Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1960moy.001

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                                                                              ╚January 2, 1961

Man of the Year:U.S. Scientists



    We scientists are the only people who are not bored, the
only adventurers of modern times, the real explorers -- the
fortunate ones. -- 1960 Nobel Laureate Willard F. Libby

    Not everybody else was bored in 1960, and there were some
adventurers -- bearing spears in the Congo or banging shoes at
the U.N. -- who could hardly be called scientific. But the world
of 1960 will readily agree with Chemist Willard Libby that U.S.
scientists and their colleagues in other free lands are indeed
the true 20th century adventurers, the explorers of the unknown,
the real intellectuals of the day, the leaders of mankind's
greatest inquiry into the mysteries of matter, of the earth, the
universe, and of life itself. Their work shapes the life of
every human presently inhabiting the planet, and will influence
the destiny of generations to come. Statesmen and savants,
builders and even priests are their servants; at a time when
science is at the apogee of its power for good or evil, they are
the Men of the Year 1960.

    TIME has chosen 15 U.S. scientists as Men of the Year --
15 because that number embodies about the right inclusiveness
and exclusiveness, U.S. because the heart of scientific inquiry
now beats strongest in this country. They are representative of
all science -- with its dependence on the past, its strivings
and frustrations in the present, and its plans, hopes and,
perhaps, fantasies for the future.

    The Men. The 15 men include two or three whose greatest
work is probably behind them. Chemist Linus Pauling published
his milestone theories about the nature of the chemical bond in
the '30s, waited until 1954 to receive his Nobel Prize. But
Pauling's accurate insights remain a basis for the work of
1960's scientists in many fields. Physicist I.I. Rabi received
his Nobel Prize in 1944 for his work on the atomic nucleus, in
recent years has been most active as an articulate advisor to
the Federal Government, explaining science to the Solons as
something that requires, and is worthy of, a basic "optimism of
the possible." The most remarkable feat performed by Physicist
Edward Teller came when, with a burst of brilliance, he flashed
forth with an idea that made the hydrogen bomb not only possible
but practical for the U.S.; the details of that idea remain top-
secret to this day.

    But the 15 Men of the Year also include the prodigious
striplings of science. One is Biologist Joshua Lederberg, 35,
a Nobleman in 1958 for his demonstration that viruses can change
the heredity of bacteria, who is now deep in the study of a new
science that he calls "exobiology" -- an attempt to obtain and
compare life on other planets with that on earth. Another is
Physicist Donald Glaser, one of the U.S.'s two Nobel
prizewinners in science for 1960. (Chemist Libby is the other).
Glaser's award came for his development of the bubble chamber,
a quantum jump in the study of atomic particles. But at age 34,
Glaser is about to start his scientific life anew, switching to
micro-biology, which has an irresistible lure for his insatiable
curiosity.

    The Men of the Year for 1960 reflect the wide scientific
spectrum, with all its communal interests and all its conflicts.
On one side is Harvard's Nobel Prizewinner Robert Woodward,
famed for his synthesis of quinine, cholesterol and, in 1960,
of chlorophyll. Woodward seeks no practical application for his
work, saying: "I'm just fascinated by chemistry. I am in love
with it. I don't feel the need for a practical interest to spur
me." At an opposite pole is M.I.T.'s Charles Stark Draper, an
engineering genius in aeronautics and astronautics who
describes himself as nothing more than "a greasy-thumb mechanic
type of fellow." And there is William Shockley, who with two
colleagues (John Bardeen and Walter Brattain) earned a 1956
Nobel Prize for creating the transistor -- that hugely useful
little solid-state device that has made possible everything from
the fob-sized portable radio to the fantastic instrumentation
that the U.S. packs into its space satellites. Shockley, who
uses a yellow legal pad instead of a blackboard to draw his
scientific diagrams, says candidly: "We simply wouldn't start
the research if no application were seen."

