<p> Behind the awards: tales of pain, lost promise and recognition
too long deferred
</p>
<p> The myth is simple and satisfying: genius labors long and hard,
achieves brilliant success, wins Nobel Prize, basks in glory.
But prizewinners' stories are rarely so straightforward. This
year's controversial Peace Prize, for example, which was shared
by Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, has triggered
as much controversy as celebration. And for some of the other
laureates, there are, behind the Nobel Committee's glowing citations,
tales of recognition too long deferred, of promise lost, of
pain and tragedy.
</p>
<p> ECONOMICS
</p>
<p> Often the winner of a Nobel Prize is an obscure academic, noticed
by few in his community until he is thrust into the spotlight.
But when photographs of John Nash appeared in the press last
week, a common reaction in and around Princeton, New Jersey,
was a shock of recognition: "Oh, my gosh, it's him!" Nash, who
shared the Economics Prize with John Harsanyi of the Haas School
of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and Reinhard
Selten of the University of Bonn, is a familiar eccentric in
the university town--a quiet, detached man who frequently
spends his time riding the local "Dinky" train on its short
hop between Princeton and Princeton Junction, reading newspapers
discarded by other passengers. Some knew him as the author of
the enormously complicated mathematical equations that appeared
on classroom blackboards from time to time--the product of
a splendid but troubled mind working out his thoughts when no
one was around.
</p>
<p> The work that earned Nash his prize was largely completed by
1950 when, at age 22, he submitted the Princeton Ph.D. thesis
that has been described as the rock on which the mathematics
of game theory is based. Game theory tries to explain economic
behavior by analyzing the strategies "players" in the marketplace
use to maximize their winnings. Nash, drawing on the dynamics
of such games as poker and chess, introduced the distinction
between cooperative games, in which players form binding agreements,
and noncooperative ones, in which they don't. His "Nash Equilibrium"
has been used by generations of corporate and military strategists
to help decide when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.
</p>
<p> Nash taught in the '50s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
but his career there was reportedly interrupted by bouts of
mental illness. He returned to Princeton, where he became increasingly
withdrawn. Eventually, the mathematics department appointed
him a "visiting research collaborator," a post that has allowed
the man a university press officer describes as "incredibly
brilliant and eccentric" to roam his beloved campus freely for
the past 25 years, using its computers whenever he likes, and
occasionally its blackboards.
</p>
<p> MEDICINE
</p>
<p> Recognition came a few months too late to save co-winner Martin
Rodbell from the budget ax. He retired in June from the National
Institute of Environmental Health Sciences after funding dried
up for his research into how the billions of cells that make
up the body communicate with one another. Working independently,
Rodbell and Dr. Alfred G. Gilman of the University of Texas
Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas discovered that the cells
employ a kind of molecular switchboard to sort out incoming
chemical and hormonal messages. The switches in this biological
telephone system, molecules called G proteins, have since been
implicated in everything from diabetes to alcoholism to whooping
cough.
</p>
<p> PHYSICS
</p>
<p> Shoot neutrons through a liquid or solid, and these subatomic
particles will bounce off the atoms inside. The angles at which
the quantum bullets ricochet tell scientists how the target
atoms are arranged. That knowledge has already led to advances
in semiconductors and may someday explain the bizarre phenomenon
of high-temperature superconductivity. Clifford Shull, now retired
from M.I.T., and Bertram Brockhouse from McMaster University
in Ontario, Canada, helped perfect neutron-scattering techniques
in the 1940s and '50s. Today, nearly a half-century later, they
have Nobels to show for it. Ironically, the man who did the
pioneering work in the field, Shull's mentor Ernest Wollan,
died in 1984. By Nobel rules, the prize is never awarded posthumously.
</p>
<p> CHEMISTRY
</p>
<p> Oil refining, coal liquefaction and other related industrial
processes depend on chemists' being able to manipulate the complex
molecules known as hydrocarbons. George Olah of the University
of Southern California discovered in the 1960s how to slow down--and thus control--hydrocarbon reactions by supercooling
them. His work led directly to the development of higher-octane
gasoline--and earned him this year's Chemistry Prize.
</p>
<p> LITERATURE
</p>
<p> Kenzaburo Oe was a child of 10 when World War II ended; occupying
foreigners, ruins, humiliations and guilt filled the Japanese
landscape of his adolescence. His early fiction and essays were
unusually intense by Japanese standards, tinged with pessimism
and despair. After 1963, when his first son was born brain damaged,
Oe's work became even more personal; a helpless or deformed
child figure recurs, suggesting both implacable fate and the
possibility of redemption. Compared with the four previous laureates--Octavio Paz, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison--Oe is little known but, thanks to the Swedish Academy, not
