibly work. Then they said it was too hard to understand. But three decades after Herbert Hauptman and Jerome Karle, working at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, developed a mathematical method to determine the three-dimensional structure of molecules, no chemist can live without it. Recognizing the importance of the analytical technique, the Nobel Committee awarded the 1985 Prize for Chemistry to Karle, who still works at the Naval lab, and Hauptman, now the research director of the Medical Foundation of Buffalo Research Laboratories. The honor was not entirely unexpected. "You get the clue that there are people around the world who are recommending you for something important," says Karle. "Still, when it happens, one is shocked."

Known simply as the "direct method," the Karle-Hauptman system has extensive practical and medical applications. More than 45,000 small molecules have been analyzed with its aid, including such basic substances as hormones and vitamins. Most recently, the method has been used to design new antibiotics and vaccines. Says Swedish Chemist Ingvar Lindqvist, a member of % the Nobel Committee: "It is not possible to name fields in chemistry where the method is not used."

Karle and Hauptman's work was an advance in the field of X-ray crystallography, which has been employed since 1912 to examine the architecture of substances that have been crystallized. An X-ray beam is aimed at a crystal. As the beam travels through it, the crystal's atoms diffract, or scatter, the rays, producing fuzzy spots of varying intensity on film. The resulting diffraction pattern looks something like strings of beads. Although each type of crystal creates a distinctive design, the patterns are extremely intricate and were once very difficult to interpret. To get beyond the primitive and tedious practice of scrutinizing the film, Karle and Hauptman contrived a complex statistical formula that takes the position and brightness of the separate spots and "reconstructs" them into a three- dimensional picture of the crystal. Straightforward as this sounds, the equations were so daunting that they were ignored by the scientific community for ten years. Says Hauptman: "Crystallographers didn't have the background to use it." With the spread of high-speed computers, however, the power of the new method became clear. Once it took a couple of years to analyze a small crystal. Now, says Karle's wife Isabella, a chemist and one of the earliest champions of the technique, "this is done routinely in about a day or two."

Hauptman and Karle first met at City College of New York, from which they graduated in 1937 (the same class that spawned Arthur Kornberg, the medicine Nobelist for l959). Both of this year's winners are compulsive about science, but Hauptman, at least, squeezes out some time for such outside pursuits as creating patterns for stained glass. The difference in their temperaments is perhaps best revealed by the way each learned about his award. Hauptman, married to a schoolteacher and father of two daughters, had just finished his daily hour of swimming at a YMCA pool. Karle, whose three daughters are also scientists, was flying home from a scientific meeting in Munich when the pilot announced the news. "We are honored to have flying with us today America's newest Nobel prizewinner," he said. "And he doesn't even know it yet." --By Natalie Angier. Reported by George Borrelli/Buffalo