crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-05 17:13:46

1463) Donald J. Cram

Gist

Life:

Donald Cram was born and raised in Chester, Vermont. When Cram was four years old, his father died. Because money was scarce, Cram began working at an early age and was able to continue his education thanks to scholarships. After studies at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he worked at Merck & Co. He received his doctorate at Harvard University in 1947. He subsequently worked at UCLA in Los Angeles. Donald Cram was married twice, first to Jean Turner and then to Jane Maxwell.

Work:

Chemical reactions often occur through the influence of molecules that have cavities and pockets where other atoms and molecules can be attached to then join with other molecules. After Charles Pedersen discovered crown ethers, molecules that can capture certain metallic atoms, Donald Cram succeeded in building molecules with the ability to attach specific atoms and molecules to themselves. This made it possible to create chemical compounds through chemical reactions that have a significant impact on biological processes.

Summary

Donald J. Cram (born April 22, 1919, Chester, Vermont, U.S.—died June 17, 2001, Palm Desert, California) was an American chemist who, along with Charles J. Pedersen and Jean-Marie Lehn, was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his creation of molecules that mimic the chemical behaviour of molecules found in living systems.

Cram was educated at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and at the University of Nebraska, and he received a doctorate in organic chemistry from Harvard University in 1947. He joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles in 1947 and became a full professor there in 1956 and emeritus in 1990.

Donald J. Cram (born April 22, 1919, Chester, Vermont, U.S.—died June 17, 2001, Palm Desert, California) was an American chemist who, along with Charles J. Pedersen and Jean-Marie Lehn, was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his creation of molecules that mimic the chemical behaviour of molecules found in living systems.

Cram was educated at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and at the University of Nebraska, and he received a doctorate in organic chemistry from Harvard University in 1947. He joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles in 1947 and became a full professor there in 1956 and emeritus in 1990.

Details

Donald James Cram (April 22, 1919 – June 17, 2001) was an American chemist who shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jean-Marie Lehn and Charles J. Pedersen "for their development and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity." They were the founders of the field of host–guest chemistry.

Early life and education

Cram was born and raised in Chester, Vermont, to a Scottish immigrant father, and a German immigrant mother. His father died before Cram turned four, leaving him the only male in a family of five. He grew up on Aid to Dependent Children, and learned to work at an early age, doing jobs such as picking fruit, tossing newspapers, and painting houses, while bartering for piano lessons. By the time he turned eighteen, he had worked at least eighteen different jobs.

Cram attended the Winwood High School in Long Island, N.Y. From 1938 to 1941, he attended Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida on a national honorary scholarship, where he worked as an assistant in the chemistry department, and was active in theater, chapel choir, Lambda Chi Alpha, Phi Society, and Zeta Alpha Epsilon. It was at Rollins that he became known for building his own chemistry equipment. In 1941, he graduated from Rollins College with a BS in chemistry.

In 1942, he graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln with a MS in organic chemistry, with Norman O. Cromwell serving as his thesis adviser. His subject was "Amino ketones, mechanism studies of the reactions of heterocyclic secondary amines with -bromo-, -unsaturated ketones."

In 1947, Cram graduated from Harvard University with a PhD in organic chemistry, with Louis Fieser serving as the adviser on his dissertation on "Syntheses and reactions of 2-(ketoalkyl)-3-hydroxy-1,4-naphthoquinones"

Career

From 1942 to 1945, Cram worked in chemical research at Merck & Co laboratories, doing penicillin research with mentor Max Tishler. Postdoctoral work was as an American Chemical Society postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with John D. Roberts. Cram was the originator of Cram's rule, which provides a model for predicting the outcome of nucleophilic attack of carbonyl compounds. He published over 350 research papers and eight books on organic chemistry, and taught graduate and post-doctoral students from 21 different countries.

Research

Cram expanded upon Charles Pedersen's ground-breaking synthesis of crown ethers, two-dimensional organic compounds that are able to recognize and selectively combine with the ions of certain metal elements. He synthesized molecules that took this chemistry into three dimensions, creating an array of differently shaped molecules that could interact selectively with other chemicals because of their complementary three-dimensional structures. Cram's work represented a large step toward the synthesis of functional laboratory-made mimics of enzymes and other natural molecules whose special chemical behavior is due to their characteristic structure. He also did work in stereochemistry and Cram's rule of asymmetric induction is named after him.

In 1973, Cram collaborated on research with Irish chemist Francis Leslie Scott.

Professor

Cram was named an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1947, and a professor in 1955. He served there until his retirement in 1987. He was a popular teacher, having instructed some 8,000 undergraduates in his career and guided the academic output of 200 graduate students. He entertained his classes by strumming his guitar and singing folk songs.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-06 18:02:54

1464) Jean-Marie Lehn

Summary

Jean-Marie Lehn (born September 30, 1939, Rosheim, France) is a French chemist who, together with Charles J. Pedersen and Donald J. Cram, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1987 for his contribution to the laboratory synthesis of molecules that mimic the vital chemical functions of molecules in living organisms.

Lehn earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Strasbourg in 1963, and in 1970 he became a professor of chemistry at Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg. From 1979 to 2010 he was a professor at the Collège de France in Paris.

Lehn expanded on Pedersen’s achievement in creating crown ethers, a class of two-dimensional ring-shaped organic compounds that are capable of selectively recognizing and combining with other molecules. In the course of his efforts to synthesize three-dimensional molecules that would possess similar reactive characteristics, Lehn created a molecule that combines with the chemical acetylcholine, which is an important neurotransmitter in the brain. His work raised the possibility of creating totally artificial enzymes that would have characteristics superior to their natural counterparts in the human body.

Details

Jean-Marie Lehn (born 30 September 1939) is a French chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Donald Cram and Charles Pedersen in 1987 for his synthesis of cryptands. Lehn was an early innovator in the field of supramolecular chemistry, i.e., the chemistry of host–guest molecular assemblies created by intermolecular interactions, and continues to innovate in this field. He described the process by which molecules recognize each other. Drugs, for example, "know" which cell to destroy and which to let live. As of January 2006, his group has published 790 peer-reviewed articles in chemistry literature.

Biography

Early years

Lehn was born in Rosheim, Alsace, France to Pierre and Marie Lehn. He is of Alsatian German descent. His father was a baker, but because of his interest in music, he later became the city organist. Lehn also studied music, saying that it became his major interest after science. He has continued to play the organ throughout his professional career as a scientist. His high school studies in Obernai, from 1950 to 1957, included Latin, Greek, German, and English languages, French literature, and he later became very keen of both philosophy and science, particularly chemistry. In July 1957, he obtained the baccalauréat in philosophy, and in September of the same year, the baccalauréat in Natural Sciences.

