EXCELLENCE WATCH : Nobel Chemistry

How quickly is a new scientific discovery recognized as new? In a world in which the number of working scientists is large and growing and in which their craving for the earliest possible news about developments in their fields is fed by ever swifter modes of transmission, recognition can still come with surprising slowness, rather as the accumulation of many acknowledgments than as instant, universal acclaim. So, at any rate, it seems to have been in the career of Rudolph A. Marcus, Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry at Caltech and the just-announced winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry.

Marcus’ seminal work was done between 1956 and 1965 in the mathematical modeling of electron transfer between molecules: basic science at its most basic. At the time, it seems, there were those who doubted that a seed had been sown; but during the decades that followed, much has flowered in the furrows that Marcus first plowed, and more is awaited.

The initial insight--that electron transfer was a relatively slow process--was counterintuitive, according to Salo Gronowitz, chairman of the Nobel chemistry committee: “It’s like saying that if you stand on a ski slope, you will glide up instead of gliding down.” But that insight, now no longer contested, touches everything from solar power to rust to chemical “cold” light to electrical conductivity in synthetic plastics to the functions of the human body.

Caltech has done it again, done it, to be precise, for the 22nd time. California joins the world in warmest admiration and in hope.