Nobel Prizewinners

When the war began, most of the world's scientists started working--and still work --in secrecy. Last week the Swedish Royal Academy of Science, after due thought, gave three Nobel prizes to men who had made their scientific marks before the blackout:

P: Chemistry prize for 1945 went to Professor Ilmari Artturi Virtanen, 50, of Finland, who is almost unknown outside Scandinavia. His specialty: agricultural biochemistry. Scandinavian dairymen are grateful to him for a method of preserving green cattle fodder with minimum loss of food value.

P: Physics prizewinner for 1945 was Vienna-born Professor Wolfgang Pauli, 45, who had worked since 1940 in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J. Professor Pauli is an authority on quantum mechanics, that nightmarish never-never branch of science where solid matter begins to dissolve into waves and energy.

Lately, he has been working on the "binding force," the powerful, short-range attraction which holds the nucleus of an atom together. Except for the binding force, science's innermost mystery, the entire earth would presumably explode.

P: The 1944 prize for chemistry went to pioneer atom-splitter Professor Otto Hahn, 66, lately of Berlin. Hahn came to the U.S. in 1933 to lecture for one year at Cornell. He is believed to be in the U.S. at the present time, under different circumstances. Where he is now, U.S. scientists cannot say and Government authorities will not say. If he is one of the German scientists imported to the U.S. as "human reparations," it will be the first time a Nobel prize has been awarded to a virtual prisoner of war. When Professor Hahn did his first atom-splitting, he was chemical head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Later, under the Nazis, the institute worked furiously to construct an atomic bomb, based on his discovery.

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