At the University of Strasbourg, although he considered studying philosophy, he ended up taking courses in physical, chemical and natural sciences, attending the lectures of Guy Ourisson, and realizing that he wanted to pursue a research career in organic chemistry. He joined Ourisson's lab, working his way to the Ph.D. There, he was in charge of the lab's first NMR spectrometer, and published his first scientific paper, which pointed out an additivity rule for substituent induced shifts of proton NMR signals in steroid derivatives. He obtained his Ph.D., and went to work for a year at Robert Burns Woodward's laboratory at Harvard University, working among other things on the synthesis of vitamin B12.

Career

In 1966, he was appointed a position as maître de conférences (assistant professor) at the Chemistry Department of the University of Strasbourg. His research focused on the physical properties of molecules, synthesizing compounds specifically designed for exhibiting a given property, in order to better understand how that property was related to structure.

In 1968, he achieved the synthesis of cage-like molecules, comprising a cavity inside which another molecule could be lodged. Organic chemistry enabled him to engineer cages with the desired shape, thus only allowing a certain type of molecule to lodge itself in the cage. This was the premise for an entire new field in chemistry, sensors. Such mechanisms also play a great role in molecular biology.

These cryptands, as Lehn dubbed them, became his main center of interest, and led to his definition of a new type of chemistry, "supramolecular chemistry", which instead of studying the bonds inside one molecule, looks at intermolecular attractions, and what would be later called "fragile objects", such as micelles, polymers, or clays.

In 1980, he was elected to become a teacher at the prestigious Collège de France, and in 1987 was awarded the Nobel Prize, alongside Donald Cram and Charles Pedersen for his works on cryptands.

He is currently a member of the Reliance Innovation Council which was formed by Reliance Industries Limited, India.

As of 2021, Lehn has an h-index of 154 according to Google Scholar and of 137 (946 documents) according to Scopus.

Legacy

In 1987, Pierre Boulez dedicated a very short piano work Fragment d‘une ébauche to Lehn on the occasion of his Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Personal life

Lehn was married in 1965 to Sylvie Lederer, and together they had two sons, David and Mathias.

Lehn is an atheist.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-07 16:13:08

1465) Charles J. Pedersen

Summary

Charles J. Pedersen (born October 3, 1904, Pusan, Korea—died October 26, 1989, Salem, New Jersey, U.S.) was an American chemist who, along with Jean-Marie Lehn and Donald J. Cram, was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his synthesis of the crown ethers—a group of organic compounds that would selectively react with other atoms and molecules much as do the molecules in living organisms.

Pedersen was born to a Norwegian father and a Japanese mother. In the early 1920s he went to the United States to study chemical engineering at the University of Dayton in Ohio, where he took a bachelor’s degree. He received a master’s degree in organic chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 1927 went to work for E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. as a research chemist. He worked there for the next 42 years.

In the 1960s Pedersen synthesized a group of compounds that he named crown ethers for their structure—a loose flexible ring of carbon atoms punctuated at regular intervals with oxygen atoms. By varying the size of the rings, he found that crown ethers would bind the ions of certain metal elements at the centre of the “crown.” His discoveries were expanded upon by Lehn and Cram, and the result was the laboratory synthesis of molecules that could selectively react with other molecules in much the same way that enzymes and other natural biological molecules do.

Details

Charles John Pedersen (October 3, 1904 – October 26, 1989) was an American organic chemist best known for discovering crown ethers and describing methods of synthesizing them during his entire 42-year career as a chemist for DuPont at DuPont Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware, and at DuPont's Jackson Laboratory in Deepwater, New Jersey. Often associated with Reed McNeil Izatt, Pedersen also shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1987 with Donald J. Cram and Jean-Marie Lehn. He is the only Nobel Prize laureate born in Korea other than Peace Prize laureate Kim Dae-jung.

Pedersen made countless other discoveries in chemistry, such as discovering and developing metal deactivators. His early investigations also led to the development of a dramatically improved process for manufacturing tetraethyl lead, an important gasoline additive. He also contributed to the development of neoprene.

Early life and education

Born on October 3, 1904, in Busan, Korea, Charles J. Pedersen was the youngest of three children. His father, Brede Pedersen, was a Norwegian marine engineer who immigrated to Korea in order to join the Korean customs service after leaving home due to family issues. Later, he worked as a mechanical engineer at the Unsan County mines in present-day North Korea. His Japanese mother, Takino Yasui, immigrated from Japan to Korea with her family and established a successful line of work by trading soybeans and silkworms located close to the Unsan County mines, where the couple ultimately met. Although not much is mentioned about his elder brother, who died of a childhood disease before Pedersen was born, he had an older sister named Astrid, who was five years older than him. In Japan, he used the Japanese given name Yoshio which he spelled using the kanji for "good" and "man". According to Pedersen in a separate autobiographical account of his childhood, he had been born prior to the Russo-Japanese War and because his mother had still been grieving over the then-recent death of his older brother, he did not feel welcomed as a child.

Despite living in what is now South Korea, because Pedersen lived in the vicinity of the American-owned Unsan County mines, which spanned approximately 500 square miles in area, he grew up speaking primarily English.

At around 8 years old, Pedersen was sent by his family to study abroad in Nagasaki, Japan and then later transferred to St. Joseph College in Yokohama, Japan.

After successfully completing his education at St. Joseph College, due to the close ties his family had with the Society of Mary (Marianists), Pedersen decided to attend college in America at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

While spending his undergraduate life in 1922 studying chemical engineering at the University of Dayton in Ohio, Pedersen had been a well balanced student who immersed himself in the sports, academic and social aspects of his college. With a passion for the sport of tennis, Pedersen played on his school's varsity tennis team under Coach Frank Kronauge, a former University of Dayton tennis captain. Playing for all four years of his undergraduate years, Pedersen became captain for both of his junior and senior seasons on the team. Furthermore, Pedersen spent his time as both the vice-president of the Engineers' Club as well as in charge of Literary in the Daytonian Editorial Department. Graduating from the University of Dayton in 1926 with a degree in chemical engineering, he was dedicated for his time at the university as well as the various accomplishments he made while studying as an undergraduate.

Earning a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering, Pedersen decided to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in order to obtain a master's degree in organic chemistry. Although his professors at the time encouraged him to stay and pursue a PhD in organic chemistry, Pedersen decided to start his career instead, partially because he no longer wanted to be supported by his father. He is one of the few people to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences without having a PhD.

Du Pont

After leaving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pedersen became employed at the DuPont Company in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1927 through connections from his research advisor, Professor James F. Norris. While at DuPont, Pedersen was able to begin research at the Jackson Laboratory under William S. Calcott and finished his career with DuPont at the Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware. As a young chemist at DuPont, Pedersen witnessed and gained inspiration many flourishing chemists such as Julian Hill and Roy J. Plunkett, and also breakthroughs in polymers and work in the field of organic chemistry. Pedersen had a particular interest in industry as he started his focus on his chemical career, which influenced the direction of problems he set out to solve as a chemist. As Pedersen began working on problems as a new chemist, he was free to work on whatever problems fascinated him and he quickly became interested in oxidative degradation and stabilization of substrate. Pedersen's papers and work expanded beyond this, however it was a major influence to his eventual Nobel Prize awarded research.

