The physics prize went to Stanford’s Martin Perl, 68, for discovering a subatomic particle called the tau, and to Frederick Reines, 77, of UC, Irvine, for finding the neutrino, a particle with no charge and so little mass that it’s the closest thing in nature to a ghost. The medicine award is shared by Edward Lewis, 77, of Caltech; Eric Wieschaus, 48, of Princeton, and Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, 52, of the Max Planck Institute in Tubingen, Germany. They discovered how, in fruit flies, one cell blossoms into an entire organism.
