The Prize

In 1955, using the University of California's big new atom smasher at Berkeley, Physicists Emilio Segre and Owen Chamberlain identified an elusive subatomic particle that had long been postulated but never found: the antiproton. Their discovery, honored four years later by a Nobel Prize, helped confirm the existence of "antimatter"--the strange substance that has many physical properties exactly opposite to those of "normal" matter. Now, to the astonishment of the scientific world, a fellow physicist has filed suit against Segre and Chamberlain, accusing them of stealing a key idea that led to their significant discovery and Nobel Prize.

The $125,000 action was brought in the California courts by Oreste Piccioni, a physics professor at the San Diego branch of the University of California who had visited Berkeley in the 1950s and discussed with Segre and Chamberlain how the antiproton might be detected. Piccioni contends that he originated the complex detection system that was crucial to the experiment, and that Segre and Chamberlain initially agreed to let him participate in the work. Subsequently, he charges, they reneged on the agreement, used his system anyway, and then denied him proper credit when they got favorable results. Why had he stalled so long before pressing his claim? The volatile, Italian-born Piccioni says that he has always wanted to set the record straight, but that Segre--who was also born in Italy--and Chamberlain are such powerful figures in the physics hierarchy that anyone challenging them might have risked losing access to research grants. Moreover, Piccioni charges, they threatened to bar him from the Berkeley laboratory if he made public his claims.

So far, Segre and Chamberlain have remained silent, but several of their colleagues pointed out that both men acknowledged Piccioni's "very useful suggestions" in their original report and later cited his contributions in their Nobel lectures. In any case, whatever the merit of Piccioni's charges, many scientists agree that he has touched on an increasingly troublesome issue. In an era of big science, more often than not a major discovery is the work of many minds. Can the Nobel Committee properly single out one man--or even a few* --for the lion's share of the honors? The question is particularly pertinent for high-energy physics. In 1964, for example, it took no fewer than 33 scientists, operating the large Brookhaven atom smasher, to discover another fleeting bit of matter--the omega-minus particle.

Pell-Mell Rush. The increasing number of scientists involved in research projects has helped to ensure a hot, often ungentlemanly competition for the Nobel Prize and the other honors that follow in its wake. This is apparent in the pell-mell rush to publish results of experiments--some of them later proved faulty--in scientific journals just to establish priority of discovery. In his unusually candid book The Double Helix, Nobel Prizewinner James Watson confessed to another questionable practice. Determined to unravel the complex structure of the DNA molecule before Caltech's famed chemist Linus Pauling got to it, Watson and one of his co-winners, Francis Crick, deliberately withheld information from Pauling that might have helped their rival in the race for the Nobel.

Some researchers have begun to react against what Biologist Paul Saltman, vice chancellor of the University of California (San Diego), calls a "Sammy Glickish approach to science." Younger scientists especially are rejecting "the scramble for prestige and glory," says Molecular Biologist Harrison Echols of Berkeley. Recently Howard Temin and David Baltimore avoided that scramble by insisting on reporting their identical but independently reached discoveries --showing that genetic material can replicate itself in other than the conventionally accepted way--in back-to-back papers in the same issue of Nature. Perhaps most surprising of all, even some Nobel laureates are questioning the importance attached to the prize. Says Caltech's Max Delbruck: "By some random selection procedure, you pick out a person, and you make him an object of a personality cult. After all, what does it amount to?"

* Under Nobel rules, the prize can be shared by no more than three people.

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