CHEMISTRY NOBEL IS SHARED BY 3; 2 WIN IN PHYSICS
Author: By Alison Bass, Globe Staff
Date: Thursday, October 15, 1987
Page: 20
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
Two Americans and a Frenchman were named winners yesterday of the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry for shedding light on a crucial problem in biology. The
Nobel Prize in Physics went to two scientists at IBM's Swiss research
laboratory who discovered that certain ceramics can be made into
superconductors.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave the chemistry award to Donald J.
Cram, chemistry professor at the University of California at Los Angeles;
Charles J. Pedersen, a former research chemist at the Du Pont Co.; and Jean-
Marie Lehn, a chemistry professor at the Universite Louis Pasteur in
Strasbourg, France.
Named to receive the top prize for physics were Georg Bednorz of West
Germany and K. Alex Mueller of Switzerland. They were the first to discover
ceramic materials that can conduct electricity with virtually no loss of
energy at unusually high temperatures.
"It really shakes me up," Cram, a 68-year-old native of Brattleboro, Vt.,
told radio station KNX-AM in Los Angeles. "What I'm delighted about is that
the two people with whom I'm sharing it are very fine people."
Pedersen, 83, reached at his home in Salem, N.J., told reporters: "I've
never had an experience like this. It is a great honor." Pedersen, who is
retired and suffers from Parkinson's disease, was pleased that the honor came
during his lifetime, said Herman Schroeder, former director of research for Du
Pont and a close family friend.
Lehn, 48, speaking from his Strasbourg laboratory, said he was "a bit
surprised, but very pleased."
Pedersen, Cram and Lehn were recognized for discovering some of the
mechanisms by which organic molecules recognize and fit into one another
''like a key fits a lock," academy officials said.
The work of the three has enormous implications in biology and medicine,
since all natural enzymes catalyze important biochemical reactions by
recognizing and binding to other molecules in the body.
The findings of Bednorz and Mueller sparked a feverish race among
scientists worldwide to find other compounds that are superconducting at ever
higher temperatures.
Previous metal superconductors worked only at extremely cold temperatures,
limiting them to a few expensive, esoteric uses.
Practical superconductors may make possible a broad range of applications,
from ultrafast computers to trains that fly along at 300 miles per hour,
levitating on a cushion of magnetic force.
"It's a great day for me," a smiling Mueller, 60, told reporters in Naples,
where he was participating in a physics symposium.
"I felt like I was in the clouds, like my feet were not touching the
ground," Bednorz, 37, said at a news conference at the International Business
Machines Corp. laboratory in Switzerland.
This is the second straight year that the physics prize has gone to
scientists from IBM's Zurich lab. Last year, IBM's Gerd Binnig and Heinrich
Rohrer shared the prize with a West German scientist for designing the
scanning tunneling microscope.
It is also the third consecutive year that a German has won or shared the
physics prize and the second that an American has shared the chemistry prize.
Each Nobel carries a prize of $340,000, which is divided among the laureates
in each field.
In announcing the chemistry award, the academy said the work by Cram,
Pederson and Lehn "laid the foundation for what is today one of the most
active and expanding fields of chemical research" -- an area known as
''supramolecular chemistry."
A crucial part of the body's defense system, for instance, is the ability
of antibodies to recognize invading agents such as bacteria or viruses, which
can then be destroyed by other molecules in the immune system.
But scientists do not yet know exactly how such molecules recognize and
bind to each other to stop the spread of disease.
American scientists have been represented overwhelmingly among the winners
of Nobel Prizes since they were first awarded in 1901. US citizens have won 52
of the 129 physics awards and 31 of the 86 chemistry prizes.
Superconductivity itself has a long Nobel Prize history. It was discovered
in 1911 by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who received the Nobel
Prize in 1913. But in recent years, progress in the field, which focused
primarily on metallic compounds, had been maddeningly slow.
"I think a lot of people in this field are delighted that Bednorz and
Mueller won," said Robert J. Cava, a member of the team at AT&T Bell
Laboratories who has also pursued new superconducting compounds. "They did the
breakthrough thinking and we're all following the path that they laid out for
us."
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