Science: Prizemen

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U.S. chemists last week placed $1,000 on Professor Linus Carl Pauling as a sure place-winner in their profession and a possible winner of a Nobel Prize. Professor Pauling was 30 last February. At Oregon State Agricultural College where he won his B.S. degree at 21 (no early age) he was a promising, gangling youth always browsing in the chemistry and physics laboratories. Three years later he was a California Institute of Technology Ph.D., no easy distinction under the strict driving of Professor Arthur Amos Noyes, director of Caltech's Gates Chemical Laboratory. Director Noyes kept the brilliant young man at Caltech another year under a National Research Fellowship, then sent him on a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship to Europe for a look at physical chemistry there. Back went the scholar to Caltech and an assistant professorship. A workout in that position, then an associate professorship; then this year, at 30, a full professorship of theoretical chemistry.

As the 82nd annual meeting of the American Chemical Society approached next week (at Buffalo), Professor Pauling's career and accomplishments were objects of many secret discussions. U.S. Chemistry has had two great rewards for its doers: the William H. Nichols Medal and the Josiah Willard Gibbs Medal.

This year Jacob Fred Schoellkopf, Buffalo power and dye tycoon, contributed a gold medal, named for his late father, to honor important industrial research. First Schoellkopf medalist, named last week, is President Frank Jerome Tone, 63, of Carborundum Co., who helped develop that and other synthetic abrasives, who originated the first commercial process for producing silicon metal (used in electrical transformers, alloys, hydrogen manufacture), who possesses "to an unusual degree the rare combination of the qualities of the pure scientist, the plant engineer, and the successful business administrator." Graduates of Hill School and Cornell of six or seven years ago wondered if President Tone is any relation to popular, broadshouldered Jerry Tone who used to catch on the Cornell baseball team. They are father & son. Jeremiah Tone now works as one of his father's salesmen. Another son is Franchot Jerome Tone, actor (Pagan Lady, Green Grow the Lilacs).

Also this year for the first time Dr. Arthur Comings Langmuir, rich Hastings-on-Hudson authority & manufacturer of shellac and glycerine, elder brother and early teacher of General Electric's famed Dr. Irving Langmuir, offered a $1,000 prize for "accomplishment, in America, of outstanding chemical research by a young man or woman preferably working in a college or university." Caltech's young Professor Pauling is the first Langmuir Prize winner.