Quickies: Science and Technology Briefs

compiled by Isabella P. Chow

Martin Perl has earned the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the presence of a third, "heavy" electron--dubbed "tau"--that suggested the existence of a third family of particles. With the discovery of the top quark last spring by Frederick Reines and the late Clyde Cowan of University of California at Los Alamos, the entire portrait of the third quark family was completed.

Perl, now a professor at Stanford University, is a graduate of Columbia (Ph.D. 1955), and credits his Columbia Physics mentors I.I. Rabi and Polykarp Kusch for inspiring his research.

The discovery that man-made chemicals can damage the planet's protective ozone layer instigated the most successful global environmental treaty ever: the 1987 Montreal Protocol limiting use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

The 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Paul Crutzen (Max Plank Institute for Chemistry, Germany) who demonstrated in 1970 that airborne nitrogen oxides could damage the ozone gas that floats high in the stratosphere and screens out cancer-causing ultraviolet light.

Mario Molina (M.I.T) and Sherwood Rowland (University of California at Irvine) determined that CFCs are highly efficient ozone destroyers that eat up many times their volume in ozone molecules. Their studies led to a phasing-out of all CFCs and an eventual ban on production by 2006.

Three researchers shared this year's prize in Medicine or Physiology for work that has helped solve the puzzle of how genes control embryonic development in insects and in humans.

Edward Lewis, of the California Institute of Technology, identified the complex of master control genes that organize development of the embryo into the specialized segments--head, abdomen, thorax.

Eric Wieschaus of Princeton University and Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, of the Max Plank Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany, focused on the genes that initiate embryo development. They discovered that most mutations had minor effects on development.

However, sometimes "extraordinary things would happen. There would be no muscles, or the skin would become composed of nervous cells." Nusslein-Volhard and Wieschaus determined that of a fly's 20,000 genes, only 139 are absolutely essential for early development.

The Nobel Prize Internet Archive
Why There is No Nobel Prize in Mathematics