Konrad Bloch

Today Konrad Bloch becomes the third Harvard scientist in four years to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology. Bloch's work on the synthesis of cholesterol in the living cell has taken almost 25 years and has occupied virtually all of his professional attention. Working independently, he and Feodor Lynen, the co-winner of the prize and director of the Max Planck Institute for Cell Chemistry in Munich, have puzzled out the 36-step process by which acetic acid is transformed into Cholesterol. Cholesterol is known to be the raw material of the sex hormones; some researchers believe that excess cholesterol causes heart disease. While this theory has not been confirmed, the Nobel Committee observed in its citation that "The therapy against circulatory diseases and related disturbances ... will in the future rest upon the form foundation laid by Bloch and Lynen."

Like most great scientists these days, Bloch is a kind of research executive. He spends most of his time not in the laboratory but in a sepulchral office off Oxford Street, thinking, writing, preparing lectures, and conferring with the dozen or so graduate students and post-doctoral fellows who comprise his team. "The last time I worked in a lab was two years ago this past summer," Bloch says. "It isn't practical during the year unless you have vast chunks of time to spend fiddling with apparatus." Bloch originates the main line of an experiment and then instructs a co-worker to carry it out. Once the results of many such experiments are available Bloch reports the findings in a professional journal.

Bloch and Lynen did not collaborate formally, although they did correspond, and have met at nearly a dozen conferences. "There has been continuous interaction and supplementation," Block says, "but we have each run our own laboratory and conducted our own experiments." Recently, Lynen has begun to investigate the role of vitamins in the synthesis of fats while Bloch has stayed with the problem that has structured so much of his career. "We know that cholesterol is found in almost all living cells, but we don't know. what it's really for."

Bloch is a slender, quiet man who speaks haltingly, sometimes eloquently, with a trace of a German accent. He came to this country in 1936 after a two-year stint in a Swiss bacteriology lab, having fled his native Germany in 1934. He became an American citizen in 1944 and came to Harvard ten years later as Higgins Professor of Biochemistry, after teaching at Columbia and Chicago. Bloch's interests are almost completely confined to his research. Unlike many Harvard scientists he serves on no government policy committees and did not participate in last month's presidential campaign. Nor is he tempted to teach a lower-level or Gen Ed course.

It is difficult to say what has made Bloch so successful in one of the most baffling fields of modern inquiry. According to him, the element of chance has played an enormous role in his work. "Biochemistry is still a fairly new subject, and so progress is often a matter of intuition rather than logical deduction." He does admit however, that important notions occur most frequently to the prepared mind. "Success in science is an awareness of relationships. Every once in a while you recognize that two facts you have known all along are not isolated by have some logical connection."

Though gratified by the Nobel Committee's recognition of his work. Bloch feels that awards of any sort are irrelevant to science. "I have my doubts that awards serve any function at all--and I have been saying this for many years." By neglecting deserving workers, Bloch says, "Awards create as much unhappiness as happiness, and this is just unnecessary. Certainly the quality of research being done today is no better for the existence of awards."

But if awards are no incentive to the scientist, is human welfare? "No," says Bloch. "If a challenging intellectual problem bears on one of the main social problems confronting mankind, the researcher is pleased." But, he says, the consequences of research are seldom a powerful element in the motivation of the scientist. "In my case, the motivation was simple curiosity. I was puzzled by a chemical structure--before it was even thought to be detrimental to health--in the same way that a jig-saw puzzle is intriguing, and I wondered how it all came about."

Bloch volunteered that Jacques Barzun's criticism of scientists for irresponsibility does not trouble him. "Science is a glorious entertainment in the best sense--all scientists are doing is amusing themselves, but in non-frivolous way," Bloch said. "This may sound irresponsible, but at least it's honest."