Richard Bernstein, 66; Chemist Won National Medal of Science

Richard B. Bernstein, a much-honored professor of chemistry at UCLA, has died in Helsinki, Finland, where he was attending a conference of Soviet and American scientists. Bernstein was 66 when he was stricken by a heart attack near Leningrad in the Soviet Union and died Sunday night.

On the UCLA faculty since 1983, Bernstein was credited with a new field of research in chemistry--molecular beam scattering--as a means of studying intermolecular interactions.

For this he was awarded America’s highest scientific honor--the National Medal of Science--last year by President Bush.

He and Ahmed H. Zewail of Caltech collaborated on another new chemistry field that permits the observation of chemical reactions at the instant they occur. Called “femto” chemistry, the Bernstein-Zewail study uses lasers to observe chemical reactions in a millionth of a billionth of a second--a femto second.

Before joining UCLA, Bernstein was chairman of the chemistry department at Columbia University in New York, where he earned his doctorate degree in 1948. While still an undergraduate at Columbia, he became a member of the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

He also taught at the University of Texas, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan and was a senior vice president of Occidental Research Corp. in Irvine.

In 1988, Bernstein was awarded the prestigious Robert A. Welch Award in chemistry.

Survivors include his wife, Norma, a son, three daughters, a brother and four grandchildren.