THE MEN ON THE COVER

John Franklin Enders, 63, was on his way to earning a Harvard Ph.D. in English when he met the late great Microbiologist Hans Zinsser. Inspired by Zinsser, Enders switched to bacteriology. But inspiration, he insists, has little place in the practical results of research. "As a rule, the scientist takes off from the manifold observations of his predecessors . . . The one who places the last stone and steps across to the terra firma of accomplished discovery gets all the credit." Thus Dr. Jonas Salk got most of the credit for developing polio vaccine. But it was Enders' patient work that first demonstrated how to grow the dangerous polio virus in other than nerve tissue. That work got Enders and his associates a Nobel Prize; it got Salk his vaccine. Now active at Boston's Children's Medical Center, John Enders is presently putting the patience that whipped polio to work on measles and infectious hepatitis.

Willard Frank Libby, 52, sometimes seems to be a finicky, formal sort of man who wears a business suit in the laboratory, suffers a necktie in the warmest weather. But he gives himself away with his missionary zeal. To Chemist Libby, recruiting bright young newcomers to his calling is every bit as important as his own contributions. His radioactive carbon-14 dating technique brought him his well-deserved Nobel Prize; his five-year service on the Atomic Energy Commission was an invaluable bridge between the possibilities of science and the problems of politics. In Washington, Libby discovered that there are a lot of intelligent people who are not scientists." Says Chemist Libby: "They would have made good chemists."

Linus Carl Pauling, 59, Caltech's outspoken, opinionated chemist, began prying into the personality of the atom just after World War I, when the laboratories of his specialty were alive with novel and productive ideas. The coincidence was explosive. For Pauling believes that "the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas." He had plenty. His theory about the nature of the chemical bond, the forces that make atoms stick together, won him a Nobel Prize in 1954. "Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life," says Pauling.

Isidor Isaac Rabi, 62, became a scientist, he says, for one overpowering reason: "I couldn't help it." Brought to the U.S. from Austria as an infant, he has never forgotten his mother's daily query when he came home from public school on Manhattan's Lower East Side: "Did you ask any good questions today?" For a brief period Rabi (rhymes with hobby) did try the workaday world outside the laboratory--he analyzed furniture polish and mothers' milk; he ran a Brooklyn newspaper until it failed--"then came the vision, I found physics and myself." His experiments in molecular physics won a Nobel Prize in 1944, were vital to U.S. atomic research. Now a part-time professor at Columbia University, Rabi argues that all scientists ought to be "oddballs." Their lives, he says, leave no room for such bourgeois considerations as suburban homes or Madison Avenue clothes: "Once you put on the clothes and cut your hair you begin acting the part." But Rabi himself wears well-cut clothes--and his hair is neatly cut.

Edward Teller, 52, vehemently dislikes his title: "Father of the H-bomb." In the first place, he argues, the big bomb was the creation of many minds. Even more important, the phrase is unpopular with Teller's teen-age son Paul. Explains Teller: "No one would want the hydrogen bomb for a kid brother." But the rumpled, Hungarian-born physicist has small chance of escape. Many minds did indeed contribute to the U.S. H-bomb, but it was Teller's basic insight that made the finished product possible. Today, he teaches a freshman course in physics appreciation at U.C.L.A., has a couple of books under way, is investigating the peaceful application of nuclear energy.

Joshua Lederberg, 35, is a balding biologist--and a genius. At 21, the studious son of a New Jersey rabbi, he was already making significant contributions to genetics. Working with his teacher, Edward Tatum, at Yale, he demonstrated that bacteria have a sex life of sorts. At 27, in collaboration with one of his own students at the University of Wisconsin, Lederberg discovered that bacteria infected with certain viruses may suffer hereditary changes. His work on this process, known as transduction, won him a Nobel Prize. Now, at Stanford's School of Medicine, Lederberg's latest cause for excitement is the far-out field of exobiology.

Donald Arthur Glaser, 34, wore an evening waistcoat that was yellowed with age when he stepped up to receive his Nobel Prize in Physics from Sweden's King Gustav VI Adolf early this month. The old vest, he explained, had been worn by two other Nobelmen, Edwin McMillan and Emilio Segre, before him, "and I guess I'll pass it along to somebody else for some future Nobel ceremony." Chances are, Glaser himself may some day want it back for just that reason. Having reached top rank in his field with his invention of a bubble chamber for photographing atomic particles, the Cleveland storekeeper's son has decided to start all over again--this time in microbiology.

