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Recognition came a few months too late to save co-winner Martin Rodbell from the budget ax. He retired in June from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences after funding dried up for his research into how the billions of cells that make up the body communicate with one another. Working independently, Rodbell and Dr. Alfred G. Gilman of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas discovered that the cells employ a kind of molecular switchboard to sort out incoming chemical and hormonal messages. The switches in this biological telephone system, molecules called G proteins, have since been implicated in everything from diabetes to alcoholism to whooping cough.
PHYSICS
Shoot neutrons through a liquid or solid, and these subatomic particles will bounce off the atoms inside. The angles at which the quantum bullets ricochet tell scientists how the target atoms are arranged. That knowledge has already led to advances in semiconductors and may someday explain the bizarre phenomenon of high-temperature superconductivity. Clifford Shull, now retired from M.I.T., and Bertram Brockhouse from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, helped perfect neutron-scattering techniques in the 1940s and '50s. Today, nearly a half-century later, they have Nobels to show for it. Ironically, the man who did the pioneering work in the field, Shull's mentor Ernest Wollan, died in 1984. By Nobel rules, the prize is never awarded posthumously.
CHEMISTRY
Oil refining, coal liquefaction and other related industrial processes depend on chemists' being able to manipulate the complex molecules known as hydrocarbons. George Olah of the University of Southern California discovered in the 1960s how to slow down -- and thus control -- hydrocarbon reactions by supercooling them. His work led directly to the development of higher-octane gasoline -- and earned him this year's Chemistry Prize.
LITERATURE
Kenzaburo Oe was a child of 10 when World War II ended; occupying foreigners, ruins, humiliations and guilt filled the Japanese landscape of his adolescence. His early fiction and essays were unusually intense by Japanese standards, tinged with pessimism and despair. After 1963, when his first son was born brain damaged, Oe's work became even more personal; a helpless or deformed child figure recurs, suggesting both implacable fate and the possibility of redemption. Compared with the four previous laureates -- Octavio Paz, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison -- Oe is little known but, thanks to the Swedish Academy, not for long.