    There is not, and cannot be, a realistic rule for
classifying science or scientists. Physicist Emilio Segre, a
1959 Nobelman for his explorations into the Alice-Through-the-
Looking-Glass world of antimatter, is a master of pure theory.
Virologist John Enders, with his struggles to understand
submicroscopic organisms, has given mankind a powerful
biological tool to produce immunization against diseases.
Physicist Charles Townes, from his theoretical speculations
about microwaves, sired one of the most revolutionary devices of
the age: the maser, of immense practical application not only
on earth but in seeking out the wonders of the universe.
Geneticist George Beadle has broken barriers with his
experiments with such a seemingly trifling substance as bread
mold. Physicist James Van Allen has searched out the radiation
belts that surround the earth, and Physicist Edward Purcell can
eloquently discuss the possibility of communicating with
creatures in other worlds by means of radio waves.

    The Age. Such men, along with scores of their colleagues
both in the U.S. and abroad, made 1960 a golden year in the ever
advancing Age of Science, which had its tentative beginnings in
the Renaissance. In 1620 Britain's Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon
in his Novum Organum (New Instrument), wrote: "Man, by the fall
lost his empire over creation, which can be partially recovered,
even in this life, by the arts and sciences." The 340 years that
have passed since Novum Organum have seen far more scientific
change than all the previous 5,000 years.

    Building on its own past, science climbs in an ever
steepening curve. For every Newton or Galileo or Einstein, with
their intuitive explosions of individual genius, there follow
hundreds of other scientists, probing and proving and
progressing. Such is the soar of the scientific exponential
curve that, it has been said, almost 90% of all the scientists
that the world has ever produced are alive today.

    By the very nature of that curve, 1960 was the richest of
all scientific years and the years ahead must be even more
fruitful. It was not a year of breath-taking breakthrough in the
formulation of new and basic principle; 1960 was a year of
massive advance on nearly all scientific fronts. Among the
1960's major developments:

 --  In molecular biology, the study of the chemical basis of
life and one of the most exciting free frontiers of modern
science, man seemed verging on basic understanding of life-
origin and processes. In dozens of laboratories, scientists
attacked and began to unravel the secrets of DNA
(deoxyribonucleic acid), the big and enormously complicated
molecule that acts as a coded genetic instruction book,
decreeing how every living organism will develop, deciding what
will be a mollusk, what a monkey, and what a man.

 --  In physics, technology came to the aid of the
theoreticians, who had seemed approaching a dead end. Confronted
by subatomic particles whose existence they had only recently
recognized and whose behavior they still cannot explain, the
physicists desperately needed high-energy equipment with which
they could bombard and shatter, and thus study, the odd and
infinitesimal particles that are the heart of all matter. The
physicist got that equipment in 1960 with the successful
operation of a great proton synchrotron at Brookhaven, Long
Island, which generated 30 billion electron volts at its first
try, and in a very similar machine in Switzerland.

 --  In solid-state physics, the maser replaced the transistor
as the hottest of all items. Masers (from Microwave
Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) are a large
and fast-growing family of instruments working on the principle
that molecules and atoms can exist on two or more energy levels.
When they fall from a high to a low level, they give off
electromagnetic waves that act as incredibly sensitive
amplifiers. Charles Townes developed the radio-frequency maser
in 1954; in 1960 came the first successes with light masers.
Dealing with waves of visible light that can travel without
distortion for distances bordering on infinity, they can be used
to seek out galaxies at the edge of the knowable universe, as
a possible means for humans to communicate with the creatures
of other worlds.

 --  In Chemistry, Harvard's Robert Woodward climaxed a drive
in the field of synthesis by producing a laboratory version of
chlorophyll -- the large (137 atoms), complex and fragile
molecule that, as the green, food-producing substance in the
leaves of plants, supports much of earth's life. In its final
result, Woodward's chlorophyll synthesis was a chemical witch's
brew, requiring 55 separate and enormously complicated steps.

 --  In astronomy, Palomar's 200-in. optical telescope
photographed two colliding galaxies six billion light-years from
the earth -- by far the most distant objects ever pictured. But
even more significant was the part played in the accomplishment
by one of the newest and most fascinating of all sciences: radio
astronomy. It was radio telescopes, beaming in on the waves shot
out by the colliding galaxies, that told Palomar where to focus
its optical explorer.