Robert Burns Woodward. 43, is a man with two loves: the color blue and the science of chemistry. The first is an easy affectation; Harvard's Woodward satisfies it with a blue and white office, a blue coffee cup and, day in day out, a blue necktie. The second is an all-consuming passion. Disdaining all other activities (exercise seems a particular waste of time to him), Woodward has been the architect of some of the most complex biological molecules ever built by man. He synthesized quinine by the time he was 26, kept lengthening the list of his accomplishments--cortisone, strychnine, reserpine. cholesterol--until this year he manufactured the most complicated substance of all: chlorophyll. Says an admiring colleague: "It's not his chemical synthesis but his intellectual synthesis that is so striking."

Charles Stark Draper, 59, head of M.I.T.'s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and of its Instrumentation Lab, was once trying to spell out the meaning of dyne centimeter, a tiny unit of torque (twisting force). "A dyne centimeter," said Draper, a sociable chap, "is just about the amount of torque that would have to be applied to my arm to get me to take a drink." Draper's contributions to aeronautic and missile technology include the A-4 gunsight that gave U.S. Sabre jets clear superiority over Russian MIGs in Korea and the inertial guidance systems that control far-ranging U.S. missiles, including the Polaris. Says Draper: "I've been accused of being the mother and father of inertial guidance."

William Shockley, 50, is that rare breed of scientist, a theorist who makes no apology for a consuming interest in the practical applications of his work. "Asking how much of a research job is pure and how much applied," says Shockley, "is like asking how much Negro and white blood Ralph Bunche might have. What's important is that Ralph Bunche is a great man." Hired by Bell Telephone Laboratories right after he graduated from M.I.T. in 1936, Theoretical Physicist Shockley was one of a team that found a use for what had previously been a scientific parlor stunt: the use of silicon and germanium as a photoelectric device. Along with his partners, Shockley won a Nobel Prize for turning hunks of germanium into the first transistors, the educated little crystals that are fast replacing vacuum tubes in the country's booming electronics industry.

Emilio Gino Segre, 55, was a promising young Italian engineering student when he was invited to become the late great Physicist Enrico Fermi's first graduate student. The invitation paid off. Fermi and Segre collaborated with three other Italian scientists in perfecting the slow neutron process that was essential to the production of the atomic bomb. In 1938 Segre came to the U.S., and six years later, like Fermi, became a U.S. citizen. Although he feels certain that most scientists do their best work before they are 30, he excepts himself, continues with his Nobel-prizewinning work in the weird never-never land of "anti-matter." Says he: "When God made the universe--if you assume he did--is there any rea-sjon to believe he preferred matter to anti-matter?"

Charles Hard Townes, 45, saw no reason to waste time while he waited for a restaurant to open one morning ten years ago. So he sat on a park bench and pondered a problem in physics: how to produce microwaves shorter than any that had previously been generated. Before he got to breakfast, Townes thought he had the answer--and four years later he completed a device that proved he was correct. It was a maser, in which hopped-up ammonia molecules were made to serve as an atomic clock of unequaled accuracy. Since then, Townes's maser has been used to check Einstein's theory of relativity. It may soon revolutionize radar and open up new channels for communication. Townes is currently on leave from Columbia University to work at the Institute for Defense Analysis in Washington.

George Wells Beadle, 57, head of the biology division at Caltech, was all set to spend his life on the family farm in Wahoo, Neb. when he got a crush on his pretty high school science teacher. Neither Beadle nor science ever quite got over it. The farm boy went to college and became a geneticist. With skill, patience and insatiable curiosity he helped to transform his narrow, abstruse specialty into a vital branch of science. Moving on from the classic fruit-fly experiments which had extended the study of heredity, Beadle began to investigate the intricate internal chemistry of bread mold. His observations led to a major scientific breakthrough: the first intimations of the manner in which genes control enzymes and enzymes control the basic chemistry of life itself.

James Alfred Van Allen, 46, has an eloquently simple definition for space: "It is the hole we are in." That hole, says Physicist Van Allen, "is a vast area of human ignorance, and the history of the world shows that attacking ignorance is fruitful." Ever since he was a shy student studying cosmic rays at Iowa Wesleyan, Van Allen has been in the vanguard of the attack. In his cluttered lab at the State University of Iowa, his carefully compiled experiments with rockets and satellites add up to an interplanetary detective story. Clue piled upon clue finally demonstrated the existence of the deadly Van Allen belts of radiation that girdle the earth, a hazard to future spacemen.

Edward Mills Purcell, 48, now on leave from his job as a Harvard physics professor, says of his work: "The thing that's so wonderful is that you get paid for telling the truth, just laying it out for anyone to do with as they will." It was a spare-time experiment with a borrowed electromagnet and a quarter's worth of paraffin that led to his Nobel-prizewinning "nuclear resonance" system for measuring atomic properties. In his early studies of the 21-cm. radio waves coming from hydrogen clouds in interstellar space, Purcell made do with a hastily devised antenna hung outside his Harvard laboratory. It looked like a horn left over from an ancient phonograph, but it worked.

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