Last year's recipients were former United States Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, for his campaigns to curb cigarette smoking, and M.S. Swaminathan, an agricultural scientist working in Asia.
`Great National Interest'
McCarty was given the prize this year for his research into the microbiological cleanup of contaminated ground and surface water.
"The biological approach we are trying to develop is of great national interest," he says. "We are learning how to use microorganisms to destroy contaminants, rather than using the alternative physical or chemical approaches, which do little more than push the contaminants from one place to another."
Currently, McCarty is working with private companies and federal and state governments involved in toxic waste cleanup under Superfund, the major funding apparatus created in the early 1980s to finance environmental reclamation projects.
McCarty says he deals primarily with chlorinated solvents, which are present in many industrial cleaning and lubrication fluids. He ...
