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George Wells Beadle, 57, head of the biology division at Caltech, was all set to spend his life on the family farm in Wahoo, Neb. when he got a crush on his pretty high school science teacher. Neither Beadle nor science ever quite got over it. The farm boy went to college and became a geneticist. With skill, patience and insatiable curiosity he helped to transform his narrow, abstruse specialty into a vital branch of science. Moving on from the classic fruit-fly experiments which had extended the study of heredity, Beadle began to investigate the intricate internal chemistry of bread mold. His observations led to a major scientific breakthrough: the first intimations of the manner in which genes control enzymes and enzymes control the basic chemistry of life itself.
James Alfred Van Allen, 46, has an eloquently simple definition for space: "It is the hole we are in." That hole, says Physicist Van Allen, "is a vast area of human ignorance, and the history of the world shows that attacking ignorance is fruitful." Ever since he was a shy student studying cosmic rays at Iowa Wesleyan, Van Allen has been in the vanguard of the attack. In his cluttered lab at the State University of Iowa, his carefully compiled experiments with rockets and satellites add up to an interplanetary detective story. Clue piled upon clue finally demonstrated the existence of the deadly Van Allen belts of radiation that girdle the earth, a hazard to future spacemen.
Edward Mills Purcell, 48, now on leave from his job as a Harvard physics professor, says of his work: "The thing that's so wonderful is that you get paid for telling the truth, just laying it out for anyone to do with as they will." It was a spare-time experiment with a borrowed electromagnet and a quarter's worth of paraffin that led to his Nobel-prizewinning "nuclear resonance" system for measuring atomic properties. In his early studies of the 21-cm. radio waves coming from hydrogen clouds in interstellar space, Purcell made do with a hastily devised antenna hung outside his Harvard laboratory. It looked like a horn left over from an ancient phonograph, but it worked.