(Page 5 of 5)

Only four years after arriving in the United States from Vietnam, with little facility in English, Mr. Nguyen-Huynh won a Westinghouse scholarship for a project on the pharmacology of antipsychotic drugs. He was then a senior at University High School in Cleveland. Now he is a biochemistry major at Harvard University.

Mr. Nguyen-Huynh was born in Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1968, soon after the Tet offensive. When Saigon collapsed in 1975, his father, a South Vietnamese Army officer, was arrested and later died in captivity. Mr. Nguyen-Huynh said that in 1981, at age 13, ''my mother decided we must leave because she thinks we are in danger, and our future was bleak.''

With about 40 other people, he, his mother and sister crowded into a fishing boat for a terrifying voyage across the Gulf of Siam to Thailand. Five times pirates boarded the boat. ''They took jewelry, clothing, money,'' he said. Miraculously, no one was harmed. ''The adults were very scared,'' Mr. Nguyen-Huynh said, ''but I was young and didn't know better.''

After four months in a refugee camp near Songkla, Thailand, and eight months in a camp in Indonesia, Mr. Nguyen-Huynh stepped off a plane in Seattle during a winter storm. Stooping down, he picked up a handful of white, wet matter. ''I wanted to touch snow,'' he said. ''I had only heard there was such a thing.''

Asian students in America, Mr. Nguyen-Huynh said, lean toward the sciences ''because the language barrier is less, but what consolidated my interest was when I worked at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital with Dr. Anne Andorn, a psychiatrist who was studying antipsychotic drugs.''

Mr. Nguyen-Huynh said, ''It's hard for me to say, for other people, whether high school preparation here is solid.'' What is needed, he said, are ''teachers who care about their subject, a curriculum that stresses understanding of concepts rather than straight memorization, opportunity for some hands-on experience.

''The interest has to be nurtured, encouraged,'' he said.


Professor and Nobel laureate in physics

SOME teachers are smart enough to admit their ignorance, and Sheldon Glashow appreciates that. ''I remember in seventh grade, my teacher was talking about astronomy and I asked her: 'Why is the man in the moon always facing the earth?,' '' he said. ''That meant the lunar day corresponded to the Earth's day. It seemed to me a coincidence that was not implied by anything she had taught us.''

Fortunately, that teacher, at Junior High School 52 in Manhattan, was secure enough to respond by saying she did not know. ''That was a good answer,'' Dr. Glashow said, ''because it is rare that you find a teacher so brazenly willing to flaunt her ignorance.''

What the future Westinghouse winner and Nobel laureate learned was that ''there simply were questions the teachers could not answer. That turned me toward books.''

Both his father, a plumber, and his brother, who became a dentist, ''regarded Einstein as a hero to be emulated,'' Dr. Glashow recalled. With their encouragement, he earned admission to the Bronx High School of Science. There he made friends with another student, Steven Weinberg, and around them gathered a group of students who became ''kind of a school within a school,'' Dr. Glashow said. ''You know, long talks about science over the phone, on the subway home.''

In 1950, during his senior year, Dr. Glashow won a Westinghouse scholarship for a project investigating the ''hydroponic growth of tomato plants with selenium, a chemical element, replacing sulfur.'' Hydroponics is the technique of growing plants in fluids.

He and Mr. Weinberg went on to Cornell together, then met again at the University of California at Berkeley, this time as professors. Later they found themselves at Harvard in academic positions, and in 1979, they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. The Nobel committee cited their contribution in discovering a piece of the puzzle called the unified field theory, which proposes that the universe's four fundamental forces - gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force - are connected.

Dr. Glashow, still at Harvard teaching physics, is concerned about the state of science education in America. ''At the junior high and high school level, it stinks on hot ice,'' he said. ''With exceptions, the teachers know little and the books are worse.''

A large part of the problem is systemic, he contends. ''The only way you can take physics is first to take biology and chemistry, which is maniacal because what we do is teach them as three independent disciplines, which they are not.''

Because of such problems, he said, ''The brightest American kids are no longer going into science, they are going into investment banking.''

Photos: Nina Schor (The New York Times/Scott Goldsmith) (pg. 24); Theron Stanford (The New York Times/Terrence McCarthy) (pg. 25); Robert Axelrod (pg. 26); Atom Sarkar (The New York Times/Walter D. Unks) (pg. 27); Paul Teschan (The New York Times/Dan Loftin) (pg. 28); Roger Cuffey (pg. 29); Gay Ann Wilson (The New York Times/Jose R. Lopez) 9pg. 30); Anh Tuan Nguyen-Huynh (The New York Times/Joe Wrinn) (pg. 31); Sheldon Glashow (Tom Graham) (pg. 34)