 --  Almost inevitably, space science was the glamour science.
The U.S. sent into orbit satellites Tiros I and Tiros II, which
observed the earth's weather from above and sent back thousands
of cloud-pattern pictures that are revolutionizing meteorology.
The U.S.'s Courier I-B showed what can be done by a satellite
packed with electronic equipment and acting as a relay station
for forwarding floods of messages almost instantaneously around
the curve of the earth. Echo I, the 100-ft. balloon satellite,
which is still a striking naked-eye spectacle in the sky, showed
the value of a large, passive reflector from which to bounce
radio waves. Transit satellites I-B and II-A were U.S. Navy
prototypes for a network that will outmode all previous methods
of air and sea navigation. The U.S.'s Pioneer V lived up to its
name by spinning into an orbit around the sun, still sending
radio messages back to earth when it was 22 million miles away.
The problem of greatest interest to most laymen (and of little
interest to many scientists), that of sending man himself into
space and getting him back, came closer to a solution. The
Russians reported having put up a satellite with two living dogs
as its crew and bringing them safely home. The U.S. Air Force's
Discoverer program succeeded in recovering three capsules shot
down by orbiting satellites.

    Although outpaced in certain specific fields by other
nations (by Britain in inorganic chemistry, by Russia in
mathematics), the U.S. is the recognized leader of the
scientific surge. Its leadership is relatively recent. Before
World War I, the U.S. had plenty of practical inventors of the
Edison type, but its technology was built almost entirely on
basic ideas imported from Europe and its real scientists were
rare. In the years after World War I, young Americans still went
to Europe for scientific enlightenment; among them were Rabi and
Pauling, who completed their education abroad, then came home
to do original research that put them ahead of their teachers.

    In the cruel prelude to World War II, many eminent European
scientists fled to the U.S. to escape totalitarian tyranny. The
U.S. gave them freedom -- and in return they contributed their
knowledge and disciplines to its science. World War II itself
gave U.S. science its decisive impetus, for from the war came
the tools and instruments that have made possible the scientific
explosion. Out of wartime radar research grew the pure materials
that later enabled William Shockley to develop the transistor.
From the U.S.'s atomic bomb program came the cheap and plentiful
radioactive tracers that have since transformed chemistry,
biology and several other sciences. It is no coincidence that
where the U.S. had only 15 Nobel prizes in physics, chemistry
and medicine in the 39 years before World War II, it has had 42
since 1940.

    Against that background, the scientists of 1960 moved to new
heights and stood on thresholds of marvelous achievement. By
general agreement, the fields of high-energy physics and
molecular biology offer the most thrilling prospects.

    What's the Matter? "We," says Caltech's Theoretical
Physicist Murray Gell-Mann, at 31 one of the brightest new stars
of U.S. science, "think that one of the most exciting things the
human race can do is understand the laws of nature. It is sad
that it is so hard for others to follow us in this chase."

    Gell-Mann compares the world of physics to cleaning out a
cluttered basement. "Once the debris has been swept away," he
says, "the basement's outline can be seen." This always happens
in physics, but there is one hitch: "Somebody has discovered
over in a corner a trap door, leading to a sub-basement. First
we had to learn about atoms, but when we got atoms cleared up,
we found a trap door to the next sub-basement, the atomic
nucleus, which was then completely unknown. Now that this is
being swept out a bit, the next trap door leads us into the new
world of the subatomic particles and what makes them tick."

    The tools of the high-energy physicists are enormous
machines -- cyclotrons, synchrotrons, linear accelerators --
that smash atoms and subatomic particles to bits and expose them
to study. Already, the physicists know of some 30 particles that
form atoms or can be knocked out of them by high-energy
collisions. The great challenge confronting the physicist is to
formulate sets of laws describing the interaction of such
particles and, at an even deeper level, to explain the reason
for their existence. Therein lies the key to the understanding
of the matter -- and of all nature.

