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The Men of the Year for 1960 reflect the wide scientific spectrum, with all its communal interests and all its conflicts. On one side is Harvard's Nobel Prizewinner Robert Woodward, famed for his syntheses of quinine, cholesterol and, in 1960, of chlorophyll. Woodward seeks no practical application for his work, saying: "I'm just fascinated by chemistry. I am in love with it. I don't feel the need for a practical interest to spur me." At an opposite pole is M.I.T.'s Charles Stark Draper, an engineering genius in aeronautics and astronautics who describes himself as nothing more than "a greasy-thumb mechanic type of fellow." And there is William Shockley, who with two colleagues (John Bardeen and Walter Brattain) earned a 1956 Nobel Prize for creating the transistor—that hugely useful little solid-state device that has made possible everything from the fob-sized portable radio to the fantastic instrumentation that the U.S. packs into its space satellites. Shockley, who uses a yellow legal pad instead of a blackboard to draw his scientific diagrams, says candidly: "We simply wouldn't start the research if no application were seen."
There is not, and cannot be, a realistic rule for classifying science or scientists. Physicist Emilio Segrè, a 1959 Nobelman for his explorations into the Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass world of antimatter, is a master of pure theory. Virologist John Enders, with his struggles to understand submicroscopic organisms, has given mankind a powerful biological tool to produce immunization against diseases. Physicist Charles Townes, from his theoretical speculations about microwaves, sired one of the most revolutionary devices of the age: the maser, of immense practical application not only on earth but in seeking out the wonders of the universe. Geneticist George Beadle has broken barriers with his experiments with such a seemingly trifling substance as bread mold. Physicist James Van Allen has searched out the radiation belts that surround the earth, and Physicist Edward Purcell can eloquently discuss the possibility of communicating with creatures in other worlds by means of radio waves.
The Age. Such men, along with scores of their colleagues both in the U.S. and abroad, made 1960 a golden year in the ever advancing Age of Science, which had its tentative beginnings in the Renaissance. In 1620 Britain's Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon, in his Novum Organum (New Instrument), wrote: "Man, by the fall lost his empire over creation, which can be partially recovered, even in this life, by the arts and sciences." The 340 years that have passed since Novum Organum have seen far more scientific change than all the previous 5,000 years.
Building on its own past, science climbs in an ever steepening curve. For every Newton or Galileo or Einstein, with their intuitive explosions of individual genius, there follow hundreds of other scientists, probing and proving and progressing. Such is the soar of the scientific exponential curve (see diagram) that, it has been said, almost 90% of all the scientists that the world has ever produced are alive today.