MacArthur’s Award for Genius : Fellowship: The big honor bestowed on scientists, humanists and artists is prestigious and comes with no strings attached.

Self-made billionaire John D. MacArthur left an unusual last testament: His fortune was to be given away however the executors saw fit.

During his lifetime, the shirt-sleeves individualist ran his insurance empire from a table in a Florida coffee shop and had neither the time nor the inclination to become a munificent donor.

“I’m going to do what I do best; I’m going to make the money,” he told his lawyer, William Kirby. “When I die, you fellows give it away.”

Following MacArthur’s death in 1978, his son, J. Roderick, Kirby and three business associates met and drew up guidelines for the MacArthur Fellows Program. Today, the MacArthur Award--or “the genius award,” as it has been dubbed by the press--is regarded as one of the country’s most prestigious honors bestowed on scientists, humanists and artists.

The concept of funding creativity initially came from Dr. George Burch, Kirby’s physician and former president of the American Heart Assn., who held that breakthroughs are made by individuals, not institutions, most of whom are incapable of writing grant proposals for their discoveries which, by nature, are unforeseen.

Dr. Jonas Salk, an early fellowship participant, later pointed out that it was more productive to nurture the creative process, which could lead to the betterment of society, than to invest vast sums of money in problems too enormous to be financially resolved. Consider the modest research funds for the Salk vaccine versus worldwide programs for treating polio, he argued.

In 1981, the first MacArthur fellows were named. Since then, about 30 have been selected each year, producing a total of 283 winners, ages 18 to 82. Candidates are recommended by a national network of 100 anonymous scouts, with the final choice made by a MacArthur Fellows Program selection committee that screens nominees by asking:

How creative is this person? What is the likely importance to society of his or her work? What difference might the award make?

Award winners receive the good news in a brief, businesslike telephone call from the program director, Kenneth Hope, who typically leaves the “geniuses” stunned and speechless.

During the five-year fellowship, winners are mailed monthly tax-free checks and provided with comprehensive medical insurance. This year’s recipients each received a fellowship total of $150,000 to $375,000, depending on their age.

The award’s most unusual feature, however, is that there are no strings attached. Other than informal annual seminars, fellows are not required to report on their work or how they spend the money.

“It’s a bet, a gamble,” says Hope of the program’s success.

Before his death in 1984, J. Roderick MacArthur said it would be at least a decade before any long-term results would be seen. That 10-year mark will be reached with the next round of winners, which will be announced at any time, without warning, during the coming year.

In interviews with some of the two dozen winners previously or currently living in Southern California, certain strengths and weaknesses of the program emerge.

On the negative side, only 16% of the honorees are women, though 40% of the nominators are women; the award has not redirected the work or lives of most winners with full-time university jobs; there have been cases of jealousy, loss of other means of support and a feeling of letdown when the fellowship is over.

On the positive side, winners say they have worked harder and faster than before, experimented and done work they would not have done otherwise, made career leaps and, at times, were rescued from despair and encouraged to swim against the tide. Since receiving their awards, all point to accomplishments.

Here, they reflect on the meaning and relationship of their gifts and achievements.

1981

ROBERT S. ROOT-BERNSTEIN

Raised in Mar Vista and graduated from Venice High School, Robert S. Root-Bernstein, now 36, was just out of Princeton graduate school when he was named one of the first MacArthur winners and awarded $152,000.

The effect was disastrous.

Envious former professors cold-shouldered him (“They thought they should have gotten it well before I did,” he says), and, because of the windfall, his fellowship stipend at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla was abruptly scrapped.

After his stint at the Salk Institute, Root-Bernstein spent three years looking for a job. “I don’t fit the usual niches of academia,” says the biochemist, who sent out over 75 resumes while working as an unpaid research associate at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in West Los Angeles.

Root-Bernstein, who had by then become a husband and the father of two children, still had not found a job when the MacArthur checks ran out in 1986, leaving his family to live tenuously on savings. A year later, he landed a post at Michigan State University, where he teaches undergraduate classes in introductory biology. “I got dumped back into the same narrow-minded system I was liberated from,” he says. “It’s a sad commentary.”

The duration of the MacArthur program is too short to make scientific accomplishments, Root-Bernstein says, citing 15 years as the typical time between the inception and acceptance of an idea.

“The grant gave me just enough money and time to make me think I could do extraordinary things,” he says. “But it wasn’t enough.”

Still, MacArthur fellows don’t think small; for Root-Bernstein, the grant opened up options to study “the big new theories of biology.”

Next spring, he will publish a paper arguing that AIDS is caused by a variety of viruses, not just HIV, and that extensive sexual activity among homosexuals and massive blood transfusions are in themselves severely immuno-suppressive, in addition to being means of transferring the HIV virus.