    The world of the physicist can be an eerie one -- and that
is part of its facination. In the field of high-energy physics,
few are involved in more eerie or more fascinating work than
Berkeley's Italian-born Emilio Segre, who discovered the anti-
proton, which turns into a flash of energy when it hits an
ordinary proton. Many other anti-particles have since been found,
including anti-electrons, anti-neutrons and anti-mesons. Segre
believes that a full set of anti-particles will be found,
existing for only tiny fractions of a second in the debris left
by high-energy collisions. The anti-particles cannot last long on
earth, where ordinary matter, their enemy, is prevalent, but
Segre suggests that they are dominant elsewhere. The concept of
symmetry, he says, calls for equal numbers of particles and anti-
particles, gathered into equal amounts of matter and anti-matter
in the universe. Some of the galaxies seen in far-off space, he
says, may in fact be anti-galaxies made up of anti-stars with
anti-planets revolving around them. "While you and I sit talking
here," he tells an interviewer, "there exists somewhere else an
anti-you scribbling with an anti-pencil while an anti-I fiddles
with an anti-letter opener. To an anti-you, it would look just
like the letter opener here in my hand, but the present you would
not live to see it. The anti-matter in an anti-letter opener of
this size would create a bigger explosion than the biggest
nuclear
bomb,"

    The Magical Code. Weird and wonderful as is the field of
high-energy physics, it offers no more glittering opportunities
than those now open to the geneticists, the virologists, the
biochemists and others who have recently begun calling
themselves molecular biologists. The objective of the molecular
biologists is nothing less than to explain the inner chemical
workings of living creatures. Every living cell, including those
of multicelled animals such as man, has in its nucleus large
and complicated molecules that control growth and heredity.
Except in some bacteria and viruses, these molecules are made
of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which James Watson of Harvard
and Francis Crick of Cambridge, England, found to be two long
chains of atoms linked together and twisted spirally. The links
between two spirals, often many thousands of them, differ
slightly and constitute a sort of code that carries information
and controls the heredity of the cell.

    When a cell reproduces by division, the DNA molecules in
its nucleus have two jobs. First they must make perfect
duplicates of themselves. Then they must control the formation
of enzymes (protein catalysts) that will generate the other
proteins that the cell needs to grow bigger and split in two.

    The most direct way to achieve understanding of this system
would be to find the exact structure of DNA, including the
magical code. But when it is considered that the DNA molecules
in human cells may have something like a million atoms all
linked and twisted in a special way, the difficulties stagger
imagination. So the attack on the molecules of life is mounted
in other, more indirect ways. One approach is through genetics:
learning about the chemistry of reproduction of small and
comparatively simple organism like molds. Another approach is
through X-ray studies of proteins, with the X rays scattering in
patterns and giving clues about protein structure. Using this
technique, Cambridge's Dr. John Kendrew recently located a large
part of the 2,500 coiled-up atoms in myoglobin, a rather simple
protein. The size of the entire problem is suggested by the fact
that most protein molecules are much bigger than myoglobin, and
that there are about 100,000 different proteins in the human
body.

    Despite such chilling challenges, the molecular biologists
have the tingling feeling that they are about to break through
the black unknown. Caltech's Geneticist George Beadle thinks
that future understanding of DNA and proteins may tell why some
cells of a developing embryo turn into skin, others into bone
or brain. Caltech's Pauling, a physical chemist who shifted to
biochemistry and proved that proteins have a coiled structure,
believes  that "very fundamental discoveries are now possible
in this field. The foundation has been laid for men to make a
penetrating attack on the nature of life." With deeper
understanding of the proteins and DNA of the human body, it
should become possible to treat and correct genetic diseases,
now mostly incurable. "Why," says Pauling, "we could increase
the life expectancy of Americans by 20 years. I don't mean just
keeping old people alive 20 years longer. We'd keep people in
their youth and middle age for 20 more years, with their health
still good."

    Cancer, too, is a target of molecular biology. Harvard's
Dr. John Enders, a virologist whose tissue cultures made polio
vaccine possible, believes that some cancers in lower animals
are certainly caused by viruses. "Recent work has shown," he
says, "that malignant cells that develop after infection by a
virus do not necessarily continue to hold the virus. They lose
the virus but continue to grow and can pass cells to other
animals without the virus' being present. It looks as if the
function of the virus is to start the cell going wrong. Then it
can continue to go wrong by itself." This may happen in human
cancers, too, and since viruses carry only small packets of
genetic material, improved molecular biology may prevent them
from starting cancers, or may even reform the lawlessly growing
cells that have been led by viruses into evil ways.

