The award of the prize for physics in 1939 to Professor E. O. Lawrence, of the University of California, will be widely popular. He is the inventor of the cyclotron, the machine which produces atomic projectiles of enormous power on the principle of whirling them round and round like a stone on the end of a piece of string and then letting them go. He has accomplished something that looked virtually impossible to the best minds in the same field, With his great machine he has discovered about one hundred and fifty new radioactive substances, and has advanced far towards the manufacture of radium substitutes. He has recently devoted much of his attention to the application of his machine and the new substances manufactured by it to medical problems. Besides being a great scien-fist, Professor Lawrence is a young and generous man. He has spent much time supplying workers al over the world with materials that only he could make, He is assisted in his researches by his brother, Dr. J. Lawrence, who gave a fascinating account of them at Dundee this year.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.