Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 14, 1993 TAG: 9310140025
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN LENGTH: Medium
Two faculty members at Princeton University won the physics prize, for recognizing collapsed twin stars whose evidence of gravity waves supported Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
The chemistry Nobel was awarded to Kary B. Mullis, 48, of La Jolla, Calif., who is writing a book about his discovery, and Michael Smith, 61, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
The winners of the physics prize were Princeton's Russell A. Hulse, 42, and Joseph H. Taylor Jr., 52. Each Nobel Prize carries an award worth $825,000, to be split between the winners.
Mullis went surfing after being told he had won the chemistry prize for inventing a method called the polymerase chain reaction, making it possible to make millions of copies of a single, microscopic strand of DNA within hours.
The technique has become a widespread method of analyzing genetic material. Doctors and scientists use it to diagnose infections, find the causes of hereditary diseases and recover DNA from fossils, an idea carried into fiction in the book and movie "Jurassic Park." Police use the method to trace criminals through the DNA in a drop of blood or strand of hair.
Mullis said that when he came up with the idea in 1983 while driving in northern California, he thought to himself, "This is going to make me a famous guy, if it works."
Smith, director of the University of British Columbia's biotechnology laboratory in Vancouver, shared the chemistry prize for his independent work on discovering the process of site-directed mutagenesis. The technique allows researchers to reprogram a single piece of the genetic code in a strand of DNA to make it perform differently.
Such mutations permit researchers to determine the functions of the myriad proteins in the human body and to engineer new proteins that could be useful in treating or curing disease.
Outside of basic research, Smith's work has applications ranging from improved dishwashing detergents to antibodies that can be tailored to neutralize cancer cells.
Smith, 61, said he was lying in bed, listening to the news, and thinking he should congratulate two friends who won the Nobel Prize in medicine earlier this week, when he heard he had won the chemistry prize. "I was stunned," he said. He is the fourth Canadian chemistry laureate.
The winners of the physics prize were honored for discovering the first binary pulsar, an orbiting pair of aging, collapsed stars called neutron stars.
"My big problem is how to spend this day," Taylor told the Swedish news agency TT as he prepared to leave for Princeton to lecture on "Radio Astronomy and Pulsars." "I would like it to be a normal day but I understand it can't be that way."
He and Hulse built the first radio telescope at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst out of chicken wire and telephone poles. They were using a more sophisticated radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to look at single pulsars in space when they detected something no one else had ever seen.
The pair of orbiting neutron stars 16,000 light-years from Earth became a space laboratory used to test Einstein's prediction: that moving objects emit gravitational waves.
"It already has convinced physicists of the existence of gravitational waves," said Carl Nordling, another member of the academy. "Einstein's theory passed the test with flying colors."
Novelist Toni Morrison won the Nobel literature prize last week, genetics researchers Phillip A. Sharp and Richard J. Roberts shared the medicine prize Monday, and economic historians Robert W. Fogel and Douglass C. North won the economics prize Tuesday. Roberts is a British citizen. The other winners are from the United States.
by CNB