Five Prizewinners

Standing before their colleagues at the National Science Foundation in Washington last week, five scientists received the annual Ernest Orlando Lawrence Memorial Awards given the AEC for contributions in developing atomic energy. The very name of the prize testified to its significance--for Physicist Lawrence, who died in 1958, was one of the great atomic adventurers. He built the first cyclotron, was one of the scientists who advised President Franklin Roosevelt on the first atomic bomb, organized the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California--still one of the country's prime sources of nuclear research. Winners of the $5,000 tax-free awards:

>> Richard Phillips Feynman, 44, a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech (and winner of the $15,000 Albert Einstein Award in 1954), one of the world's most inventive theoretical physicists. He enriched quantum field theory, helped revise the laws and theories of Einstein and Maxwell to explain the actions of the more than 30 known atomic particles.

>> Herbert Goldstein, 39, now a professor of nuclear engineering at Columbia, wrote a classic textbook on mechanics and made significant contributions to electromagnetic theory while still a young Harvard instructor. More recently, Goldstein has been working on problems involved in shielding nuclear reactors.

>> Andrew A. Benson, 44, of U.C.L.A.'s Laboratory of Nuclear Medicine and Radiation Biology, pioneered the use of carbon 14 as a radioactive tracer in biochemistry. Since then, he has been a leader in the use of radioactive isotopes to study photosynthesis, the process by which plants use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into food.

>> Herbert Frank York, 40, chancellor of the University of California at San Diego, was part of the Oak Ridge team that separated isotopes with electromagnets during World War II; later, as director of the Livermore Radiation Laboratory, he was involved in the supersecret development of thermonuclear weapons. From 1958 to 1961, York was Director of Research and Engineering for the Department of Defense.

>> Anthony L. Turkevich, 45, professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago, is a leading radiochemist who has made important contributions to the still developing field of "activation analysis," a technique for analyzing the content of compounds that have been bombarded with radiation. With activation analysis, Dr. Turkevich eventually hopes to learn the makeup of material on the moon and far-out planets.

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