Another Nobel

The 7 a.m. Monday morning phone call from local radio station WGBH woke Nicolaas Bloembergen and his wife, Deli, but it was well worth it. Bloembergen, the interviewer said, had just been awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in physics--an honor the Gade University Professor later called "recognition for a lifetime of work."

Bloembergen, who shared the $180,000 prize with two non-Harvard scientists "for the development of laser spectroscopy," wasn't the only University official "delighted" by the sudden news. His selection made him Harvard's third Nobel Laureate this year, tying a 27-year-old University mark. Just two weeks earlier, two Medical School professors had garnered the prize in medicine for research on how the brain processes visual information.

Gleefully sipping champagne at an afternoon celebration, Bloembergen and his colleagues attributed the recent rash of Nobel Laureates--seven in the last three years--to Harvard's demanding tenuring process, which they said winnows out all but the most stellar of scholars in a manner similar to the Nobel selection format of the Swedish Academy.

But many said the University should not expect its string of multiple winners to continue forever. Advances in science at other schools will likely spread the future Nobel wealth; also, they said, Harvard's recent gains largely stem from an unusually large--and talented--group of professors hired in the mid-1950s whose work has recently reached fruition.

Concerns over diminishing University prizewinnings, though, was far from anybody's mind Monday. Bloembergen, an expert on non-linear optics and nuclear magnetic resonance, voiced only one worry, and it was appropriately mild: "I hope [the award] won't change my life too much because I consider my life pretty good as it is."