The Chemical World This Week

NOBEL PRIZE M CHEMISTRY FOR BORANE WORK Scientists whose experimental data lead to new theories of matter and how it interacts are being honored by this year's Nobel Prizes both in chemistry and in physics. In chemis­try, the prize will be given to Dr. William N. Lipscomb, Abbott & William James Lawrence Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University "for his studies on the structure of boranes illuminating problems of chemical bonding." In physics, the prize will be shared by Dr. Burton Richter of Stanford University and Dr. Samuel C. C. Ting of Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their nearly si­multaneous discoveries of a new kind of heavy elementary particle, which Richter calls psi and Ting calls J.

Lipscomb, who received his doc­torate from California Institute of Technology under chemistry Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling in 1946, has been studying the structure and bonding of boranes since 1949. He says that although boron and carbon are next to each other in the periodic table and both form many com-

ACS ballot deadline postponed two weeks By action of the ACS Council Committee on Nominations & Elections, acting under the society's constitution and by­laws, the deadline for receipt in Wash­ington, D.C., of ACS election ballots— for president-elect, two directors-at-large, and directors from Regions I and V—has been postponed from Nov. 1 to Nov. 15. The action was taken to offset a U.S. Postal Service delay in distribu­tion of the ballots to members, an indi­rect result of the strike at United Parcel Service. The strike has led to heavy overloading of Postal Service facilities and personnel, causing serious delays in delivery for third and fourth class mail in some areas. The ACS balloting ma­terials had been mailed third class to members in the U.S. this year to take advantage of postage savings calculated at more than $11,000.

Members who still have not received their ballots are advised to contact their local post offices. The society has been assured by the Postal Service that all ballots have cleared the point of origin in the Washington area; any further de­lays are likely to be due to difficulties at the local level.

Chemistry prize to Lipscomb (

pounds with hydrogen, their chem­istries are quite different. Hydrocar­bons typically form chains whereas boron-hydrogen compounds (bo­ranes) are usually polyhedral frag­ments.

Using x-ray crystallography, Lip­scomb's group determined the three-dimensional structure and bonding for many borane compounds. Together with earlier data on bonding in carbon compounds, this work forms the experimental basis for the extended Huckel theory, the first widely applicable use of molecular orbital theory to study chemical bonding. The applications of this work, Lipscomb points out, go far beyond borane chemistry. In fact, although he still spends about one third of his time studying boranes, two thirds of his own research now aims at applying x-ray crystallogra­phy and bonding theories to under­standing the structure of enzymes.

Lipscomb receives the Nobel Prize for a continuing research effort spanning more than 25 years. This year's physics prize, however, is being awarded for a single observation that both Richter and Ting made inde­pendently and reported in November 1974. Ting, working at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Richter, at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, each observed a new subatomic par­ticle with a mass about three times that of a proton or neutron, no elec­trical charge, and a lifetime about 1000 times longer than is expected for a particle of its mass.

Unlike Lipscomb's work, the theory that will explain Ting and Richter's observations has not yet

V), physics to Richter and Ting

been fully worked out. One explana­tion being widely considered is that the psi or J particle, and others like it, contain a pair of quarks (the subunits theorized to make up nuclear parti­cles) with a new quantum number called charm. These particles would be the first observed with this quan­tum number.

Americans made a clean sweep of the Nobel Prizes this year. In medi­cine the prize was shared. It went to Dr. Baruch S. Blumberg of the Insti­tute for Cancer Research, Philadel­phia, for his discovery of a way to in­dicate the presence of hepatitis Β virus in blood leading eventually to the production of gamma globulin and vaccine to protect against hepa­titis. Sharing it was Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek of the National Institutes of Health for his work on noninflam­matory infectious brain diseases. The prize in economics went to Dr. Milton Friedman of the University of Chi­cago, and the literature prize to Saul Bellow, also of Chicago. The peace prize was not awarded. D

Chemical profits down in weak third quarter The evidence is now overwhelming that the recovery in the U.S. basic chemical industry hit a plateau last spring. Company after company in reporting third-quarter performance refers to a slump, slowdown, flat pe­riod, or similar break in what had been a strong upward movement.

However, the reaction by com­panies to this unexpected pause is

6 C&EN Oct. 25, 1976