    Out of This World. But no matter how profound the
significance of the work being done by the physicists, the
molecular biologists and the practitioners of a dozen other pure
sciences, it is the "science" of space that is of most absorbing
interest to the peoples of the world. Man's reach toward the
heavens is indeed the stuff that dreams are made of -- and some
scientists are inclined to scoff at it for precisely that
reason. But others, of equal stature and equal dedication to
scientific truth, not only share in the out-of-this-world dreams
but are devoting their great talents toward cracking the secrets
of the infinite beyond.

    Among those at the most practical pole of space science
is Astronauticist Charles Draper. In his capacity as head of
M.I.T.'s Instrumentation Lab, Draper in 1960 was working in
guidance systems for space vehicles of the Dyna-Soar type --
vehicles with supporting wings to get them out of the earth's
atmosphere. He sees little future for manned space exploration
in Project Mercury, which uses a ballistic missile, which is
shot like a bullet, has no wings and not much control after it
is fired. "That's sort of like going over Niagara Falls in a
barrel," says Draper. "You don't expect to find many people
making a career of it." Draper's Instrumentation Lab has also
designed on paper an unmanned payload to circle Mars and return
to earth with photographs or other observations. "All that
remains is to do it," says Draper. "We've got a habit of
confusing the final generation of a satisfactory piece of
hardware with specifications on paper. We have proved that this
can be done and shown how. Now we have to make the thing."

    Instrumental space research already has proved its vast
scientific worth. James Van Allen, of the State University of
Iowa, discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts, testifies
that unmanned U.S. satellites are teaching earthbound scientists
a tremendous amount about "that nuclear physics laboratory
called the sun." Explorer VII, launched in October 1959, is
still in orbit and still sending information. It has made nearly
2,300 passes and sent observations from nearly 1,000,000 data
points. In 1960 it reported on the effects of two unusually
violent eruptions on the sun. As the sun threw out vast streams
of charged particles, charts were made via Explorer VII of their
intensity and effects on the radiation belts. Never before had
earth's scientists so good a ringside seat for watching solar
explosions. Van Allen is sure that future satellites carrying
instruments will yield even better information about the sun and
its effects on the earth.

    By almost any standard, Stanford Geneticist Joshua
Lederberg is the purest of pure scientists. Yet Lederberg's
current interests extend into space in a way that pauperizes
science fiction. Working under a Rockefeller Foundation grant,
he and his Stanford team are designing and building a prototype
apparatus that can be landed on, say, Mars or Venus, and can
send back information about possible plants, bacteria, viruses
or other micro-organisms in the soil and reel them beneath the
lens of a fixed microscope. A television camera would photograph
the magnified object and send the picture back to earth for
study.

    The implications of such a system are basic to biology.
"Lacking an adequate framework of biological theory," Lederberg
said recently, "we cannot easily construct a precise definition
of life that could apply to all possible worlds. It would be
incautious to reject the possibility of exotic forms of life
that dispense with water or oxygen and that thrive at
temperatures below minus 100 degrees or above 250 degrees
centigrade." Lederberg hopes his experiment may one day decide
the argument about whether life arose spontaneously on different
planets or whether it arose everywhere (assuming it exists
elsewhere) out of spores floating through space. This second
theory, he says, has "odds against it of a million to one, even
in the minds of its most enthusiastic supporters -- and I'm one
of them."

    Another kind of space science -- new-style astronomy -- is
near at hand. Ground-based optical astronomy just about reached
its limit with the completion of the 200-in. Palomar Mountain
telescope in 1948. Bigger optical telescopes will not be much
better because of the turbulence of the earth's atmosphere. This
deadlock may be broken by automatic telescopes carried by
satellites far above all trace of air. Even if rather small, the
telescopes will see much more clearly than the 200-incher.
Perhaps they will settle the question of the "canals" on Mars.
They will certainly observe in the heavens kinds of radiation
(X-Ray and ultraviolet) that cannot penetrate the atmosphere.
This type of observation is important because many stars are
known to radiate chiefly in these unobservable rays.

