Science of Reporting

When the atomic age dawned in July 1945 on the New Mexican desert, William L. Laurence of the New York Times was the only reporter there--although security prevented him from printing a word for a month. On Aug. 9, 1945, he rode with the B-29 bomber that obliterated Nagasaki. He once talked Harry Truman into sending a clandestine Government expedition to Africa, in quest of a rare plant from which cortisone could be produced. Leading scientists were more than his informants; they were also his friends, who respected his ability to translate the labyrinthine mysteries of their profession into language that almost anyone could understand. Last week, not without regret, Science Editor Bill Laurence, 75, announced that he is retiring after 33 years on the Times.

All respectable newspapers have science reporters now, but when Laurence's career began, such specialized journalists were rare. Good ones were rarer. Laurence not only reported science with exceptional competence but managed to be something of a scientist himself. A suggestion of his set Squibb Laboratories on the track that led to synthesis of the drug sulfadiazine. Another Laurence idea proposed a new avenue of cancer research. He was intrigued by the action of an antivitamin substance that apparently starved cancer cells, and so impressed was the American Association for the Advancement of Science that Laurence was asked to rewrite his Times story--in suitably abstruse prose--for the association's journal.

Wild Chance. Nothing like science or journalism was in the mind of the young Orthodox Jew who smuggled himself out of Russia in a sauerkraut barrel. He arrived in the U.S. in 1905 with 50-c- and an unnegotiable name: Yehuda-Leib Siew. This he changed to William Laurence--the surname chosen for the street he lived on in Boston. He taught himself a kind of English by comparing Russian and English versions of Shakespearean plays and practiced on unamused trolley conductors: "Holla, sirrah, wouldst prithee halt!"

The wildest of chance deflected Laurence into newspapering. After graduation from Harvard ('12), he earned a law degree at Boston University and went to New York. There, a well-connected Harvard classmate took him to a party at the Long Island home of Herbert Bayard Swope, publisher of the old New York World. A popular party game, "Ask Me Another," was in progress, and to the mortification of the host, who fancied himself as the reigning champion, Laurence won. "Who are you--and why?" demanded Swope of the interloper and offered him a reporter's job on the World.

Chance also governed Laurence's switch to reporting science. Unhappy at the World, which gave him such bizarre assignments as locating a minor Russian spy (Laurence produced the man in 90 minutes flat), in 1930 he asked the New York Times for a job. When the Times offered him one as science reporter on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, Laurence took it.

Open Mind. By 1934, he was savvy enough to ask his friend Albert Einstein a prophetic question: could man unlock the atom's energy? Einstein's reply: "No, never. We are marksmen shooting at birds in the dark, and in a country where there are very few birds."

Laurence did not entirely concur with this prediction, even though it came from Einstein. He has the scientist's habit of storing odd bits of information until they mesh, and by 1939 a pattern had begun to form. Routinely covering a scientific meeting at Columbia University that year, he carefully noted the heavy concentration of nuclear physicists and repeated allusions to "chain reaction," a phrase that meant little to him at the time. But by the following May, a story of his gave Times readers an advance look at the awesome energy packed into an isotope of uranium called U-235.

His grasp of the subject was so comprehensive, in fact, that the War Department drafted him in 1945 for a special mission with the secret Manhattan Project. It was Laurence's duty to write the story of the development of the Abomb, against the day when the Government could release it.

Flown to Tinian on Aug. 5, 1945, to ride over Hiroshima with the crew of the Enola Gay, Laurence was bumped off the plane by Curtis LeMay, had to console himself by talking the copilot into keeping a log. Laurence's 3,000-word story had clearance, but a military censor on Tinian made him boil it down to 500 words--and for some reason the dispatch was then shortstopped on Guam. It never got out at all. The first newspaper accounts of the Hiroshima bomb consisted of stories prewritten by Laurence and others weeks before.

The prospect of retirement does not particularly please Bill Laurence. He plans to add a few more titles to his list of three published books, and he will take a position next year as consultant to the New York Science Museum at the New York World's Fair. But when he steps out of Times harness next week, he will leave the paper's science department far stronger than he found it. Six Timesmen now patrol the beat, all of whom had the chance to watch a pro in action, and all of whom surely gained by the experience.

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