TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT1418> <title> Man of Year 1960: U.S. Scientists </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--Man of the Year </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> January 2, 1961 Man of the Year U.S. Scientists </hdr> <body> 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 fascination. 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. </body> </article> </text>