NOBELS GO TO BRITON, AMERICAN

Author: By Dick Soderlund Associated Press

Date: Tuesday, October 19, 1982
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER

Wilson, the 46th American to receive the physics award, is a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He was born in Waltham, Mass. Klug, who was born in South Africa, is a researcher into molecular biology at Cambridge University in England.

The Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Wilson, 46, for his theoretical work on the so-called "critical phenomena" of matter and its behavior at the point when it changes form, such as when water starts to boil. It said his findings illustrated "in a definite and profound way" that all matter at the critical point behaves in much the same way.

Klug, 56, for 20 years a researcher at the molecular laboratory of the university's Medical Research Council, was honored primarily for his research on genes and the proteins linked to them. He also was cited for the development of ways to use the electron microscope to examine crystals.

His studies "will, in a longer perspective, undoubtedly be of crucial importance for our understanding of the nature of cancer," the awards committee said in its announcement.

Committees of the Swedish Academy award the prizes, which, like all the Nobel prizes this year, carry a $157,000 award. The physics and chemistry prizes were the first awarded this year to individuals.

Wilson, eldest son of a retired chemistry professor at Harvard University, said he would have expected to share the prize with Michael E. Fisher, a colleague at Cornell, and Leo P. Kadanoff of the University of Chicago.

Both were mentioned in the academy's announcement, but it said Wilson's work provided the problem-solving breakthrough that eluded Fisher, Kadanoff and other leading researchers.

The problem of "critical phenomena" has long been studied by physicists and has yielded several previous Nobel prizes, notably to Lev Landau, a Soviet scientist, in 1962 and to Lars Onsager, a Norwegian-American who received the chemistry award in 1968.

Wilson has described in mathematical terms the broader properties of changes that occur in physical systems at certain critical temperatures, including large systems as well as quarks, which are now thought to be the fundamental building blocks of all matter.

Born in Johannesburg, Klug has done most of his work with combinations of nucleic acids and proteins, the key substances of life.

His work was built on research into the structure of large biological molecules by Max Perutz and John Kendrew, researchers at Cambridge. The two developed methods of studying the molecular structure of proteins by X-ray diffraction and were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1962.

With his own sophisticated version of an electron sweep microscope, Klug managed to "look around the corner" and get a three-dimensional picture of the DNA spiral in each cell, showing it to be wired around a protein molecule.

"His technique is based on an ingenious combination of electron microscopy with principles from diffraction methods," the Nobel committee said. He showed that mathematics can be used to amplify as well as clarify two-dimensional electron microscope pictures of biological objects that otherwise would be impossible to see, thus lending them a three-dimensional scope, the committee said.

The science prizes were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite. The recipient of the literature prize probably will be announced Thursday, a day after the recipient of the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in economics is announced. The economics prize was established by the Riksbank, Sweden's central bank.

All prizes will be presented on Dec. 10, the 86th anniversary of Nobel's death.

TOLBER;10/18,18:35 MFEENE;10/20,13 B07795004