NOBELS FOR THREE AREA SCIENTISTS
HARVARD PROFESSOR WINS FOR CHEMISTRY; TWO FROM MIT FOR PHYSICS

Author: By David L. Chandler, Globe Staff

Date: Thursday, October 18, 1990
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

Henry W. Kendall and Jerome I. Friedman of MIT, along with Richard E. Taylor of Stanford University, will share the prize in physics, worth about $700,000, for work in the late 1960s that proved the existence of quarks, the smallest known component of matter.

Elias James Corey of Harvard won the prize in chemistry for basic research that revolutionized the ability of chemists to create synthetic versions of organic chemicals in the laboratory. His work made it possible to make many important pharmaceuticals more easily and cheaply and improved the theoretical understanding of how these chemicals work.

Corey learned about his $700,000 prize from a graduate student as he arrived at his laboratory yesterday morning. "It was a surprise," said Corey, who has been rumored to be a Nobel candidate for years. Winning the Nobel Prize, he said, "is a statistically improbable event for any scientist. So many good scientists don't get it. I've always maintained a solid skepticism, for which I'm still not sorry."

Corey added that he believes the prize was given not to him personally but to the whole field of synthetic chemistry, which he developed and which he called yesterday "an incredibly beautiful intellectual field."

He won the award for a lifetime of work, most importantly for developing a now-widespread method for analyzing the component parts of a natural molecule to see how the molecule can be put together synthetically.

Kendall, 64, a professor of physics, is widely known for his work as chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit organization that has been highly critical of the nuclear power industry and the "star wars" defense program.

Kendall said he was "overwhelmed" when the phone call announcing the award came at 5 a.m. yesterday. Because he had done the research 20 years ago, he said, "this came as quite a surprise."

Friedman, 60, who was attending a meeting in Texas, said that when his wife phoned to give him the news, "it was so unbelievable I literally thought I was still sleeping and that this was part of my dream."

With the latest awards, a total of 23 MIT professors and alumni have won Nobel prizes.

The three winners in physics were honored for work that revealed an internal structure inside what were thought to be "fundamental" particles of matter -- the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus of an atom.

The small nuggets of matter they detected turned out to match theoretical predictions about the existence of basic building blocks called quarks, from which the basic subatomic particles are built.

But even the theorists who concocted the idea never expected such particles to be discovered. When Murray Gell-Mann of the California Institute of Technology constructed the theory and coined the name quark, Kendall said, ''these were only considered a kind of mathematical crutch having no genuine existence, although very helpful in the theory he developed. They were not believed to be real things."

Thus, when Kendall, Friedman and Taylor conducted their experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a huge "atom smasher," the results were ''quite surprising," Kendall said. "Surprising to us, surprising to the theoretical physics community." It showed that quarks "in fact existed inside the atomic nucleus and in fact formed the basic building blocks of the neutrons and protons."

Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas and a previous Nobel laureate in physics, said the Kendall-Friedman-Taylor experiment "was really a very fundamental experiment in the history of elementary particle physics." Despite its importance, he said, "it wasn't realized at the time how fundamental it was." It was only over time that physicists began to accept that this experiment was the discovery of the quark, the most basic particle of matter now known.

Even the scientists doing the experiment did not immediately realize its significance, Kendall told a news conference at MIT. "It was not a sudden event like Archimedes discovering the law of buoyancy and jumping out of his tub shouting 'Eureka!' " The evidence for quarks "slowly came out of the pattern of data we were accumulating" over a period of years.

Robert J. Birgenau, head of MIT's physics department, said: "Obviously we're ecstatic about this prize here at MIT. But we're ecstatic not just
because it honors a great intellectual accomplishment, but because both Jerry and Henry are outstanding as human beings, and they provide great examples that you can be both a great scientist and a great humanist as well.

"They're outstanding teachers, they have a commitment to increasing the number of minorities in physics. Henry has a leading role in a variety of social causes. It is possible to be a real human being and a great scientist," Birgenau said.

Kendall helped found the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1969 and has been its chairman since 1973. The group played a prominent role in challenging claims made by the nuclear power industry and the Atomic Energy Commission about the safety of nuclear power. Its members' testimony at the long and grueling hearings on the Pilgrim power plant in Plymouth in the early 1970s formed the basis for a British documentary called "Power Struggle." Kendall also served as a consultant to the antinuclear movie "The China Syndrome."

The independent organization also played a prominent role in challenging the technical feasibility of President Reagan's "star wars" plan for an orbiting system of satellites to defend American cities against nuclear attack. More recently, the group has focused its attention on the consequences of the "greenhouse effect," which many scientists believe is raising temperatures worldwide.

Kendall may be one of the wealthiest people ever to win a Nobel Prize. He and a brother were the major shareholders of a family business, Kendall Co., makers of bandages and hospital equipment, which was sold to Colgate-Palmolive Co. in 1972 for $512 million. They founded a charitable organization, the Henry P. Kendall Foundation, that is one of the largest philanthropic groups in New England.

Kendall, a pilot, mountain climber and scuba diver, was described by Kurt Gottfried, a close friend and physicist, in an interview last year as the kind of resourceful person you would want to have along "if you find yourself lost in Alaska with just a knife."

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