11 to receive Benjamin Franklin Medals

The Franklin Institute will bestow its annual awards in science, technology, and business on 11 men and women Thursday evening, including Bill Gates. The awards, first given in 1824, have gone to such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and four of last year's Nobel Prize winners.

This year's honors are in eight categories. One, the Bower Award for Achievement in Science, comes with a $250,000 prize.

Anyone who has made a secure purchase on the Internet is using encryption technology that Shafrira "Shafi" Goldwasser helped create.

Goldwasser and her colleagues developed the so-called zero-knowledge proof, a method of verifying information without sharing it. Zero knowledge enables an online buyer to prove she has a valid credit card without divulging the numbers.

Goldwasser is viewed as a pioneer of modern cryptography for using computers and complex mathematical processes to encrypt everything from government secrets to online bank statements. For that, she will receive the 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Sciences.

The 51-year-old computer scientist was born in New York City. She is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a professor of mathematical science at the Weizman Institute of Science in Israel.

Throughout her career, Goldwasser has been on the cutting edge of efforts to develop complex codes that the most advanced computers require years or decades to decode, thus rendering the code unbreakable in practice.

- Josh Goldstein

Gerhard M. Sessler and James E. West

As Gerhard M. Sessler recalls it, the assignment given to him and James E. West was open-ended.

"Just do something useful," their supervisor told them.

The two worked at Bell Labs, the invention factory that was the pride of the old AT&T telephone monopoly.

The result of their work, in the early 1960s, was quite useful: a tiny, high-tech microphone now used in an estimated two billion cell phones, video cameras, hearing aids, and other products each year. For their work, the two are receiving the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering.

Microphones work by converting sound pressure into an electrical signal. But older microphones were bulky and required a battery. They also didn't work well when subjected to vibration. Hearing-aid wearers got unwanted noise just from the movement associated with walking.

The solution was a substance called an electret, an electrical cousin of a magnet. It could hold an electric charge indefinitely, much like a magnet maintains a magnetic field.

Existing electrets could hold their charge only for a few months. West and Sessler tried various polymers and found that a type of Teflon would hold a permanent charge. The first electret microphones were the size of a shirt button.

West, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, studied physics at Temple University, against his father's wishes. West is African American, and at the time few black men with science degrees could find jobs in their field.

He decided to pursue physics anyway. A useful decision indeed.

- Tom Avril

To test how adding a bump to a plane's wing would change air flow and lift, a simple wind tunnel will do.

But if you're building an opera house and want to know where placing an air vent (and a door, and an aisle, and a slope in the floor) would best protect a patron in row E7 from a fire in, say, the men's bathroom, ask Brian Spalding.

Spalding, the winner of the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering, pioneered the practice of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) - basically computer modeling of how liquids, gases, and some solids move in different situations. It is used in planning for such applications as pollution control, swimming pools, and car engines.

Even as a boy growing up in the United Kingdom, Spalding, 87, recalled he had fun watching what happened when he dammed a stream running by his garden. To some extent, he was in the right place at the right time. He was working on theories of heat transfer, mass transfer, and hydrodynamics as a Cambridge graduate student in the 1950s and 1960s, just before the rise of digital computing.

Spalding developed a series of algebraic equations that allow computers to apply the laws of mass, momentum, and energy to myriad conditions involving flow.

One area that Spalding believes is ripe for development is computer models of entire cities.

"If you then input, 'Here is an explosion,' it will say what areas will get hot gases," he said. "It will tell authorities what areas need to be evacuated." - Don Sapatkin

Ignacio Cirac, Peter Zoller, and David Wineland

Of this year's three winners of the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, only two were entranced by science in high school - Spanish native Ignacio Cirac, 45, and Austrian Peter Zoller, 57. The other winner, California native David Wineland, said he spent his high school years racing dirt bikes and fixing up cars. "Those were the days of hot rods," said Wineland, 65.

The trio's more studious members, Zoller and Cirac, are being recognized for devising a possible route to a new kind of computer - a visionary concept known as a quantum computer. If such a device could be built, it would perform in a second what would take an ordinary computer a billion years.

Once Zoller and Cirac published their concept, Wineland went into his lab and built the first logic device that might make up this ultimate hot-rod computer.

All three scientists work in atomic physics - a field that involves the behavior of atoms in isolation and the various arrangements of their electrons around the nucleus.

In the late 1970s, Wineland was using electric fields and lasers to slow down, trap, and isolate atoms. Those experiments laid the groundwork for today's atomic clocks - devices so accurate that they would lose less than a second in 65 million years.

At the time, he did not know he was also laying groundwork for quantum computation.