Retiring at the age of 65, his work resulted in 25 papers and 65 patents, and in 1967, he published two works describing the methods of synthesizing crown ethers (cyclic polyethers). The donut-shaped molecules were the first in a series of extraordinary compounds that form stable structures with alkali metal ions. In 1987, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in this area with Donald Cram and Jean-Marie Lehn, whom expanded upon his original discoveries. In the whole process of the Nobel Prize winning, the Dupont Company fully supported Pedersen by providing him a full-time public relations man, and a part-time secretary. DuPont Company also utilized their own corporate aircraft to accompany Pedersen and his family, as he could not travel on commercial aircraft.

Discovery of the crown ethers

At around 1960, Pedersen went back to research in the field of Coordination Chemistry, focusing on the synthesis of multidentate ligands. It was recommended by his colleague Herman Schroeder to work on the coordination chemistry of vanadium before working on the polymerization and oxidative catalytic activity of vanadium. It was while working on this research that Pedersen made his discovery of crown ether. Through studying the bio[2-(o-Hydroxyphenoxy)Ethyl] ether, Pedersen accidentally discovered an unknown substances described as a "goo" while purifying the compound. Using ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy to study its reactions with phenol groups, after treating the samples with alkali, although the absorption curve initially showed no changes, it was observed to have shifted to higher absorption readings if one or more of the hydroxy groups were unpaired. Basing further research on this observation, Pedersen then dipped the unknown product in methanol and sodium hydroxide. Although the solution was not soluble in methanol, it became alkaline when in contact with the sodium hydroxide.

Due to not being soluble in methanol, Pedersen then proceeded to treat the methanol with soluble sodium salts, to which the unknown substance became soluble, allowing him to conclude that the solubility was due to sodium ions instead of alkalinity. Since the behavior of this substance mirrored that of 2,3-benzo-1,4,7-trioxacyclononane, with twice the molecular-weight, the unknown molecule was then coined as dibenzo-18-crown-6, the first of the aromatic crown compounds discovered.

Charles-John-Pedersen-1904-1989-was-born-in-Busan-North-Korea-from-a-Norwegian-marine.jpg

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-09 16:59:31

1466) Susumu Tonegawa

Gist

(born 1939). Japanese molecular biologist Tonegawa Susumu was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987. He received the award for discovering how genetics plays into the great diversity of antibodies produced by the vertebrate immune system. Tonegawa was born on September 5, 1939, in Nagoya, Japan.

Summary

Tonegawa Susumu (born September 5, 1939, Nagoya, Japan) is a Japanese molecular biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for his discovery of the genetic mechanisms underlying the great diversity of antibodies produced by the vertebrate immune system.

Tonegawa earned a B.S. degree from Kyōto University in 1963 and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of California, San Diego, U.S., in 1969. He was a member of the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland from 1971 to 1981. During that time Tonegawa applied the newly devised recombinant DNA techniques of molecular biology to immunology and began to tackle one of the greatest unsolved immunological questions of the day: how antibody diversity is generated. Prior to Tonegawa’s discovery, it was unclear how a limited number of genes—there are believed to be about 100,000 in the human genome—could produce the total human antibody repertoire, which numbers in the trillions. According to Tonegawa’s research, each antibody protein is not encoded by a specific gene, as one theory contended; instead, antibodies are constructed from a relatively small number of gene fragments that are rearranged randomly to generate different antibody molecules.

In 1981 Tonegawa moved to the United States to become a professor of biology at the Center for Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In addition to conducting immunological investigations, Tonegawa studied molecular and cellular aspects of neurobiology, and in 1994 he joined MIT’s Center for Learning and Memory (now the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory). His research focused on the role of the hippocampus in the processes of memory formation and recall. To conduct these studies, Tonegawa developed a genetically engineered mouse model in which the animals were no longer able to produce an enzyme called calcineurin. Calcineurin plays important roles in the immune system and in the brain, where it is associated with receptors that bind chemicals involved in neural synaptic transmission. Tonegawa’s mice unexpectedly displayed symptoms characteristic of schizophrenia. Further studies indicated that genetic variations in the calcineurin gene contribute to the development of schizophrenia in humans. Tonegawa’s mouse model has since been employed for the discovery of pharmacological agents for the treatment of schizophrenia. Tonegawa also identified genes and proteins involved in long-term memory storage, and he developed techniques to facilitate the study of neuronal circuits involved in cognition and behaviour.

Tonegawa received numerous awards throughout his career, including the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (1982), the Person of Cultural Merit prize (Bunka Korosha; 1983), conferred by the Japanese government, and the Order of Culture (Bunka Kunsho; 1984).

Details

Susumu Tonegawa (Tonegawa Susumu, born September 5, 1939) is a Japanese scientist who was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for his discovery of V(D)J recombination, the genetic mechanism which produces antibody diversity. Although he won the Nobel Prize for his work in immunology, Tonegawa is a molecular biologist by training and he again changed fields following his Nobel Prize win; he now studies neuroscience, examining the molecular, cellular and neuronal basis of memory formation and retrieval.

Early life and education

Tonegawa was born in Nagoya, Japan and attended Hibiya High School in Tokyo. While a student at Kyoto University, Tonegawa became fascinated with operon theory after reading papers by François Jacob and Jacques Monod, whom he credits in part for inspiring his interest in molecular biology. Tonegawa graduated from Kyoto University in 1963 and, due to limited options for molecular biology study in Japan at the time, moved to the University of California, San Diego to do his doctorate study under Dr. Masaki Hayashi. He received his Ph.D. in 1968.

Career

Tonegawa conducted post-doctoral work at the Salk Institute in San Diego in the laboratory of Renato Dulbecco. With encouragement from Dr. Dulbecco, Tonegawa moved to the Basel Institute for Immunology in Basel, Switzerland in 1971, where he transitioned from molecular biology into immunology studies and carried out his landmark immunology studies.

In 1981, Tonegawa became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1994, he was appointed as the first Director of the MIT Center for Learning and Memory, which developed under his guidance into The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Tonegawa resigned his directorship in 2006 and currently serves as a Picower Professor of Neuroscience and Biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

Tonegawa also served as Director of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute from 2009 to 2017.

Research:

Immunology

Tonegawa's Nobel Prize work elucidated the genetic mechanism of the adaptive immune system, which had been the central question of immunology for over 100 years. Prior to Tonegawa's discovery, one early idea to explain the adaptive immune system suggested that each gene produces one protein; however, there are under 19,000 genes in the human body which nonetheless can produce millions of antibodies. In experiments beginning in 1976, Tonegawa showed that genetic material rearranges itself to form millions of antibodies. Comparing the DNA of B cells (a type of white blood cell) in embryonic and adult mice, he observed that genes in the mature B cells of the adult mice are moved around, recombined, and deleted to form the diversity of the variable region of antibodies. This process is known as V(D)J recombination.