    Which Creation? Already in vigorous operation is radio
astronomy, a postwar newcomer that may prove more important than
its optical older brother. Already, it has drawn a new map of
the heavens, finding strong "radio stars" where nothing can be
seen in visible light. Some of these mysterious sources have
turned out to be pairs of galaxies in collision, which are of
especial importance to cosmologists in their struggle to figure
out how the universe was formed. They are fairly common, and
they seem to extend indefinitely into the depths of space,
rushing away faster and faster in proportion to their distance
from the earth. Radio astronomy may be able to chase them close
to the "edge of the knowable universe," where they will be
moving so fast that their light and radio waves cannot reach
the earth at all. Long before this point is attained, the
cosmologists should have evidence enough to decide whether the
universe was created in one place at the same time or whether
is it being created continuously in the form of virgin hydrogen
atoms in the empty spaces between the galaxies.

    At the farthest end of the space science spectrum is a
project to listen for massages sent by intelligent creatures
living on planets revolving around other stars than the sun.
This project was made plausible by Harvard's Physics Professor
Edward Purcell, who was the first to detect the 21-cm. waves
from cold hydrogen throughout space, Purcell explains that if
intelligent aliens send messages to the earth, they will use
a sort of reversed cipher that is deliberately made easy to
translate. Their first problem will be to select the proper
radio frequency: there is no use picking one at random. Unless
listening earthlings know how to tune their receivers, they will
hear nothing. Therefore, says Purcell, the aliens will select
the 21-cm. waves, which are the sharpest and most universal
radio waves that flash through space. The aliens will reason
that if earthlings are bright enough to have an electronic
technology, they will know about the 21 cm. waves and will tune
to them.

    A further subtlety, says Purcell, is that when the aliens
turn their transmitter toward the sun, they will know the speed
at which their star is approaching the solar system or receding
from it. They will therefore allow for the slight shift of
frequency caused by this motion. They may also allow for the
motion of the planet on its orbit, but cannot know the earth's
orbital motion. This final fine tuning will have to be done at
the receiver on earth.

    What message will the aliens send if they want to be
understood by earthlings? Purcell suggests that a simple on-off
signal will be easier to detect, and is most likely to be sent.
But he speculates that many messages of varying difficulty may
be sent simultaneously, which is not hard to do. Aliens on a
planet of Epsilon Erident, a likely star, will not expect to get
an answer from the solar system in less than 22 years. But by
sending simultaneous messages, they can educate their earthside
listeners quickly. Besides simple number series, says Purcell,
the messages will probably contain other mathematical
relationships. Words and logical concepts can be taught the same
way, growing more and more complicated as the many-layered
message is deciphered.

    All this seems fantasy, but if so, it is the fantasy of
highly intelligent scientists who believe that a comparatively
small effort in listening for radio messages from space may pay
off richly. And in that belief, the first try was made at the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia last
spring. It heard nothing, but another attempt will be made with
improved apparatus.

    "Of Passionate Concern." With such bursts through the
boundaries of knowledge, with such leaps of faith in the
possibilities of the future, it is small wonder that an electric
atmosphere pervaded the whole of science in 1960. "I could have
lived in no other age in which so intoxicating and beautiful
a series of discoveries could have been made," breathes British
Mathematician Jacob Bronoeski. "If I have any regrets at the
thought of dying it is that we live in so explosive a time that
discoveries will continue to be made that I will know nothing
about."

    By the very reason of his climb up the ever steepening
curve, the scientist has more than ever become into the
consciousness of world society -- and in that limelight the
scientist more than ever before is fumbling for and arguing
about his proper role in society itself. "Scientists," says
Author-Scientist C.P. Snow, "are the most important occupational
group of the world today. At this moment, what they do is of
passionate concern to the whole of human society."

    And in 1960, what the scientist did was to transform the
earth and its future. They were surely the adventurers, the
explorers, the fortunate ones -- and the Men of the Year.