Plasmas, Magnets and Sugars

At his beach house in La Jolla, Calif., Hannes Alfven returned to bed after he got the news. Inside his lab in Buenos Aires, Luis Leloir squirmed uncomfortably as his colleagues toasted him with test tubes and flasks filled with Old Smuggler Scotch. At a restaurant in France, Louis Neel barely bothered to interrupt his lunch. "There are only a few Nobel prizes," he explained, "yet there are many good physicists." The modesty of the 1970 Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry last week was becoming, but less than indicative of their achievements.

Alfven, 62, a Swedish physicist, was cited for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of plasmas--the ionized (electrically charged) gases that make up the bulk of matter in the universe. Ignored at first, his work became important in the late 1940s when the plasma waves he had postulated were detected in the laboratory. Soon his theories may produce a bigger dividend: physicists are convinced that plasmas offer the only practical means of attaining the enormous temperatures (630 million degrees F.) needed for controlled nuclear fusion. Restlessly, Alfven has already expanded into other fields: cosmology (the universe, he contends, is made up of equal quantities of matter and antimatter), science fiction (The Tale of the Big Computer), music (the book for a data-technology opera) and space planning (he is currently campaigning for an unmanned mission to one of the asteroids). His main interest now is investigating how planets are born.

Neel, 65, shares the physics prize with Alfven for his penetrating research into magnetism. In the early 1930s, physicists explained that magnetism in materials like iron is caused by their electrons all spinning in the same direction. Neel contended that there was another form of magnetism in which the electrons of neighboring atoms whirled in opposite directions, thereby all but canceling out the observable field. The existence of this phenomenon, antiferromagnetism, was subsequently confirmed in such substances as manganese salts. Later, Neel discovered still another form of magnetism called ferrimagnetism, in which some of the spins are in opposite directions. Overall, however, there is a preponderance in one direction, thus producing an observable field. Because ferrimagnetic substances are electrically nonconducting--therefore immune to stray currents--they have proved highly useful material for the coating of magnetic tape, computer memory cores and other important Electronic Age components.

Leloir, 64, a Parisian-born Argentine, won the chemistry prize for his pioneer work in unraveling the chemistry of carbohydrates. Although it had long been known that the body breaks down carbohydrates into simpler sugars for energy, it was Leloir who realized in the late 1940s that there was an undiscovered missing link in these vital reactions: organic compounds called sugar nucleotides. Leloir also showed how one of the more complex body sugars, glycogen, is synthesized with the help of sugar nucleotides, stored in the liver and muscles and then made available on demand to produce simpler glucose whenever the body needs energy.

Thomas Carlyle called economics the "dismal science." Paul A. Samuelson has spent nearly a lifetime trying to prove him wrong. As author of possibly the most popular economics text since Das Kapital, the peppery, 55-year-old M.l.T. professor is known for his witty, effortless expositions of the dismal science to countless collegians around the globe. Now in its eighth edition, Samuelson's Economics has sold nearly 3,000,000 copies, has been translated into 21 languages (including Arabic, Serbo-Croatian and Punjabi), and has earned its author several million dollars.

Last week Samuelson added to his honors (and assets) by becoming the second winner of the newly created Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics. The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences specifically cited Samuelson for a 1947 publication, Foundations of Economic Analysis--actually his Harvard Ph.D. thesis--and implicitly recognized his role as one of the principal spokesmen for the New Economics. What grade does New Economist Samuelson give the Nixon Administration? Barely passing. At a press conference last week, he said: Why does Nixon not "rejoin the human race and join the campaign to get the economy moving again?"

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