NOBEL WINNER AT HARVARD

Author: By Richard Saltus and Alison Bass, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, October 13, 1989
Page: 1
Section: METRO

Half of the physics award, and of the $469,000 prize money, went to Norman F. Ramsey of Brookline, a homespun, 74-year-old Harvard professor whose achievements run the gamut from research on radar and the atomic bomb in World War II to evaluating the purported "cold fusion" breakthrough this year. Although he is officially retired, the outgoing Ramsey is forging ahead in research on a problem he has studied for more than 40 years bearing on the question of why the universe contains more matter than its mirror image, antimatter.

Sharing in the other half of the physics prize were Hans G. Dehmelt of the University of Washington in Seattle and Wolfgang Paul of the University of Bonn in West Germany. They developed a method for isolating individual electrons and ions and making exact measurements of them.

The winners of the chemistry prize were Thomas Cech of the University of Colorado and Canadian-born Sidney Altman of Yale University. Working independently, they showed that RNA, or ribonucleic acid, a molecule that previously seemed to be merely a messenger of chemical information, has the ability to initiate chemical reactions in the cell and replicate itself. This revelation suggested that RNA may have been the original molecular basis of life on earth.

The Nobel announcement prompted two separate champagne celebrations in Cambridge. At Harvard, Ramsey held a news conference in the physics department, where he received congratulations from two colleagues who had previously won the physics Nobel, and from dozens of students. He raised a glass of champagne and said, "The rest of my day is probably shot anyway" just before he quaffed it.

Across town, Cech, 41, got word of his prize while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was lecturing to undergraduates. The previous night, he had been honored with the Warren Triennial Prize from Massachusetts General Hospital.

The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, adjacent to MIT, held a celebration for Cech. "I am obviously excited about it," he said. "It was something that everybody has been telling me would happen, but I had no way of knowing when."

Cech and Altman cracked a problem that had mystified scientists for years. Previously, it was believed that the first living things must have sprung from genetic blueprints written in DNA -- the molecule that carries the recipes for proteins, which make up all living things. But turning those inert recipes into living organisms would have required a catalyst, a kind of protein able to spark chemical reactions.

Until the 1970s, it was thought that DNA -- and its close relative, RNA -- could encode the information necessary for life but lacked the ability to set off the necessary chemical reactions. By the same token, no catalyst contained information for making proteins. How, therefore, how did life get its start?

"It was a chicken-and-egg phenomenon," explained Cech. "Which came first: information or function?"

What Cech and Altman discovered "came as a complete surprise to scientists," said the Nobel committee: That RNA can not only carry information but can also initiate chemical reactions in much the same way that proteins can.

"This means that RNA came first in evolution -- that the very first organism was a self-replicating RNA that could both store information and pass it along," said Harvey Lodish, a professor of biology at the Whitehead Institute. "This discovery seems to resolve the whole chicken-and-egg thing."

The recipients of the physics award also were dedicated to understanding fundamental principles of nature, said Ramsey at Harvard. What unites the three physicists is that "we have all made very accurate measurements of important quantities" of basic particles and forces, he said. He added that Paul and Dehmelt were good friends and he "couldn't think of another pair of people I would rather share this award with."

Ramsey has been at Harvard since 1947 and is now professor emeritus, although he continues to do research.

The Nobel Prize committee cited him for developing the "separated oscillatory field" method, which he said was a variation on a technique developed by the late physicist I.I. Rabi, under whom he studied at Columbia University.

One fruit of the work was the cesium or atomic clock, which uses highly regular oscillations of parts of the cesium atom to determine the length of a second. It is the most accurate clock in existence and is used worldwide as the fundamental standard of time against which all other timepieces are checked. It is also used to time such operations as joint observations by widely separate radio telescopes and navigational measurements.

In his lengthy career, Ramsay was a member of the MIT "Rad Lab" team that developed 3-centimeter radar, used by the Allies in World War II, and later worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.

In 1982 he headed a panel that studied a videotape that some believed showed that a second gunman was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Ramsey's group concluded that the tape showed no evidence of a second assassin.

Earlier this year, Ramsey led an advisory panel for the Department of Energy that studied the so-called "cold fusion" process developed by electrochemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann. The panel recommended against further government efforts to research the purported phenomenon.

Former students gathered to honor Ramsey said he was an extraordinary teacher whose students "all adore him." Several said he became a father figure to them, both in professional and personal ways.

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