In 1983, Tonegawa also discovered a transcriptional enhancer element associated with antibody gene complex, the first cellular enhancer element.

Neuroscience

Shortly following his Nobel Prize in 1990, Tonegawa again changed fields from immunology to neuroscience, where he has focused his research in the ensuing years.

Tonegawa's lab pioneered introductory transgenic and gene-knockout technologies in mammalian systems. He was involved in early work demonstrating the importance of CaMKII- (1992) and the NMDA receptor-dependent synaptic plasticity (1996) in memory formation.

Tonegawa's lab discovered that dendritic neuronal spines in the temporal cortex are a likely target for treatment of Fragile X Syndrome. With one dosage of the inhibitor drug FRAX586, Tonegawa showed a marked reduction of FXS symptoms in the mouse model.

Tonegawa was an early adopter of optogenetics and biotechnology in neuroscience research, leading to his groundbreaking work identifying and manipulating memory engram cells. In 2012, his lab demonstrated that the activation of a specific sub-population of mouse hippocampal neurons, labelled during a fear conditioning paradigm, is sufficient to evoke a behavioral response correlated with a precise memory trace. This demonstrated for the first time that memory information is stored in specific cellular ensembles in the hippocampus, now frequently called memory engram cells.

More recently, his lab continues to employ optogenetic technology and virus injection techniques to expand their findings on the engram cell ensemble. Notably, Tonegawa has uncovered the role of memory engram cell ensembles in memory valence, social memory, as well as their role in brain disorders such as depression, amnesia, and Alzheimer's disease. These works provide proofs of concept for future medical treatments in humans through the manipulation of memory engram ensembles.

Personal life

Tonegawa currently resides in the Boston area with his wife, Mayumi Yoshinari Tonegawa, who worked as an NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) director/interviewer and is now a freelance science writer. The Tonegawas have three children, Hidde Tonegawa, Hanna Tonegawa, and Satto Tonegawa (deceased).

Tonegawa is a fan of the Boston Red Sox, and threw out an opening pitch during their 2004 World Series championship season

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-10 17:19:57

1467) Leon M. Lederman

Gist

In decays of certain elementary particles, neutrinos are produced; particles that occasionally interact with matter to produce electrons. Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, and Jack Steinberger managed to create a beam of neutrinos using a high-energy accelerator. In 1962, they discovered that, in some cases, instead of producing an electron, a muon (200 times heavier than an electron) was produced, proving the existence of a new type of neutrino, the muon neutrino. These particles, collectively called “leptons”, could then be systematically classified in families.

Summary

Leon Max Lederman (born July 15, 1922, New York, New York, U.S.—died October 3, 2018, Rexburg, Idaho) was an American physicist who, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988 for their joint research on neutrinos.

Lederman was educated at the City College of New York (B.S., 1943) and received a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University, New York City, in 1951. He joined the faculty at Columbia that same year and became a full professor there in 1958. He was director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, from 1979 to 1989.

From 1960 to 1962, Lederman, together with his fellow Columbia University researchers Schwartz and Steinberger, collaborated in an important experiment at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. There they used a particle accelerator to produce the first laboratory-made beam of neutrinos—elusive subatomic particles that have no detectable mass and no electric charge and that travel at the speed of light. It was already known that when neutrinos interact with matter, either electrons or electron-like particles known as muons (mu mesons) are created. It was not known, however, whether this indicated the existence of two distinct types of neutrinos. The three scientists’ work at Brookhaven established that the neutrinos that produced muons were indeed a distinct (and previously unknown) type of neutrino, one which the scientists named muon neutrinos. The discovery of muon neutrinos subsequently led to the recognition of a number of different “families” of subatomic particles, and this eventually resulted in the standard model, a scheme that has been used to classify all known elementary particles.

Details

Leon Max Lederman (July 15, 1922 – October 3, 2018) was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, where he was resident scholar emeritus from 2012 until his death in 2018.

An accomplished scientific writer, he became known for his 1993 book The God Particle establishing the popularity of the term for the Higgs boson.

Early life and education

Lederman was born in New York City, New York, to Morris and Minna (Rosenberg) Lederman. His parents were Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants from Kyiv and Odesa. Lederman graduated from James Monroe High School in the South Bronx, and received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1943.

Lederman enlisted in the United States Army during World War II, intending to become a physicist after his service. Following his discharge in 1946, he enrolled at Columbia University's graduate school, receiving his Ph.D. in 1951.

Academic career

Lederman became a faculty member at Columbia University, and he was promoted to full professor in 1958 as Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics. In 1960, on leave from Columbia, he spent time at CERN in Geneva as a Ford Foundation Fellow. He took an extended leave of absence from Columbia in 1979 to become director of Fermilab. Resigning from Columbia (and retiring from Fermilab) in 1989, he then taught briefly at the University of Chicago. He then moved to the physics department of the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he served as the Pritzker Professor of Science. In 1992, Lederman served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Lederman, rare for a Nobel Prize winning professor, took it upon himself to teach physics to non-physics majors at The University of Chicago.

Lederman served as president of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and at the time of his death was chair emeritus. He also served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public, from 1989 to 1992, and was a member of the JASON defense advisory group. Lederman was also one of the main proponents of the "Physics First" movement. Also known as "Right-side Up Science" and "Biology Last," this movement seeks to rearrange the current high school science curriculum so that physics precedes chemistry and biology.

Lederman was an early supporter of Science Debate 2008, an initiative to get the then-candidates for president, Barack Obama and John McCain, to debate the nation's top science policy challenges. In October 2010, Lederman participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students engaged in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch. Lederman was also a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.

Academic work

In 1956, Lederman worked on parity violation in weak interactions. R. L. Garwin, Leon Lederman, and R. Weinrich modified an existing cyclotron experiment, and they immediately verified the parity violation. They delayed publication of their results until after Wu's group was ready, and the two papers appeared back-to-back in the same physics journal. Among his achievements are the discovery of the muon neutrino in 1962 and the bottom quark in 1977. These helped establish his reputation as among the top particle physicists.

In 1977, a group of physicists, the E288 experiment team, led by Lederman announced that a particle with a mass of about 6.0 GeV was being produced by the Fermilab particle accelerator. After taking further data, the group discovered that this particle did not actually exist, and the "discovery" was named "Oops-Leon" as a pun on the original name and Lederman's first name.

