For broadcast on CBS Radio Network stations 
October 16-17, 1999:

Dead or alive.

The Stamp Collecting Report, I'm Lloyd de Vries.

This year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 
Ahmed Zewail, was the subject of two stamps issued last 
year. And he's not dead...he's still leading research on 
chemical reactions at Cal Tech.

Other countries, other rules: Those were EGYPTIAN stamps.

To be on a U-S stamp, the person being honored must have been 
dead ten years. The exception is a former president -- stamps 
for them usually are issued on the first birthday after their 
deaths. But no living people have ever been honored by U-S 
stamps.

That's not the case in other countries. The British Royal 
Family appears on its stamp, and in Australia, living people 
are honored with stamps, such as the ones earlier this year 
for Olympic Gold Medal winners.

Living people DO sneak onto U-S stamps anyway: Artists will 
use friends or relatives as the basis for their illustrations, 
sometimes changing their features....sometimes not. But those 
people aren't being honored on the stamps.

And that's stamp collecting this week. 

I'm Lloyd de Vries, CBS News. 


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