“I attack any problem I think is important in any field,” says Root-Bernstein, with fingers crossed that one of his ideas will become an important addition to science.

1982

FRANK WILCZEK

When Frank Wilczek received the MacArthur Award and $168,000, he says, “It did not affect me in any striking way.”

Now 38, Wilczek was already considered an imminent physicist at the time. A graduate and professor at Princeton, he had begun an eight-year stint at the prestigious Institute of Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara.

And the prize, he says, “had a reputation for being a flaky award. Some people in physics were questionable (choices). The award’s a lot more solid now.”

Still, he says, “it made life a lot easier.” He and his wife more easily paid off the mortgage on their house and were able to send their daughter to private school.

Before receiving the award, Wilczek, who works in elementary particle research, discovered the theory of the forces that hold the atomic nucleus together, helping scientists “to penetrate closer to ‘the big bang.’ ”

He next discovered there is more matter than anti-matter in the universe, which implies, he says, that we don’t understand what makes up 90% of the universe’s mass, mysteriously known as “dark matter.”

Since winning the award, his most dramatic discovery has been the theory of a third kind of elementary particle, called “anyons.” Previously, scientists thought all matter was made of only two kinds of particles, bosons and fermions. Anyons, Wilczek theorized, are found between these extremes.

He says he explored the theory “for its entertainment value” and was “amazed” when researchers found that anyons really do exist. He currently promotes the theory that anyons allow high-temperature superconductors to work.

Lured back into research at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, Wilczek now lives with his family in Albert Einstein’s former house.

1983

PETER SELLARS

Three days after Kenneth Hope’s early-morning telephone call, Peter Sellars was fired from the Broadway musical he was directing; today, the Pittsburgh native heads the Los Angeles Festival, scheduled for a two-week run next fall.

In between, Sellars has directed the prestigious American National Theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington and created such avant-garde operas as “Nixon in China,” turning the former President, Mao Zedong and Henry Kissinger into aria-singing characters.

Five-feet tall and coiffed like a porcupine prepared for attack, Sellars, at 32, is a Wunderkind whose liberation from commercial theater was made possible, he says, by his $144,000 award.

“The MacArthur sets you off in the landscape,” he says. “It keeps you thinking big. There is a little asterisk in the back of your mind that says you should be making a difference.”

When the newly minted MacArthur fellow was sacked by the Broadway producer, Sellars recalls, “there was a signal that said, please keep going, don’t get depressed.”

Following his idealist’s vision, Sellars dreams of putting dramas from developing countries on equal footing with American productions and offering free theater to broadened ethnic audiences. In next year’s Los Angeles Festival, he promises, “some of my crazed utopian ideas are actually going to come off.”

1984

MICHAEL FREEDMAN

A century ago, French mathematician Henri Poincare theorized that it would be possible to determine whether a hypothetical surface in a four-dimensional universe (length, depth, width and time) is a sphere (that is, a surface like a potato or an avocado).

In 1982, UC San Diego mathematics professor Michael Freedman proved the Poincare conjecture, making what the National Science Foundation declared “one of the greatest achievements in mathematics in this century.”

This is what made him “a reasonable choice” for the MacArthur, deadpans the Southern California native and La Jolla resident, who is 36. “I’ve heard some fellows found it stressful to be singled out. But I didn’t have that problem.”

Nor did the award and the $176,000 change his life, he says. When the money was cut off last month, he experienced no withdrawal symptoms because he has been banking the funds for his children’s educations. Quips Freedman: “I haven’t taken out six mortgages.”

But he has taken off two quarters to complete work on yet another new idea “that has been pursued for decades.” He is using mathematics and topology, the study of shapes, to solve the problems of magnetically confined fusion, an alternative to nuclear fission.

Freedman has also participated in a scientific group recommending strategy for the U.S.-Soviet arms treaty. “There are ideas in arms control now that have their antecedents in game theory,” he says. “There’s a mathematical analysis of the notion of the game. If you’re designing a treaty, you want to make sure it’s a poor strategy for the other side to cheat.”

1985

SAM MALOOF

When Sam Maloof flew to his first MacArthur gathering in Chicago, he was embarrassed to participate in the seminar. Hesitantly, the woodworker with a high-school diploma rose to address the audience filled with Ph.D’s. He was so well received that he was later invited to give a repeat performance.

Maloof, 74, was awarded the fellowship, and $375,000, after a lifetime’s production of nationally recognized furniture. His work appears in Los Angeles’ Craft and Folk Art Museum and the American Craft Museum in New York, and recently was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Still, Maloof has never called himself an artist. “I’ve always considered myself a woodworker,” says the soft-spoken craftsman. “It’s a good, honest word.”