Zoller, of the University of Innsbruck, tried to explain the concept. In a traditional computer, some physical system, such as a transistor current, can be on or off, thus representing either 0 or 1. That 0 or 1 makes up one bit of information.

According to the rules of quantum mechanics, an isolated atom has properties that can exist in two opposing states at the same time - thus representing 0 or 1 or any state in between. That combined state would represent one "qubit."

The same rules also allow atoms or subatomic particles to exist in more than one location at once.

So a few qubits in a quantum computer can, in theory, store billions of bits worth of information. If you string 300 qubits together, they can store bits of 2 to the 300th power, Wineland said. That's more than the number of atoms in the physical universe.

The two published their seminal paper in 1994, when Cirac was only 29 and worked at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain.

Wineland quickly went to work building the first component in his lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo. Wineland used electric fields to isolate one and then two atoms and show that they could be used as qubits, existing in two states at the same time and thus expressing both 1 and 0.

It's a fragile arrangement that can be upset with the slightest perturbation, he said.

The three physicists agree that a full-fledged quantum computer is still years away, if not decades, though specialized versions will emerge sooner.

Looking back, Wineland said he had no regrets about the time he spent in his youth rebuilding hot rods. Those mechanical skills came in handy.

- Faye Flam

In the late 1950s, University of Pennsylvania researcher Peter Nowell was studying leukemia cells, trying to figure out what made them grow uncontrollably.

He stumbled onto the first clear evidence for a theory that was then hotly debated - that abnormal genes could give rise to cancer.

Nowell's discovery of "the Philadelphia Chromosome," made with the late David Hungerford of Fox Chase Cancer Center, was key to advances in the understanding and diagnosis of cancer, particularly lymphomas and leukemias, and care of patients.

It also led to the development of Gleevec, the first genetically targeted cancer drug. Approved in 2001 for a rare type of leukemia, Gleevec has since been shown to treat several other deadly diseases.

Now 82, Nowell is still a weekly presence at Penn. He adds the Franklin Medal in Life Sciences to many other honors, including the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award, sometimes called America's Nobel Prize.

Yet his own assessment of his watershed work is characteristically self-deprecating: "We were just fooling around and were lucky," he told The Inquirer in 1998 after winning the Lasker Award. "Now, researchers have identified an enormous number of genes that are altered [in cancer]. That's both the excitement and the frustration."

- Marie McCullough

To understand the Earth as W. Richard Peltier knows it, you could pore over the trove of scientific papers he has written detailing the interactions of continents, the surging ocean currents, the Earth's molten center, and the gossamer atmosphere.

Or, if you were a kid buzzing around the Franklin Institute, as he explained his work to visitors on Tuesday, it might come down to this: Silly Putty.

In an area near the rotunda, Peltier bounces a ball of the stuff off the floor. It dents. This is sort of like Canada under the weight of the glaciers 26,000 years ago. South would be New Jersey's coast, squishing up at the edge of the glacier. Now, the Garden State is sinking again, which contributes to sea level rise.

This is just one of the seminal discoveries made by Peltier, a University of Toronto physics professor since 1973.

For his work, Peltier is receiving the Franklin Institute's Bower Award, and its $250,000 stipend. The award cites his "cross-disciplinary research into the physics of the Earth," which now is helping solve the conundrums of climate change.

This "phenomenal scientist," says colleague Benjamin P. Horton, a University of Pennsylvania professor, determined precise amounts of sea level rise and corrected estimates of how thick the last glaciers were - nearly 2.5 miles.

"Without people like him, we wouldn't really know what's going on," Horton says.

Peltier lately has been making global warming projections and is studying how past climates affected the evolution of Earth's creatures.

At the institute, the Silly Putty sits beside an inflatable plastic globe. He picks it up and grins. "I can hold the world in my hands!"

- Sandy Bauers

JoAnne Stubbe is a pioneering biochemical scientist whose groundbreaking work helped show how DNA is copied and repaired.

Besides being recognized for breakthroughs that have led to new cancer drugs and could aid the development of biodegradable plastics, the MIT professor, 63, has been lauded for her creative use of imaging techniques, such as X-rays, to study biochemical processes.

Stubbe's seminal research on the enzymes involved in DNA syntheses has led to discoveries of new drugs, including Eli Lilly's Gemcitabine, used on pancreatic and other cancers.

Stubbe's team also showed how the antibiotic bleomycin can function as a cancer drug by damaging the DNA of tumor cells.

For her work, Stubbe is receiving the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry.

Stubbe graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 with a B.S. in chemistry and is a professor of chemistry and biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Last year, President Obama gave her the National Medal of Science.

- J.G.