GERMAN CHEMISTS AND US PHYSICISTS GET NOBEL PRIZES

Author: By David L. Chandler, Globe Staff

Date: Thursday, October 20, 1988
Page: 8
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

The three Americans, Leon M. Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, won the Nobel Prize in physics for their work on particle physics in the early 1960s. The work included the discovery of one type of neutrino, a very elusive subatomic particle.

That discovery, according to others in the field, profoundly affected scientists' understanding of the way the fundamental building blocks of the
universe -- subatomic particles, from which all matter is made -- are related to each other.

The three West Germans, Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber and Hartmut Michel, won the prize in chemistry for deciphering the structure of molecules that are the key to photosynthesis -- the process that converts the sun's energy into a chemical form that sustains virtually all life on Earth.

Their work was done at the Max Planck Institute in West Germany in 1982. Deisenhofer now works at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Dallas.

This discovery was "a really major advance on several fronts," Samuel Kaplan, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois, said in an interview yesterday. The new understanding of photosynthesis made possible by their work, he said, was not only important theoretically but also could have a significant impact on such varied fields as agriculture, medicine and energy production.

Colleagues of both teams of scientists called the awards "well deserved" and said recognition of the six scientists by the Nobel committee had not been unexpected.

The work that led to the physics award began with planning at Columbia University in New York City in the early 1960s and was continued at the Brookhaven National Accelerator Laboratory on Long Island.

The research was completed more than 25 years ago, and the scientists have ''long deserved" the Nobel Prize, said a fellow Nobel laureate, Sheldon Glashow, a physicist at Harvard University. Nobel Prizes are often awarded long after the winning work is completed, he noted, adding that the Brookhaven team "was at the top of most people's list" of deserving candidates.

Lederman, in an interview with a wire service reporter, said science is enjoyable in its own right and called the award "icing on the cake." He added that the telephone call from the Swedish Academy of Sciences informing him of the award yesterday was "a nice way to be awakened."

Lederman, 66, is now director of Fermilab, a national laboratory in Batavia, Ill., that includes the world's most powerful particle accelerator, or atom-smasher. Schwartz, 55, formerly a professor at Columbia and Stanford universities, now runs a computer communications company in Mountain View, Calif.

Steinberger, 67, also an American, now works in Geneva at the laboratories of CERN, a French-language acronym for the European Center for Nuclear Research. CERN is building an atom-smasher that will soon take Fermilab's place as the world's most powerful.

Lederman described his research as part of "discovering the kind of world in which we live. The world is made up of particles. All we want to know is how the world works."

Neutrinos are the tiniest and most elusive subatomic particles known, having no electrical charge and, most scientists believe, no mass at all.

They are the most abundant particles in the universe, and billions of them race through every square inch of the Earth every second. But they are so unaffected by ordinary matter that only a handful interact at all with anything they pass through.

Scientists have had a hard time, therefore, devising ways to detect these shadowy particles. It was for a method devised in the early 1960s at Brookhaven National Accelerator Laboratory on Long Island in New York, and the work they did with it, that the scientists were honored yesterday.

The method bore fruit with the discovery of a second type of neutrino. The first had been discovered a few years earlier, and a third has been discovered since then.

"The discovery of the second neutrino was the key to it all," said Harvard University's Sheldon Glashow, recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics. That discovery was "the first real sign of the family structure of subatomic particles," he said.

"Now we know that these particles come in families," he said, and much of the work that has been done since then in particle physics has consisted of filling in the family trees of particles. "That was the start of the rolling of a very big ball of wax," Glashow said.

"In 1961 we discovered a neutrino: a basic particle, a most difficult one to see, because it has no electric charge," Lederman said yesterday, according to a wire service report. "In the process, we started a sort of cottage industry in identifying basic particles, the quarks and so on. Now there are hot and cold running neutrinos all over the place."

The citation from the Swedish Academy of Sciences said in part, "The contribution now rewarded consisted among other things of transforming the ghostly neutrino into an active tool of research." Since the team's work, neutrinos have been used as a way of analyzing everything from the structure of the atomic nucleus to the energy level of an exploding star, or supernova, that was discovered last year.

"Neutrino beams can reveal the hard inner parts of a proton in a way not
dissimilar to that in which X-rays reveal a person's skeleton," the Nobel citation said.

Alan Guth, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of yesterday's award: "I was very pleased. It was very well deserved."

That knowledge could have profound effects in several fields, scientists said yesterday. It could lead to hardier, herbicide-resistant plants for agriculture, greater understanding of how diseases invade the body's cells and better methods for delivering medicines, and more efficient solar energy.

The researchers grew crystals of a protein from the cell walls of a type of bacteria that is capable of photosynthesis. They wanted to analyze the exact structure of that protein, which starts the process of converting sunlight to chemical energy.

Understanding its structure revealed how the chemical is used by the bacteria to harvest the sun's energy.

This understanding "has proven to be the model" of how photosynthesis generally works in all plants, said Samuel Kaplan, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois.

All plants on Earth use photosynthesis to draw the energy they need to survive, and all animals derive their energy by eating, directly or indirectly, plants that contain the chemical products of photosynthesis.

The protein analyzed by the West German team of Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber and Hartmut Michel came from something called the "reaction center," which "is where the primary photosynthetic event takes place," Kaplan said.

In this reaction center, he said, "an electron is ejected from a chlorophyll molecule. That's how the energy of sunlight is ultimately transformed into chemical energy."

That reaction, Kaplan said, is "the basis of life on this planet."

Other researchers have continued the work that was started by Deisenhofer, Huber and Michel. Some have applied it to crops in order to develop strains that are resistant to the herbicides used to control weeds. Some of these herbicides work by interfering with photosynthesis.

By understanding the chemistry of photosynthesis, Kaplan said, "it's been possible to determine the nature of that resistance and develop crops that are resistant to these herbicides," making them more effective.

The methods used to determine the structure of that particular protein -- the largest protein whose structure has ever been analyzed atom by atom -- could have other applications.

The protein was from a cell membrane. Cell membranes are where all interactions between a cell and its environment take place, including the entry of viruses or biologically necessary chemicals into the cell, Kaplan noted.

Further research using the same methods could lead to better understanding of how diseases affect cells and of how to combat them with medicines, Kaplan said.

"The understanding of the detailed structure of important biological molecules that these scientists are providing is opening up new avenues for prevention and treatment of disease, such as precisely designed drugs and vaccines," said Purnell W. Choppin, head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Dallas, where Deisenhofer now works.

The research could also lead to technology that would alleviate both the energy crisis and the problem of global warming, some scientists said. By understanding the chemistry of photosynthesis, it may become possible to harness that reaction to produce more efficient solar power, eliminating the need for some burning of fossil fuel.

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