1961 - Science

Science

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann and Israeli physicist Yuval Ne'eman, 36, independently resolve the issue of atomic particle proliferation with what Gell-Mann calls the "Eightfold Way," based on Buddha's eightfold path to truth. Many of the known particles, they realize, can be fit into a series of families based on an abstract mathematical construct called the su(3) group (see 1962).

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger dies of asthma at Vienna January 4 at age 73; Harvard Nobel physicist Percy W. Bridgman by his own hand at Randolph, N.H., August 20 at age 79 (he had terminal cancer).

English biochemist Peter Mitchell, 40, of the University of Edinburgh publishes a paper in Nature suggesting that cells can store energy by creating an electric field or a proton gradient across a vesicular membrane and use it to send nerve signals and move muscles. He argues that this principle explains adenosine triphosphate (ATP) synthesis, cell movement (flagellar rotation), and solute accumulations (or expulsions), and his chemiosomotic theory that energy in plants and animals is used to generate electrical energy rather than being simply a chemical reaction opens the door for understanding energy transformation by membrane systems.

South African-born biologist Sydney Brenner, 34, French-born biologist François Jacob, 41, and Matthew Meselson, now 31, confirm the existence of a messenger RNA by using phage-infected bacteria to show that ribosomes are the site of protein synthesis (see Ochoa, 1955; Stahl, Meselson, 1958; Khorana, 1966).