As the director of Fermilab, Lederman was a prominent supporter of the Superconducting Super Collider project, which was endorsed around 1983, and was a major proponent and advocate throughout its lifetime. Also at Fermilab, he oversaw the construction of the Tevatron, for decades the world's highest-energy particle collider. Lederman later wrote his 1993 popular science book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? – which sought to promote awareness of the significance of such a project – in the context of the project's last years and the changing political climate of the 1990s. The increasingly moribund project was finally shelved that same year after some $2 billion of expenditures. In The God Particle he wrote, "The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects" while stressing the importance of the Higgs boson.

In 1988, Lederman received the Nobel Prize for Physics along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino". Lederman also received the National Medal of Science (1965), the Elliott Cresson Medal for Physics (1976), the Wolf Prize for Physics (1982) and the Enrico Fermi Award (1992). In 1995, he received the Chicago History Museum "Making History Award" for Distinction in Science Medicine and Technology.

Personal life

Lederman's best friend during his college years, Martin J. Klein, convinced him of "the splendors of physics during a long evening over many beers". He was known for his sense of humor in the physics community. On August 26, 2008, Lederman was video-recorded by a science focused organization called ScienCentral, on the street in a major U.S. city, answering questions from passersby. He answered questions such as "What is the strong force?" and "What happened before the Big Bang?".

He had three children with his first wife, Florence Gordon, and toward the end of his life lived with his second wife, Ellen (Carr), in Driggs, Idaho.

Lederman was an atheist. Lederman began to suffer from memory loss in 2011 and, after struggling with medical bills, he had to sell his Nobel medal for $765,000 to cover the costs in 2015. He died of complications from dementia on October 3, 2018, at a care facility in Rexburg, Idaho, at the age of 96.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-12 22:37:52

1468) Melvin Schwartz

Gist

In decays of certain elementary particles, neutrinos are produced; particles that occasionally interact with matter to produce electrons. Melvin Schwartz, Leon Lederman, and Jack Steinberger managed to create a beam of neutrinos using a high-energy accelerator. In 1962, they discovered that, in some cases, instead of producing an electron, a muon (200 times heavier than an electron) was produced, proving the existence of a new type of neutrino, the muon neutrino. These particles, collectively called “leptons”, could then be systematically classified in families.

Summary

Melvin Schwartz (born Nov. 2, 1932, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 28, 2006, Twin Falls, Idaho) was an American physicist and entrepreneur who, along with Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988 for their research concerning neutrinos (subatomic particles that have no electric charge and virtually no mass).

Schwartz studied physics at Columbia University, New York City, and received a Ph.D. there in 1958. He taught at Columbia from 1958 to 1966 and then was a professor of physics at Stanford University, Calif., from 1966 to 1983. In 1970 he founded Digital Pathways, Inc., a company that designed computer-security systems. Schwartz later served as an associate director at Brookhaven National Laboratory (1991–94), and in 1991 he also rejoined the faculty at Columbia, where he became professor emeritus in 2000.

Schwartz received the Nobel Prize for research he and his Columbia colleagues Lederman and Steinberger performed at Brookhaven in 1960–62. Neutrinos almost never interact with matter, and consequently it had been extremely difficult to detect them in laboratory research. (It was estimated that from a sample of 10 billion neutrinos traveling through Earth, only one neutrino would interact with a particle of matter during the entire passage.) Acting on Schwartz’s suggestion, the three researchers devised a way to increase the statistical probability of neutrino interactions by producing a beam consisting of hundreds of billions of neutrinos and sending the beam through a detector of solid matter. To achieve this, the scientists used a particle accelerator to generate a stream of high-energy protons, which were then fired at a target made of the metal beryllium. The bombardment produced a stream of different particles, including those called pions (pi mesons) that, as they traveled, decayed into muons (mu mesons) and neutrinos. The stream of particles exiting from the beryllium target then passed through a steel barrier 13.4 m (44 feet) thick that filtered out all other particles except neutrinos. This pure neutrino beam subsequently entered a large aluminum detector in which a few neutrinos interacted with the aluminum atoms. In analyzing these interactions, the three physicists discovered a new type of neutrino, which came to be known as the muon neutrino.

Schwartz was the recipient of numerous honours, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1965). In 1975 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Details

Melvin Schwartz (November 2, 1932 – August 28, 2006) was an American physicist. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger for their development of the neutrino beam method and their demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.[2]

Biography

He was Jewish. He grew up in New York City in the Great Depression and went to the Bronx High School of Science. His interest in physics began there at the age of 12.

He earned his B.A. (1953) and Ph.D. (1958) at Columbia University, where Nobel laureate Isidor Isaac Rabi was the head of the physics department. Schwartz became an assistant professor at Columbia in 1958. He was promoted to associate professor in 1960 and full professor in 1963. Tsung-Dao Lee, a Columbia colleague who had recently won the Nobel prize at age 30, inspired the experiment for which Schwartz received his Nobel. Schwartz and his colleagues performed the experiments which led to their Nobel Prize in the early 1960s, when all three were on the Columbia faculty. The experiment was carried out at the nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory.

In 1966, after 17 years at Columbia, he moved west to Stanford University, where SLAC, a new accelerator, was just being completed. There, he was involved in research investigating the charge asymmetry in the decay of long-lived neutral kaons and another project which produced and detected relativistic hydrogen-like atoms made up of a pion and a muon.

In the 1970s he founded and became president of Digital Pathways. In 1972 he published a textbook on classical electrodynamics that has become a standard reference for intermediate and advanced students for its particularly clear exposition of the basic physical principles of the theory. In 1991, he became Associate Director of High Energy and Nuclear Physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory. At the same time, he rejoined the Columbia faculty as Professor of Physics. He became I. I. Rabi Professor of Physics in 1994 and retired as Rabi Professor Emeritus in 2000. He spent his retirement years in Ketchum, Idaho, and died August 28, 2006, at a Twin Falls, Idaho, nursing home after struggling with Parkinson's disease and hepatitis C.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-13 20:48:11

1469) Jack Steinberger

Summary

Jack Steinberger (born May 25, 1921, Bad Kissingen, Germany—died December 12, 2020, Geneva, Switzerland) was a German-born American physicist who, along with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988 for their joint discoveries concerning neutrinos.

Steinberger immigrated to the United States in 1934. He studied physics at the University of Chicago, receiving a Ph.D. there in 1948. He was a professor of physics at Columbia University, New York City, from 1950 to 1971, and from 1968 to 1986 he was a physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.

In the early 1960s Steinberger, along with his Columbia University colleagues Lederman and Schwartz, devised a landmark experiment in particle physics using the accelerator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York. The three reseachers obtained the first laboratory-made stream of neutrinos—subatomic particles that have no electric charge and virtually no mass. In the process, they discovered a new type of neutrino called a muon neutrino. The high-energy neutrino beams that the three researchers produced became a basic research tool in the study of subatomic particles and nuclear forces. In particular, the use of such beams made possible the study of radioactive-decay processes involving the weak nuclear force, or weak interaction, one of the four fundamental forces in nature.