The award did not change his life nor the nature of his work, he says. He continues to live modestly with his wife, as he has for decades, amid six acres of Alta Loma lemon groves. Most of the money has gone to craft school scholarships, his church and charities.

Maloof is perhaps most grateful for the MacArthur medical coverage, which saw his wife through a serious illness: “I don’t know how we could have made it otherwise.”

1986

RICHARD TURCO

When atmospheric scientist Richard Turco, 46, received the MacArthur Award and $215,000, it rocketed him into the stratosphere. For 17 years, Turco had worked in research at R&D; Associates, a Marina del Rey think tank with Defense Department contracts. While most of his colleagues had been trying to design more efficient weapons explosions, Turco was working on the theory of what he termed “nuclear winter.”

According to the now widely accepted scenario, developed with work from four other scientists, smoke particles from a nuclear blast would block out sunlight, plunging the planet into year-round winter.

With the MacArthur, he notes, “I was a hot commodity.” From spending his time writing reports, Turco jumped to a coveted senior professorship at UCLA and told his former employer “to stuff it.”

So far, Turco has completed the book “A Path Where No Man Thought,” co-authored with scientist Carl Sagan, which sums up the nuclear winter research. He is now turning his attention to ozone depletion. Next year, he will open a research center at UCLA to study long-range global survival prospects.

After three years, the easy-going scientist still hasn’t decided how to spend the MacArthur money. With his new job, he says, “I’m already doing what I want.”

1987

JOHN SCHWARZ

When physicist John Schwarz, a Pasadena resident since 1972, won the MacArthur and $280,000 two years ago, he and his wife moved from their condominium into “a nice house.”

After all, the award could be spent for personal use, he points out. And besides, the 48-year-old scientist had spent his entire adult life working on an idea so all-encompassing that it came to be known as “the theory of everything.”

In 1984, Schwarz and Michael Green of the University of London worked out the mathematics for super-strings, infinitesimally small particles whose ratio to the atom is proportionate to that of the atom to the solar system. These loop-shaped building blocks of the universe link the four basic forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak quantum forces that hold the atom together. Scientists have been pursuing the super-string theory since Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity 74 years ago.

The ultimate result of the breakthrough would be that “we’d understand the fundamental forces of nature,” says Schwarz, but he guarantees that that is centuries away.

1988

BRUCE SCHWARTZ

When Kenneth Hope telephoned Los Angeles native Bruce Schwartz, the acclaimed puppeteer explained that after 12 years he had turned his back on his profession. Hope, says Schwartz, replied that that made them “determined all the more to consider me for the fellowship.”

The juxtaposition of critical kudos with personal penury had led Schwartz the previous year to retire from the performing arts and search out a simple job in an art gallery to pay his rent.

Now he has turned to the art form he has long wanted to explore: sculpture. Instead of forming only puppet faces and hands, though, he now creates entire terra-cotta figures.

To make certain he does not fall back into the achiever’s rut, Schwartz crafts his small figures, then smashes them against the wall of his Glassell Park studio and house, assuring himself that “these only exist for you to sculpt.”

“I feel exuberant,” says Schwartz, 34, who remembers that he was in the shower when he answered the MacArthur call and learned of his $215,000 prize. “The joy had been drained from my creativity by the strain of having to succeed. Now, my greatest hope as an artist is to reconnect with the joy I had and lost.

“I’m like a sprinter who’s been tied at the ankles for a decade, and finally they’ve let me go. I can’t express my gratitude for this.”

1989

BILL VIOLA

Born in Long Beach, Bill Viola, 38, has been crafting video art works for nearly 20 years. The two bedrooms of the bungalow where he lives with his wife and 22-month-old son are filled with equipment, while the family sleeps in the living room.

“It’s a tremendous boost,” the artist says of the MacArthur Award, recalling how he was “totally stunned” when he got the call.

“We didn’t even have money to buy towels,” he says, explaining that the typical installation of a video exhibit costs about $35,000.

Accustomed to surviving on a precarious patchwork of grants, Viola has already pitched in $5,000 of his MacArthur money to complete a San Francisco installation.

Future funds, which will total $245,000 in Viola’s case, will equip a studio, replace his 9-year-old camera and help pay for a new house in Topanga Canyon. And this year, for the first time, he and his wife drew up a Christmas gift list. They are also considering spending a year abroad.

Ultimately, Viola says, he wants to build videos that incorporate a system of perspective based on the way the mind, not the camera, works, which he calls ‘the geometry of consciousness.’ ”

“It’s a challenge to do something extraordinary, to make a breakthrough,” he says of the fellowship. “The daunting thing is (with the time and money), there are no excuses.”