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Edward Teller, 52, vehemently dislikes his title: "Father of the H-bomb." In the first place, he argues, the big bomb was the creation of many minds. Even more important, the phrase is unpopular with Teller's teen-age son Paul. Explains Teller: "No one would want the hydrogen bomb for a kid brother." But the rumpled, Hungarian-born physicist has small chance of escape. Many minds did indeed contribute to the U.S. H-bomb, but it was Teller's basic insight that made the finished product possible. Today, he teaches a freshman course in physics appreciation at U.C.L.A., has a couple of books under way, is investigating the peaceful application of nuclear energy.
Joshua Lederberg, 35, is a balding biologist—and a genius. At 21, the studious son of a New Jersey rabbi, he was already making significant contributions to genetics. Working with his teacher, Edward Tatum, at Yale, he demonstrated that bacteria have a sex life of sorts. At 27, in collaboration with one of his own students at the University of Wisconsin, Lederberg discovered that bacteria infected with certain viruses may suffer hereditary changes. His work on this process, known as transduction, won him a Nobel Prize. Now, at Stanford's School of Medicine, Lederberg's latest cause for excitement is the far-out field of exobiology.
Donald Arthur Glaser, 34, wore an evening waistcoat that was yellowed with age when he stepped up to receive his Nobel Prize in Physics from Sweden's King Gustav VI Adolf early this month. The old vest, he explained, had been worn by two other Nobelmen, Edwin McMillan and Emilio Segre, before him, "and I guess I'll pass it along to somebody else for some future Nobel ceremony." Chances are, Glaser himself may some day want it back for just that reason. Having reached top rank in his field with his invention of a bubble chamber for photographing atomic particles, the Cleveland storekeeper's son has decided to start all over again—this time in microbiology.
Robert Burns Woodward. 43, is a man with two loves: the color blue and the science of chemistry. The first is an easy affectation; Harvard's Woodward satisfies it with a blue and white office, a blue coffee cup and, day in day out, a blue necktie. The second is an all-consuming passion. Disdaining all other activities (exercise seems a particular waste of time to him), Woodward has been the architect of some of the most complex biological molecules ever built by man. He synthesized quinine by the time he was 26, kept lengthening the list of his accomplishments—cortisone, strychnine, reserpine. cholesterol—until this year he manufactured the most complicated substance of all: chlorophyll. Says an admiring colleague: "It's not his chemical synthesis but his intellectual synthesis that is so striking."