Details

Jack Steinberger (born Hans Jakob Steinberger; May 25, 1921 – December 12, 2020) was a German-born American physicist noted for his work with neutrinos, the subatomic particles considered to be elementary constituents of matter. He was a recipient of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, for the discovery of the muon neutrino. Through his career as an experimental particle physicist, he held positions at the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University (1950–68), and the CERN (1968–86). He was also a recipient of the United States National Medal of Science in 1988, and the Matteucci Medal from the Italian Academy of Sciences in 1990.

Early life and education

Steinberger was born in the city of Bad Kissingen in Bavaria, Germany, on May 25, 1921 into a Jewish family. The rise of Nazism in Germany, with its open anti-Semitism, prompted his parents, Ludwig Lazarus (a cantor and religious teacher) and Berta May Steinberger, to send him out of the country.

Steinberger emigrated to the United States at the age of 13, making the trans-Atlantic trip with his brother Herbert. Jewish charities in the U.S. arranged for Barnett Farroll to care for him as a foster child. Steinberger attended New Trier Township High School, in Winnetka, Illinois. He was reunited with his parents and younger brother in 1938.

Steinberger studied chemical engineering at Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology) but left after his scholarship ended to help supplement his family's income. He obtained a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago, in 1942. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Signal Corps at MIT. With the help of the G.I. Bill, he returned to graduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1946, where he studied under Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi. His Ph.D. thesis concerned the energy spectrum of electrons emitted in muon decay; his results showed that this was a three-body decay, and implied the participation of two neutral particles in the decay (later identified as the electron)

and muon () neutrinos) rather than one.

Career

Early research

After receiving his doctorate, Steinberger attended the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for a year. In 1949 he published a calculation of the lifetime of the neutral pion, which anticipated the study of anomalies in quantum field theory.

Following Princeton, in 1949, Steinberger went to the Radiation Lab at the University of California at Berkeley, where he performed an experiment which demonstrated the production of neutral pions and their decay to photon pairs. This experiment utilized the 330 MeV synchrotron and the newly invented scintillation counters. Despite this and other achievements, he was asked to leave the Radiation Lab at Berkeley in 1950, due to his refusal to sign the so-called non-Communist Oath.

Steinberger accepted a faculty position at Columbia University in 1950. The newly commissioned meson beam at Nevis Labs provided the tool for several important experiments. Measurements of the production cross-section of pions on various nuclear targets showed that the pion has odd parity. A direct measurement of the production of pions on a liquid hydrogen target, then not a common tool, provided the data needed to show that the pion has spin zero. The same target was used to observe the relatively rare decay of neutral pions to a photon, an electron, and a positron. A related experiment measured the mass difference between the charged and neutral pions based on the angular correlation between the neutral pions produced when the negative pion is captured by the proton in the hydrogen nucleus. Other important experiments studied the angular correlation between electron–positron pairs in neutral pion decays, and established the rare decay of a charged pion to an electron and neutrino; the latter required use of a liquid-hydrogen bubble chamber.

Investigations of strange particles

During 1954–1955, Steinberger contributed to the development of the bubble chamber with the construction of a 15 cm device for use with the Cosmotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The experiment used a pion beam to produce pairs of hadrons with strange quarks to elucidate the puzzling production and decay properties of these particles. In 1956, he used a 30 cm chamber outfitted with three cameras to discover the neutral Sigma hyperon and measure its mass. This observation was important for confirming the existence of the SU(3) flavor symmetry which hypothesizes the existence of the strange quark.

An important characteristic of the weak interaction is its violation of parity symmetry. This characteristic was established through the measurement of the spins and parities of many hyperons. Steinberger and his collaborators contributed several such measurements using large (75 cm) liquid-hydrogen bubble chambers and separated hadron beams at Brookhaven. One example is the measurement of the invariant mass distribution of electron–positron pairs produced in the decay of Sigma-zero hyperons to Lambda-zero hyperons.

Neutrinos and the weak neutral current

In the 1960s, the emphasis in the study of the weak interaction shifted from strange particles to neutrinos. Leon Lederman, Steinberger and Schwartz built large spark chambers at Nevis Labs and exposed them in 1961 to neutrinos produced in association with muons in the decays of charged pions and kaons. They used the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) at Brookhaven, and obtained a number of convincing events in which muons were produced, but no electrons. This result, for which they received the Nobel Prize in 1988, proved the existence of a type of neutrino associated with the muon, distinct from the neutrino produced in beta decay.

Study of CP violation

The CP violation (charge conjugation and parity) was established in the neutral kaon system in 1964. Steinberger recognized that the phenomenological parameter epsilon which quantifies the degree of CP violation could be measured in interference phenomena. In collaboration with Carlo Rubbia, he performed an experiment while on sabbatical at CERN during 1965 which demonstrated robustly the expected interference effect, and also measured precisely the difference in mass of the short-lived and long-lived neutral kaon masses.

Back in the United States, Steinberger conducted an experiment at Brookhaven to observe CP violation in the semi-leptonic decays of neutral kaons. The charge asymmetry relates directly to the epsilon parameter, which was thereby measured precisely. This experiment also allowed the deduction of the phase of epsilon, and confirmed that CPT is a good symmetry of nature.

CERN

In 1968, Steinberger left Columbia University and accepted a position as a department director at CERN. He constructed an experiment there utilizing multi-wire proportional chambers (MWPC), recently invented by Georges Charpak. The MWPCs, augmented by micro-electronic amplifiers, allowed much larger samples of events to be recorded. Several results for neutral kaons were obtained and published in the early 1970s, including the observation of the rare decay of the neutral kaon to a muon pair, the time dependence of the asymmetry for semi-leptonic decays, and a more-precise measurement of the neutral kaon mass difference. A new era in experimental technique was opened.

These new techniques proved crucial for the first demonstration of direct CP-violation. The NA31 experiment at CERN was built in the early 1980s using the CERN SPS 400 GeV proton synchrotron. As well as banks of MWPCs and a hadron calorimeter, it featured a liquid argon electromagnetic calorimeter with exceptional spatial and energy resolution. NA31 showed that direct CP violation is real.

Steinberger worked on the ALEPH experiment at the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP), where he served as the experiment's spokesperson. Among the ALEPH experiment's initial accomplishments was the precise measurement of the number of families of leptons and quarks in the Standard Model through the measurement of the decays of the Z boson.

He retired from CERN in 1986, and went on to become a professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in Italy. He continued his association with the CERN laboratory through his visits into his 90s.

Nobel Prize

Steinberger was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino". He shared the prize with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz; at the time of the research, all three experimenters were at Columbia University.

The experiment used charged pion beams generated with the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The pions decayed to muons which were detected in front of a steel wall; the neutrinos were detected in spark chambers installed behind the wall. The coincidence of muons and neutrinos demonstrated that a second kind of neutrino was created in association with muons. Subsequent experiments proved this neutrino to be distinct from the first kind (electron-type). Steinberger, Lederman and Schwartz published their work in Physical Review Letters in 1962.

