John Franklin Enders, 63, was on his way to earning a Harvard Ph.D. in English when he met the late great Microbiologist Hans Zinsser. Inspired by Zinsser, Enders switched to bacteriology. But inspiration, he insists, has little place in the practical results of research. "As a rule, the scientist takes off from the manifold observations of his predecessors . . . The one who places the last stone and steps across to the terra firma of accomplished discovery gets all the credit." Thus Dr. Jonas Salk got most of the credit for developing polio vaccine. But it was Enders' patient work that first demonstrated how to grow the dangerous polio virus in other than nerve tissue. That work got Enders and his associates a Nobel Prize; it got Salk his vaccine. Now active at Boston's Children's Medical Center, John Enders is presently putting the patience that whipped polio to work on measles and infectious hepatitis.
Willard Frank Libby, 52, sometimes seems to be a finicky, formal sort of man who wears a business suit in the laboratory, suffers a necktie in the warmest weather. But he gives himself away with his missionary zeal. To Chemist Libby, recruiting bright young newcomers to his calling is every bit as important as his own contributions. His radioactive carbon-14 dating technique brought him his well-deserved Nobel Prize; his five-year service on the Atomic Energy Commission was an invaluable bridge between the possibilities of science and the problems of politics. In Washington, Libby discovered that there are a lot of intelligent people who are not scientists." Says Chemist Libby: "They would have made good chemists."
Linus Carl Pauling, 59, Caltech's outspoken, opinionated chemist, began prying into the personality of the atom just after World War I, when the laboratories of his specialty were alive with novel and productive ideas. The coincidence was explosive. For Pauling believes that "the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas." He had plenty. His theory about the nature of the chemical bond, the forces that make atoms stick together, won him a Nobel Prize in 1954. "Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life," says Pauling.
Isidor Isaac Rabi, 62, became a scientist, he says, for one overpowering reason: "I couldn't help it." Brought to the U.S. from Austria as an infant, he has never forgotten his mother's daily query when he came home from public school on Manhattan's Lower East Side: "Did you ask any good questions today?" For a brief period Rabi (rhymes with hobby) did try the workaday world outside the laboratory—he analyzed furniture polish and mothers' milk; he ran a Brooklyn newspaper until it failed—"then came the vision, I found physics and myself." His experiments in molecular physics won a Nobel Prize in 1944, were vital to U.S. atomic research. Now a part-time professor at Columbia University, Rabi argues that all scientists ought to be "oddballs." Their lives, he says, leave no room for such bourgeois considerations as suburban homes or Madison Avenue clothes: "Once you put on the clothes and cut your hair you begin acting the part." But Rabi himself wears well-cut clothes—and his hair is neatly cut.