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PROFILE / DON AND FRED LAMB
A passion for science has drawn them together since childhood, but to succeed as individuals the Lamb brothers have learned to keep their distance
It is early afternoon, and outside Don Lamb's office a winter gray twilight is starting to settle over the University of Chicago campus. Inside, Don Lamb is trying to define the difference between himself and his identical twin brother Fred. Although it is getting difficult to see in the office, he is too engrossed to get up and flick the light switch. Don, like Fred, is a kinetic storyteller. As he talks, the tales tumble out one after the other, careening from their childhood in post-World War II Kansas to Beatles-era Liverpool and back to the Midwest.
But it is Don's hands that tell the real story. Whenever he talks about Fred, his index finger sketches out a straight line. And when he talks about his own life, Don's finger pirouettes around the same line. In the gathering dark, a metaphorical light bulb turns on. "That's it," he concludes. "Fred is like a straight line, and I have kind of spiraled around."
To the untrained eye, Fred and Don look more like parallel lines. Both study the physics of binary star systems that contain compact objects such as black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs. They work in the same state: Fred is the director of the Center for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign, and Don is a professor and former chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. Both also serve as scientific advisers to an amazing variety of international projects, ranging from a pair of satellites carrying x-ray telescopes to nuclear nonproliferation and the plight of scientists from the former Soviet Union.
They may have followed similar paths, but the two brothers have carefully avoided sharing the same spotlight. Experience has taught them to value their separate lives. "Once people see us together and identify us as twins, they can't seem to think of anything else," says Don. The Lambs think about it, too. Their conversation abounds in mistaken-identity stories: Fred's postdoc buttonholing Don at a conference to discuss a research project Don...