Prizes for Teams

In making its 1956 awards in physics and chemistry, the Nobel Prize Committees of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science recognized the fact that few modern scientists work alone. They generally work in teams or as individuals closely linked together by exchanges of ideas and information. The physics prize last week went jointly to three Americans who invented transistors, those specks of educated germanium that do the work of much larger vacuum tubes and have already produced an electronic revolution. The prizemen, Dr. Walter Brattain, Dr. William Shockley and Dr. John Bardeen, did their work in close association at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J., and it would have been wrong to give the whole prize to any one of them.

The chemistry prize went to a team of a different type. The winners, Sir Cyril Norman Hinselwood of Oxford and Professor Nikolai N. Semenov of the U.S.S.R.'s Academy of Sciences, worked in laboratories more than 1,300 miles apart. But they worked on the same subject, chemical chain reactions (e.g., explosions in gas mixtures), and were friends and correspondents for 25 years. Their discoveries, extremely important for an age that gets most of its energy from exploding gases, could not be disentangled.

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