Tales Of Patience and Triumph

Medicine

"We are still harvesting the fruits of what they determined almost 40 years ago." So said a Nobel official in Stockholm last week of the two Americans who won the prize for medicine for their pioneering work in drug therapy. It was an uncommon break with tradition: the Nobel committee recognized researchers in the commercial drug industry. Winners Gertrude Elion, 70, and George Hitchings, 83, are both affiliated with Burroughs Wellcome in North Carolina, and Sir James Black, 64, is now at King's College School of Medicine and Dentistry.

In the 1940s, Elion and Hitchings, who have worked together since 1945, found that the genes of healthy cells process information differently from those of cancerous cells and disease-causing bacteria and viruses. By targeting these cells and microbes with drugs that interfere with replication, they established an approach that led to new drug therapies for many diseases, including leukemia and malaria. In 1957 Elion and Hitchings developed the drug, azathioprine, that controlled rejection in organ transplants. That led to the development of acyclovir for the treatment of herpes and AZT, the only drug approved by the Federal Government for AIDS.

While the Americans concentrated on the inner workings of the cell, Black focused on "docking ports" used by chemical messengers moving between cells. In 1964 he developed a revolutionary drug for heart disease that blocks the effect of natural stimulants like adrenaline on special nerve receptors, or beta receptors, thus preventing the heart rate from increasing with damaging speed. Black's beta blocker is now widely used to treat heart disease and hypertension. Said Black with a laugh when he received the potentially overstimulating news: "I wished I had had my beta blocker handy."

Chemistry

For weeks the scientific rumor mills had anticipated the winners of the chemistry prize. So when Robert Huber, the managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry near Munich, received his telephone call from Sweden, the champagne was readily at hand. Huber, 51, and fellow West Germans Johann Deisenhofer, 45, and Hartmut Michel, 40, were recognized for revealing the "atom by atom" structure of the molecule at the heart of photosynthesis, the process by which sunlight is converted into the chemical energy that fuels plant and animal life.

In biochemistry, function often follows form. Using sophisticated X-ray techniques to analyze the atomic structure of life's most basic components, scientists have been able to unlock astonishing mysteries. Focusing on a bacterium that uses a simple method of photosynthesis, Michel concentrated on a cluster of proteins that spans the organism's outer membrane, called the photosynthetic reaction center. These so-called membrane-bound proteins are like plants themselves: antennae protrude from cell surfaces, anchors hold them in the membrane, and rootlike tentacles reach into the cell's interior. But the molecules resisted study.

In 1982, however, Michel was able to isolate the protein cluster from the membrane and concentrate it into its crystalline form. For the next three years, at Huber's direction, the researchers used X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of the protein cluster's 10,000 atoms. The laborious research opens the possibility that someday scientists will be able to produce solar cells that mimic the design of photosynthesizing molecules.

Physics

"I'm so old I can remember when the Dead Sea was only sick," cracked the ebullient director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. Leon Lederman, 66, had a premonition that there would be good news from Stockholm this year. "This is the year for the geriatric Nobel Prize," he said -- and he was right. Lederman, along with former Columbia University colleagues Melvin Schwartz, 55, now the head of his own computer firm in California, and Jack Steinberger, 67, a research physicist in Geneva, Switzerland, won the award for their groundbreaking contributions to particle physics. In 1962 the three developed techniques to capture neutrinos and use them to discover other particles in the subatomic world, including the muon neutrino, believed to be one of the dozen building blocks of matter.

Physicists had long speculated about the existence of neutrinos, particles that appear in all radioactive processes. Because the elusive neutrino is essentially without mass or charge, it was difficult to pin down. Lederman calculates that a single neutrino has only a fifty-fifty chance of being deflected when streaming through 100 million miles of solid steel. The young physicists used the powerful accelerator in Brookhaven, L.I., to produce and aim a flood of protons at a beryllium metal target. The stupendous collisions of protons slamming into the barrier shattered atomic nuclei, releasing new particles, including neutrinos. The particles then hit a wall of steel that absorbed all but a single beam, which carried billions of neutrinos into a + detector. Studying the debris at 3 o'clock one morning, Lederman found the footprints of a high-energy muon. Not only had the physicists developed a useful tool for exploring matter by means of neutrino streams, but they had also discovered a new animal in what physicists call "the subatomic zoo."

For all his high spirits, Lederman was awed by receiving the prize. "There's something spooky about the Nobel," he mused. "It has its own special aura because of earlier winners, like Einstein and Enrico Fermi, whom we venerate."

Economics

When France changed direction during the mid-1980s and turned many of its nationalized industries back to private hands, no one should have felt more pleased than Maurice Allais, France's most eminent economist. During the country's postwar reconstruction, when French economists of nearly every stripe endorsed nationalization, Allais took exception. Still, he became an influential contrarian voice in the making of France's industrial policy, arguing that even state-run monopolies are most efficient when they set prices and allocate resources according to market forces.

For his many theories and the densely mathematical formulas that support them, Allais, 77, last week won the Nobel Prize for Economics. "It took a long time to investigate him because of the great volume and complexity of his works," said Assar Lindbeck, chairman of the awarding committee for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Allais's breakthrough opus, In Search of an Economic Discipline, published in 1943, runs 900 pages and has never been translated.

The son of a Parisian dairy-store owner, Allais first earned an engineering degree but switched to economics after witnessing the spectacle of the Great Depression. "In 1933 I was in the U.S., which was then a graveyard of factories," he says. "I needed to understand why." After distinguishing himself as an economics student at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines in Paris, Allais worked for seven years in the French mine administration and in 1944 became a professor at his alma mater.

Allais developed theories on many economic relationships, including the connection of interest rates, growth and investment. But most influential were his formulas that showed how a monopoly could set prices for such products as coal or electricity at a level that would be best for society.

Though Allais is relatively unknown outside France, his ideas have gone ^ forth and prospered through the efforts of his students. Yet Allais had thought the prize would forever elude him. "I've been mentioned many times down the years," he said at his home in suburban Paris, "but I gave up thinking I would win it." Allais sees the award as a rebuke of official retirement policies, which forced him to give up teaching nearly a decade ago. Said he: "I'm happy to have the Nobel Prize to show how absurd this situation is."