2 Caltech Scholars Get MacArthur Grants

Erik Winfree and Hideo Mabuchi couldn’t have less in common.

Winfree is a computer scientist designing DNA molecules that can work as living calculators. Mabuchi is a quantum physicist pursuing single atoms through a maze of mirrors and laser beams.

Even so, life keeps throwing the two newly minted Caltech professors together, first as graduate students, then in postdoctoral assignments, now in faculty posts in Pasadena--so much so that the two are planning to conduct an experiment together next year.

As of today, the two share something more than an independent turn of mind.

Winfree and Mabuchi were named recipients of MacArthur Fellowships--grants of $500,000 apiece, designed to let them follow freely the compass of their intuition.

The youngest of this year’s recipients, the two Caltech researchers are among six Californians named today by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as beneficiaries of a fellowship program considered as prestigious as it is unusual.

The other Californians are behavioral economist Matthew Rabin and poet Anne Carson, both at UC Berkeley; environmental activist Lucy Blake in Sierraville; and Peter Hayes, a Berkeley-based expert on northeast Asia energy problems.

In all, 25 artists, scientists and activists around the country were awarded $500,000 each over five years of “no strings attached” support and free health insurance, based solely on the promise of their creativity and originality of mind.

The new MacArthur fellows include a pioneer in the field of African American photography, a lobbyist for immigrants’ rights, a cartoonist, a choreographer and an archeologist.

“Their scholarship, artistic accomplishments and public service celebrate creativity across the broad range of human endeavor,” said Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation.

It is impossible to apply for a MacArthur Fellowship. There is no application or interview process. An anonymous selection committee makes recommendations to the foundation’s board. So first word of it always comes as a surprise.

For Mabuchi, 28, the news came in a phone call from a Nobel laureate he had never met before.

“I have to say it puts you in a good mood,” the young physicist said, after being told of the grant by Murray Gell-Mann, a former Caltech professor who won the 1969 Nobel Prize for physics. “It was completely out of the blue, which really amplifies the impact of the whole thing.”

For Winfree, 30, it arrived as an urgent e-mail on his office computer urging him to call the Chicago-based foundation.

Mabuchi said he has no idea how the award will change his life.

Winfree has an inkling: his father was awarded a MacArthur grant in 1984.

Winfree’s father, Arthur T. Winfree, studies circadian rhythms and biological clocks at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He took his son to the boy’s first meeting of the MacArthur fellows. Now the son can reciprocate.

“I think he was a little surprised,” Winfree said. “I still don’t entirely believe it.”

But already Winfree feels liberated. “The greatest feeling is the sense of freedom . . . to be encouraged that I am right in listening to myself about what I want to do scientifically.

“The path I have taken in science is one where I have followed interesting questions and pursued them with as little thought to the consequences in terms of career as possible. That has allowed me to drift and stumble in unusual directions,” he said.

Winfree is a pioneer in a field that six years ago did not exist.

As an unconventional theorist who combines computer science and biology, he is trying to find ways to use the DNA molecules that encode the heredity of every living thing to build computers.

“I am coming to biology as a computer scientist,” Winfree said. “What really interests me is how one can think of molecular processes as models of computation. There is a rich area to explore here.”

Winfree is pursuing an idea conceived by USC computer scientist Leonard Adleman, who demonstrated in 1994 that the billions of molecules in a single drop of DNA could be used to solve intricate computing problems.

With its intoxicating promise of test-tube calculators, liquid supercomputers and molecular memories the size of a single microscopic silicon transistor, the idea of DNA computing galvanized an entire new field of research in less time that it takes to finish a graduate degree.

Winfree’s breakthrough is a technique called DNA tiling, which chemically mixes and matches blocks of DNA, like jigsaw pieces, to store information and carry out mathematical operations.

Theoretically, a single test tube of DNA tiles could perform about 10 trillion additions per second, about a million times faster than a conventional computer.

Winfree suspects, however, that the true power of the technique may not be in raw number-crunching but in designing molecules that can put themselves together into complex microscopic machines and nano-robots--a kind of self-assembling blueprint.

Like Winfree, Mabuchi is working on an atomic scale.

Using the high technology of lasers and optical traps, he is trying to understand the infinitesimal weirdness of quantum behavior one atom at a time. To that end, he is trying to isolate each atom from as many outside influences as possible to measure its characteristics with an accuracy never before possible.

“Increasingly, it is important to interface in an intricate way with things that have one molecule. I am developing experimental techniques that make these kinds of measurements possible,” he said.

Over the long run, his work may pave the way for new communications technologies and, as with Winfree, new forms of computation. In that area, the two are trying to put together an experiment that may help them understand better how to read and program atomic structures. But results do not matter in any direct way to the MacArthur Foundation. It is out to raise expectations.

The foundation never checks on an award winner’s progress. It just issues quarterly checks for $25,000.

“It turns out to be a heavy responsibility on the part of these [recipients],” said Daniel J. Socolow, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program. “We do have one requirement. They are supposed to deposit the checks.”

Times education writer Kenneth R. Weiss contributed to this story.