BEHIND NOBEL, A STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION
SOME SCIENTISTS SAY COLLEAGUE OF BEVERLY RESEARCHER DESERVED A SHARE OF
MEDICAL PRIZE

Author: By Anthony Flint, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, November 5, 1993
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

But behind that happy celebration is a tale of an intense competition for recognition among the scientists involved in the work that won the prize, a landmark study on how genes are spliced. The struggle raises new questions about how the scientific community bestows credit for major discoveries.

According to several scientists, Louise T. Chow, a Taiwanese researcher who worked with Roberts at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island in 1977, the year the discovery was made, should have shared in the Nobel. Chow operated the electron microscope through which the splicing process was observed -- and designed the crucial experiment using techniques she developed in the previous two years at the lab.

"The evidence she discovered formed an important part of the total creative insight that splicing was taking place. Only she could have interpreted those data," said Norman Davidson, a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology and well-known expert in electron microscopy, under whom Chow apprenticed as a graduate student.

"Roberts put it together, but Chow really broke the logjam," said one former employee of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who was contacted by the Nobel committee, which for several years before the Oct. 11 announcement attempted to discern precisely who should win the prize for the discovery.

Chow, contacted at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she is currently a professor of molecular biochemistry, said she did not want to raise the issue in the media. But when pressed about her role, she said the experiments she performed "were not trivial . . . it was a new type of experiment and needed to be designed and set up."

The co-winner of the prize, Phillip A. Sharp of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a clear choice for the Nobel committee, according to sources familiar with the case; Sharp performed parallel but separate experiments on gene-splicing in 1977. But the Nobel committee took longer to select a scientist from the Cold Spring Harbor team.

In an interview, Roberts acknowledged there was contention about who deserved primary credit for the gene-splicing work starting in 1977, and that Chow, in particular, was privately dismayed that she did not share in the prize. "I knew she was upset," he said.

Roberts said Chow and her husband and fellow researcher, Tom Broker, who was also at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1977, deserve "lots and lots of credit," but that "in the long run, when the Swedes make a decision, they don't have the luxury of including five to 10 people on the ticket."

James Watson, the head of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the 1962 Nobel co-laureate for the initial discovery of the structure of DNA, said he wanted Chow to share in the prize. But he said he was limited by the Nobel committee's rule that a maximum of three people can win one award -- and that if he nominated Chow, the committee would have felt compelled to include Susan Berget, who did the electron microscopy work for Sharp.

"I tried to push that Louise should get the prize, at one stage. But I was up against this restriction business, and it just wasn't going to work," Watson said. "There would be an equal injustice if Rich didn't get the prize -- or if no one got the prize. It was not an easy thing to do."

Controversy has arisen many times in the 92-year history of science's most prestigious award, particularly when the Nobel committee in Stockholm has chosen individuals and the work, as is so often the case in science, is of a collaborative nature.

When Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel in 1962, some said X-ray analyst Rosalind Franklin should have shared in the prize, though she died in 1959. The 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics, won by Owen Chamberlain and Emilio Segre, was similarly contested by Oreste Piccioni, who argued that he made a key contribution. The 1989 Nobel Prize in Medicine, awarded to J. Michael Bishop and Harold E. Varmus of the University of California at San Diego CORRECTION - Date: Saturday, November 6, 1993: CORRECTION: Because of a reporting error, a Page 1 story yesterday about the selection of the winners of the 1993 Nobel Prize in medicine incorrectly identified the institution at which two 1989 Nobel laureates are employed. J. Michael Bishop and Harold E. Varmus are at the University of California at San Francisco., was contested by French scientist Dominique Stehelin, who said he had the original idea for the prize-winning experiments. There are a handful of other cases.

Generally, scientists say the Nobel committee will not give the award to assistants and technicians who merely carry out orders. In the Cold Spring Harbor case, Chow and her advocates said she was not just a member of a team but had a critical, original creative role in designing the 1977 experiment.

The case also reveals the intense, behind-the-scenes world of scientists who regard themselves on equal footing jockeying for recognition. In April 1990, for example, Roberts produced a 15-page memo chronicling the process that led to the discovery -- complete with a summary at the end of who made what contribution. The memo also carefully documented the extent of contact with Sharp, to distinguish the Cold Spring Harbor work from what Sharp was doing.

"Everyone wanted to believe that their own part in the story was the most important. A competition began among the participants to downplay everyone else's contribution and so bolster their own," Roberts wrote of the Cold Spring team.

Roberts said he wrote the memo at Watson's request and gave it to "one or two friends." Watson said he circulated the memo among scientists who were likely to be contacted by the Nobel committee.

But the memo rankled some in the scientific community, who viewed it as an overly aggressive lobbying effort, according to sources. Broker was prompted to write and circulate a response to Roberts' memo. The dueling memos led to an intense but quiet debate in the scientific community about the case, before the Oct. 11 announcement and after Roberts won the prize.

A copy of Roberts' memo was made available to the Globe. In the days following the announcement, meanwhile, Chow's brother, Yu Chow, told a daily newspaper in Chow's native Taiwan about his sister's disappointment. Chow provided the newspaper a brief statement confirming what her brother had said and stating that without her, the discovery at Cold Spring Harbor would not have been made. But she declined further comment to the newspaper.

The discovery at the center of this controversy was indeed one of the great moments in molecular biology. In separate but parallel experiments, Sharp and the Cold Spring Harbor team found that genes in higher organisms do not consist of a continuous, uninterrupted stream of DNA in chromosomes, as previously believed. They found that genes are interrupted by segments of ''nonsense" information called introns, which are spliced, or "edited," out by an intermediary agent called messenger RNA, which brings the information to the machinery in the cell that makes protein.

In what scientists say is a common practice for the Nobel committee, the Swedes recognized the historic impact of the discovery first, and then set about the business of sorting out who was responsible. For years, Sharp was known to be in line for the prize; but the committee had a tougher time deciding on the Cold Spring Harbor team.

Davidson, although he said he did not want to second-guess the Nobel committee, suggested that Chow may have been slighted. "She's a woman, an Asian woman who's a little quiet," he said. "Sometimes they get ignored."

Roberts said he did not think he had lobbied for the prize or subordinated anyone's contributions. He said there was contention about who should get credit for the work before the Nobel announcement and hard feelings now that the prize has been awarded.

"To expect anybody close to this discovery not to expect the maximum amount of credit would be to deny human nature," Roberts said. His collaborators, he said, "want to get as much credit as they possibly can. That's what happened in this case. Everyone associated with the case realized it was a very big discovery.

"The Swedes spent 16 years deciding what to do. We can only assume they researched the issue carefully, and came to their own conclusions as to who did what. I don't think it was done lightly."

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