From Dying Stars to Living Cells

By Frederic Golden

Another U.S. sweep of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences

When Dynamite Inventor Alfred Nobel created his great prizes at the turn of the century, he stipulated that they be given for notable achievement in the previous year. The Swedish jurors have long since abandoned that encumbering rule because it has led to some embarrassing decisions, such as a 1926 award for discovery of a "cancer causing" parasite. No one, however, could accuse the Swedes of haste or incaution last week when they completed this year's science awards, worth $192,000 apiece.

The 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, 73, of the University of Chicago and William A. Fowler, 72, of Caltech for their work on the evolution of stars. The winner of the chemistry prize was Stanford's Henry Taube, 67, for his elucidation of the basic mechanisms of complex chemical reactions. Scientists agreed that the honors were long overdue. Including the previously announced medicine prize, this year's list of laureates gave the U.S. its first clean sweep in the Nobel science prizes since 1976 and continued four decades of American domination of the awards.

Chandrasekhar, who got word of the award on his birthday, is a slight, 5-ft. 6-in. scholar with a shy manner, a preference for black suits and a love of Tolstoy, Mozart and Beethoven. Born in Lahore, then part of India, to a prominent Hindu family (his physicist uncle, Sir Chandrasekhara Raman, won a Nobel in 1930), Chandra, as he is called by physicists everywhere, began the work for which he was cited more than a half-century ago. In 1930, when he was only 19 years old, he whiled away the long shipboard hours on his way to begin studies at Cambridge's Trinity

College by doing calculations on a problem troubling astronomers.

They already knew that a star of about the sun's mass would collapse after its nuclear fires died out and shrink to an earth-size object called a white dwarf. But what would happen if the dying star were significantly larger than the middling-size sun?

Chandra's then astonishing answer: the collapse would continue, creating even stranger objects whose interiors contained matter unlike anything on earth. Absurd, sniffed Sir Arthur Eddington, Britain's most eminent astronomer, who mockingly said that Chandra's equations pointed to a star whose surface gravity would be so powerful as to preclude even the escape of light. Today the study of black holes, as such invisible stars are now called, along with kindred neutron stars, is one of the liveliest topics in astrophysics. Chandra, who came to the U.S. in 1936, says wryly of the belated recognition: "Usually my work has become appreciated only after some length of time."

Unlike Chandrasekhar, whom he regards as his idol, the Pittsburgh-born Fowler is cherubically gregarious, almost as devoted to his beloved Pirates and old locomotives as to physics. His chief scientific interest: the nuclear reactions deep within the fiery interiors of stars. Chandra's work together with Fowler's, says University of Chicago Astronomy Professor John Simpson, "formed the basis for making models of the death and birth of stars." By the 1950s, astronomers realized that most of the universe's 90-odd elements, or types of atoms, had been "cooked" not at the moment of the universe's explosive birth but inside the hot furnaces of subsequently formed stars in fusion processes similar to those that occur when a hydrogen bomb detonates. But as they gazed out upon the heavens with their telescopes and spectrometers, astronomers found that the composition of stars varied enormously, containing different atoms and in different proportions.

Why were there so many variations?

In 1957 Fowler, together with three colleagues, Sir Fred Hoyle and Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, provided the answer. In exquisite detail, they showed how the stellar furnaces forge progressively heavier atoms out of lighter ones. They provided a number of pathways for the fusion reactions, including one in which a giant star eventually explodes in a super nova and unleashes forces powerful enough to create the heaviest known naturally occurring elements such as uranium. Fowler subsequently refined these ideas so he could predict exactly what ele ments would be found in a particular type of star. These predictions have been al most precisely matched by astronomical observations.

Taube, who was born to a day laborer's family in Neudorf, Saskatchewan, and moved to the U.S. in 1937, celebrated his award at the regular hamburger and beer party he gives for his students (they provided champagne). With characteristic modesty, he insisted that there were "so many deserving people" who might have been given the prize. But colleagues vehemently disagreed, pointing out that he had totally dominated inorganic chemistry with the originality of his insights into chemical reactions, especially those between metals.

Known as electron-transfer reactions, they involve a kind of horsetrading, in which molecules exchange some of their electrons.

Electrons are the glue that holds the atoms in a molecule together.

Says Taube: "When reactions take place, you are transferring the glue from one molecule to an other. As a result, the molecules involved sometimes totally reorganize and form entirely new molecules or substances." Through a series of ingenious experiments Taube showed that certain atoms or molecules can serve as bridges for this exchange of electrons. His work provided the first concrete models of what takes place during these reactions.

Taube's work, already widely honored in his own field, has important industrial applications for the development of agents, called catalysts, which help speed up reactions to produce commercial chemicals. It is also becoming increasingly significant in understanding how enzymes work in regulating basic biological pro cesses, including such critical events as the development of living cells. But as with the other winners, it was his early prescience, not his practicality, that the Nobel board looked back to honor.

-- By Frederic Golden.

Reported by Mary Johnson/Stockholm and J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago

With reporting by Mary Johnson; J. Madeleine Nash This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.