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Some researchers have begun to react against what Biologist Paul Saltman, vice chancellor of the University of California (San Diego), calls a "Sammy Glickish approach to science." Younger scientists especially are rejecting "the scramble for prestige and glory," says Molecular Biologist Harrison Echols of Berkeley. Recently Howard Temin and David Baltimore avoided that scramble by insisting on reporting their identical but independently reached discoveries —showing that genetic material can replicate itself in other than the conventionally accepted way—in back-to-back papers in the same issue of Nature. Perhaps most surprising of all, even some Nobel laureates are questioning the importance attached to the prize. Says Caltech's Max Delbruck: "By some random selection procedure, you pick out a person, and you make him an object of a personality cult. After all, what does it amount to?"
* Under Nobel rules, the prize can be shared by no more than three people.