He gave his Nobel medal to New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois (USA), of which he was an alumnus.

He was also awarded the National Medal of Science in 1988, by the then US president, Ronald Reagan and was the recipient of the Matteucci Medal in 1990, from the Italian Academy of Sciences.

32327___personal-picture-of-jack-steinberger.jpg?12052014_1600

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-14 20:06:28

1470) Johann Deisenhofer

Gist

One of the most fundamental processes of life is photosynthesis, which uses energy from sunlight to make carbohydrates out of water and carbon dioxide. The energy conversion takes place through the transportation of electrons via a number of proteins that are attached to special membranes in the cell. In 1983 Johann Deisenhofer, Hartmut Michel and Robert Huber determined the structure for the photosynthetic reaction center.

Summary

Johann Deisenhofer (born September 30, 1943, Zusamaltheim, Germany) is a German American biochemist who, along with Hartmut Michel and Robert Huber, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1988 for their determination of the structure of certain proteins that are essential to photosynthesis.

Deisenhofer earned a doctorate from the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, West Germany, in 1974. He conducted research there until 1988, when he joined the scientific staff at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Dallas, Texas. That year he also began teaching at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. In 2001 Deisenhofer became a U.S. citizen.

Together with Michel and Huber, Deisenhofer set out to study the structure of a protein complex found in certain photosynthetic bacteria. This protein, called a photosynthetic reaction centre, was known to play a crucial role in initiating a simple type of photosynthesis. Between 1982 and 1985, the three scientists used X-ray crystallography to determine the exact arrangement of the more than 10,000 atoms that make up the protein complex. Their research increased the general understanding of the mechanisms of photosynthesis and revealed similarities between the photosynthetic processes of plants and bacteria.

Details

Johann Deisenhofer (born September 30, 1943) is a German biochemist who, along with Hartmut Michel and Robert Huber, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1988 for their determination of the first crystal structure of an integral membrane protein, a membrane-bound complex of proteins and co-factors that is essential to photosynthesis.

Early life and education

Born in Bavaria, Deisenhofer earned his doctorate from the Technical University of Munich for research work done at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, West Germany, in 1974. He conducted research there until 1988, when he joined the scientific staff of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

Career

Together with Michel and Huber, Deisenhofer determined the three-dimensional structure of a protein complex found in certain photosynthetic bacteria. This membrane protein complex, called a photosynthetic reaction center, was known to play a crucial role in initiating a simple type of photosynthesis. Between 1982 and 1985, the three scientists used X-ray crystallography to determine the exact arrangement of the more than 10,000 atoms that make up the protein complex. Their research increased the general understanding of the mechanisms of photosynthesis and revealed similarities between the photosynthetic processes of plants and bacteria.

Deisenhofer currently serves on the board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American government. In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto. He is currently a professor at the Department of Biophysics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-15 17:37:09

1471) Robert Huber

Gist

One of the most fundamental processes of life is photosynthesis, which uses energy from sunlight to make carbohydrates out of water and carbon dioxide. The energy conversion takes place through the transportation of electrons via a number of proteins that are attached to special membranes in the cell. In 1983 Robert Huber, Johann Deisenhofer and Hartmut Michel determined the structure for the photosynthetic reaction center.

Summary

Robert Huber (born Feb. 20, 1937, Munich, Ger.) is a German biochemist who, along with Johann Deisenhofer and Hartmut Michel, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1988 for their determination of the structure of a protein complex that is essential to photosynthesis in bacteria.

Huber received his doctorate from the Munich Technical University. In 1972 he joined the staff of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry at Martinsried, Ger., where he conducted his award-winning research with Deisenhofer and Michel. He alternately worked there and at the Munich Technical University.

Huber was an internationally recognized expert in the use of X-ray diffraction to determine the atomic structure of complex molecules such as proteins. Once a protein has been reduced to a pure crystalline form, its atomic structure can be deduced by analyzing the manner in which the crystal’s atoms scatter a beam of X rays. Huber and his colleagues used this technique to determine the structure of a protein complex (called a photosynthetic reaction centre) that is essential to photosynthesis in certain bacteria. By 1985 the three scientists had succeeded in describing the complete atomic structure of the protein. Although bacterial photosynthesis is somewhat simpler than that carried on by plants, the scientists’ work significantly increased the understanding of the mechanisms of photosynthesis in general.

Details

Robert Huber (born 20 February 1937) is a German biochemist and Nobel laureate. known for his work crystallizing an intramembrane protein important in photosynthesis and subsequently applying X-ray crystallography to elucidate the protein's structure.

Education and early life

He was born on 20 February 1937 in Munich where his father, Sebastian, was a bank cashier. He was educated at the Humanistisches Karls-Gymnasium from 1947 to 1956 and then studied chemistry at the Technische Hochschule, receiving his diploma in 1960. He stayed, and did research into using crystallography to elucidate the structure of organic compounds.

Career

In 1971 he became a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry where his team developed methods for the crystallography of proteins.

In 1988 he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry jointly with Johann Deisenhofer and Hartmut Michel. The trio were recognized for their work in first crystallizing an intramembrane protein important in photosynthesis in purple bacteria, and subsequently applying X-ray crystallography to elucidate the protein's structure. The information provided the first insight into the structural bodies that performed the integral function of photosynthesis. This insight could be translated to understand the more complex analogue of photosynthesis in cyanobacteria which is essentially the same as that in chloroplasts of higher plants.

In 2006, he took up a post at the Cardiff University to spearhead the development of Structural Biology at the university on a part-time basis.

Since 2005 he has been doing research at the Center for medical biotechnology of the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Huber was one of the original editors of the Encyclopedia of Analytical Chemistry.

Awards and honours

In 1977 Huber was awarded the Otto Warburg Medal. In 1988 he was awarded the Nobel Prize and in 1992 the Sir Hans Krebs Medal. Huber was elected a member of Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts, in 1993 and Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1999. His certificate of election reads:

Huber has built up, led and still leads the most productive protein crystallography laboratory in Europe. His own contributions to crystallography, made over a period of some 25 years, are prodigious. For his PhD thesis he solved the chemical formula of the important insect hormone edtyson which had eluded the chemists. He then demonstrated that the tertiary fold of the polypeptide chain in the haemoglobin of the fly larva chironomus closely resembled that in Kendrew's sperm whale myoglobin, indicating for the first time that this fold had been preserved throughout evolution.

Huber's next achievement was the solution of the structure of trypsin inhibitor and the demonstration that in its complex with trypsin it mimicked the tetrahedral transition state of the enzyme's substrate. Since then he has determined the structures of many other proteinases, their inactive precursors and their inhibitors, and has established himself as the world authority in this field. Outstanding structures are those of procarboxypeptidase, which led to the discovery of the remarkable activation mechanism of this enzyme, and of the complex of thrombin with hirudin, which showed the molecular mechanism of inhibition of blood clotting by this leech toxin.

