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Columbia's slim, publicity-shy Robert Frederick Loeb (pronounced Lerb), 64, Bard professor of medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, one of the nation's top medical teachers. Son of famed Physiologist Jacques Loeb, discoverer of artificial parthenogenesis, Robert Loeb left the University of Chicago after his sophomore year in 1915 to enter Harvard Medical School, graduated magna cum laude. After residency at Johns Hopkins, Loeb switched to Manhattan's Presbyterian Hospital in 1921, helped administer the first insulin treatment for diabetes, pioneered in electrolyte physiology, discovered the first effective treatment for Addison's Disease. In 1947 he became Presbyterian's medical service director, in the same year Columbia's chief medical professor. No narrow specialist (he belongs to the American Philosophical Society), Loeb is a literate physician whose adroit editing for the last twelve years has kept Cecil's Textbook of Medicine the bible of U.S. medical students.
Georgetown University's courtly Tibor Kerekes (pronounced Care-a-kesh), 66, professor of European history, whose 32 hugely popular years in Washington have been a mere second act to an already crowded career in the maelstrom of World War I Europe. Budapest-born, Kerekes was a Hungarian cavalryman on the Russian front (he later lost an arm), became tutor to the Habsburg family in 1917 and claims he is the only living person who knows the ''true story" of the tragedy at Mayerling. Emigrating to the U.S., he tried orange growing in Florida, wound up in 1927 as assistant professor in Georgetown's then tiny history department (now one of the nation's largest) and chairman in 1947. Though Kerekes is first a teacher ("Because I can that way make contact with youth"), he has stayed close to the Washington pulse, advised congressional committees on Hungary. In 1956 he founded Georgetown's Ethnic Institute, will continue as director in retirement, trying to preserve, on paper at least, the rich native cultures of all peoples in the world "who are in danger of being obliterated."