Skeptics' Prize

Honors for doubting Thomases

Late into the night, veteran Associated Press Science Writer Rennie Taylor discussed the question with his friend, A.P. Science Editor Alton Blakeslee. To whom--or what--should Taylor bequeath his estate? That night the American Tentative Society was conceived. Its goal: to encourage independent scientific thinking. Why "tentative"? Because, as Society President Blakeslee explains, "all ideas should be regarded as tentative. Otherwise we become prisoners of yesterday, stuck with dogmas."

Last week, some 15 years later, the society took its first big step toward encouraging its iconoclastic objective. Dipping into the $300,000 left to it by Taylor, who died in 1973, the society honored six scientists with its first $2,500 awards. All are original thinkers whose doubting-Thomas attitude led to revolutionary developments in their fields:

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who as an astronomy student at Cambridge University in 1967 noticed the precisely timed signals from what were later identified as pulsars.

Astronomer Frank Drake, who in 1960 with Project Ozma began the first serious quest for extraterrestrial intelligent life.

Edwin Land, the self-taught genius who invented instant photography.

Norman Shumway, Stanford heart-transplant pioneer, and his colleague, Immunologist Rose Payne, who kept the new hearts from being rejected.

J. Tuzo Wilson, the Canadian geophysicist who championed continental drift and plate tectonics long before many of his conservative colleagues would even consider these theories.

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