Genes, Pulsars and Slavery

For some time now, American science has been falling out of favor -- with talented young people who spurn it, press commentators who slam it and congressional budget makers who squeeze it. But if the Nobel Prizes are any indication, the U.S. research community still has plenty of past glory to celebrate. In a typical near-sweep, six of eight winners in science and economics are American citizens, and one of the others got the prize for work done in the U.S.

MEDICINE/PHYSIOLOGY British-born Richard Roberts, 50, now of New England Biolabs, and Phillip Sharp, 49, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won for their 1977 discovery of "junk DNA." As the cell's master molecule, DNA carries the blueprints needed to make proteins. Roberts and Sharp found that genes -- the subdivisions corresponding to different proteins -- are usually not single sections of DNA, as once believed, but discrete chunks, interrupted by stretches of nonsense DNA that seem to have no function. In protein making, only the pieces of meaningful DNA are copied and then spliced together. The splicing can go awry, producing faulty proteins and genetic diseases or, on rare occasions, improved proteins that enable evolution to take place.

CHEMISTRY Co-winner Kary Mullis, 48, was at Cetus Corp., a California biotech firm, when he developed a technique called PCR (polymerase chain reaction) in the 1970s. PCR enables chemists to take a bit of DNA from a cell and make limitless copies of the molecule. PCR-amplified DNA has been used to provide material for gene-therapy experiments, to convict rapists and, yes, even to make copies of DNA fragments from ancient fossils -- a concept taken to its logical conclusion in the movie Jurassic Park.

The other chemistry winner, Canadian Michael Smith, 61, of the University of British Columbia, discovered how to cause mutations at specific sites on a strand of DNA. The potential applications range from cures for genetic diseases -- in essence, repairing faulty DNA -- to crops engineered to be pest resistant.

PHYSICS Russell Hulse, 42, and Joseph Taylor, 52, both of Princeton, provided the first support for a crucial prediction made by Albert Einstein in his general theory of relativity. The breakthrough came in the early 1970s as they searched the sky for pulsars, the superdense cinders left over when stars explode. Hulse and Taylor were first to find a double pulsar, a pair of objects whirling around each other in tight formation. Einstein's theory decreed that two such heavy bodies orbiting each other should give off gravity waves, which would drain off energy and cause the objects to come together eventually. Sure though, the pulsars are approaching each other at a rate of about 1 mm a year.

ECONOMICS Honored for using modern statistical techniques to study the past, Douglass North, 72, of Washington University in St. Louis, and Robert Fogel, 67, of the University of Chicago, are the first economic historians to win the Nobel. North's research showed that contrary to popular belief, free-market forces alone won't generate growth. Strong political and legal institutions, including courts and patent laws, are needed as well. Fogel contested the orthodox view that slavery was unprofitable in the U.S. and thus destined to fail. He found that it was economically efficient and collapsed only because of the Civil War. Attacked for having an idea that violated political correctness even before the term was invented, Fogel maintained that his theory should not be taken as an endorsement of slavery, which he considered inhumane, whatever its economic merits.