In parallel with this work, Huber solved the structures of several immunoglobulin fragments. He was the first to determine the structure of the complement-activating F-fragment, which was also the first variable and the first constant domains in Fab-fragments.

Huber's structure of citrate synthase revealed a striking example of a conformational change undergone by an enzyme on combination with its substrate by a process of induced fit. Huber shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1988 with Michel and Deisenhofer for their determination of the remarkable and supremely important structures of the photochemical reaction centre of Rhodopseudomonas viridis and of phycocyanin, the light harvesting protein of the blue-green alga Mastiglocadus laminosus. This protein binds linear tetrapyrroles in a tertiary fold reminiscent of the globins, which brought Huber back full circle to his first structure, erythrocruerin, Huber has also determined the structures of several copper-containing electron-transfer proteins, including that of ascorbate oxidase, and of other metallo-enzymes. These studies have thrown new light on electron-transfer systems and on zinc coordination in proteins. He has also solved the structure of an important class of calcium binding proteins – the annexins. Finally his very accurate structures have provided important insights into the different degrees of mobility within protein molecules.

Huber has published some 400 papers.

Personal life

Huber is married and has four children.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-16 19:39:27

1472) Hartmut Michel

Gist

One of the most fundamental processes of life is photosynthesis, which uses energy from sunlight to make carbohydrates out of water and carbon dioxide. Hartmut Michel studied a bacterium that performs photosynthesis like green plants. The energy conversion takes place through the transportation of electrons via a number of proteins that are attached to special membranes in the cell. In 1982 Michel succeeded in crystallizing these types of proteins. The follow year he, along with Johann Deisenhofer and Robert Huber, determined the structure for the photosynthetic reaction center.

Summary

Hartmut Michel (born July 18, 1948, Ludwigsburg, Germany) is a German biochemist who, along with Johann Deisenhofer and Robert Huber, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1988 for their determination of the structure of certain proteins that are essential for photosynthesis.

Michel earned his doctorate from the University of Würzburg in 1977. In 1979 he joined the staff of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, West Germany, where he conducted his award-winning research. In 1987 he became head of the Department of Molecular Membrane Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt am Main.

It was Michel’s preliminary work, done in the period from 1978 to 1982, that cleared the way for the three scientists’ joint research. They wanted to determine the three-dimensional structure of a four-protein complex (called a photosynthetic reaction centre) that is crucial to the process of photosynthesis in certain bacteria. Michel performed the hitherto impossible feat of crystallizing the membrane-bound protein complex to a pure crystalline form, thus making it possible to determine the protein’s structure atom-by-atom by means of X-ray diffraction techniques.

Details

Hartmut Michel (born 18 July 1948) is a German biochemist, who received the 1988 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determination of the first crystal structure of an integral membrane protein, a membrane-bound complex of proteins and co-factors that is essential to photosynthesis.

Education and early life

He was born on 18 July 1948 in Ludwigsburg. After compulsory military service, he studied biochemistry at the University of Tübingen, working for his final year at Dieter Oesterhelt's laboratory on ATPase activity of halobacteria.

Career and research

Hartmut later worked on the crystallisation of membrane proteins – essential for their structure elucidation by X-ray crystallography. He received the Nobel Prize jointly with Johann Deisenhofer and Robert Huber in 1988. Together with Michel and Huber, Deisenhofer determined the three-dimensional structure of a protein complex found in certain photosynthetic bacteria. This membrane protein complex, called a photosynthetic reaction center, was known to play a crucial role in initiating a simple type of photosynthesis. Between 1982 and 1985, the three scientists used X-ray crystallography to determine the exact arrangement of the more than 10,000 atoms that make up the protein complex. Their research increased the general understanding of the mechanisms of photosynthesis, revealed similarities between the photosynthetic processes of plants and bacteria and established a methodology for crystallising membrane proteins.

Since 1987 he has been director of the Molecular Membrane Biology department at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and professor of biochemistry at the Goethe University Frankfurt.

Awards and honours

In 1986, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research. In 1988, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He received the Bijvoet Medal at the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research of Utrecht University in 1989. In 1995 he became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He also became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2005.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-18 18:35:17

1473) James Black (pharmacologist)

Gist

Many of the body's processes are controlled by substances known as hormones. These are absorbed by the cells of receptors on the cell’s surface. The hormone adrenaline causes the heart to pump harder and blood pressure to rise. At the beginning of the 1960s, James Black developed the drug propranolol, which is a beta-blocker that has a calming effect on the heart by blocking the receptor for adrenaline. At the beginning of the 1970s he developed the drug Cimetidine that suppresses the formation of gastric acid and is used to fight ulcers.

Summary

Sir James Black (born June 14, 1924, Uddingston, Scot.—died March 21, 2010) was a Scottish pharmacologist who, along with George H. Hitchings and Gertrude B. Elion, received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1988 for his development of two important drugs, propranolol and cimetidine.

Black earned a medical degree from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in 1946. He taught at various universities for the next 10 years and then joined Imperial Chemical Industries as a senior pharmacologist in 1958. He became head of biological research at Smith Kline & French Laboratories in 1964, and he joined the Wellcome Research Laboratories as director of therapeutic research in 1978. From 1984 he was professor of analytical pharmacology at King’s College, London, becoming emeritus in 1993. From 1992 to 2006 Black served as chancellor of the University of Dundee in Scotland, and, in honour of his work, the university built the Sir James Black Centre, a research facility for the investigation of cancer, tropical diseases, and diabetes. Knighted in 1981, Black became a member of the Order of Merit in 2000.

Black’s drug discoveries arose out of his systematic research on the interactions between certain cell receptors in the body and chemicals in the bloodstream that attach to them. Black wanted to find a drug that would relieve angina pectoris—i.e., the spasms of intense pain felt in the chest when the heart is not receiving enough oxygen.

It was known that beta receptors in the heart muscle, when stimulated by the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine, cause the heartbeat to quicken and increase the strength of the heart’s contractions, thus increasing that organ’s oxygen requirement. Black developed a drug that would block the beta receptor sites, thus preventing epinephrine and norepinephrine from attaching to them. The resulting inhibition of the hormones’ excitatory effects reduced the heart’s demand for oxygen and could thus help relieve anginal pain. Other beta-blocking agents were subsequently developed to treat heart attacks, hypertension, migraines, and other conditions.

Black used a similar approach to develop a drug treatment for stomach and duodenal ulcers, which are largely caused by the stomach’s oversecretion of gastric acids. He developed a drug that could block the histamine receptors that stimulate the secretion of gastric acid in the stomach, and the new drug, cimetidine, revolutionized the treatment of gastric and duodenal ulcers.

Details

Sir James Whyte Black (14 June 1924 – 22 March 2010) was a Scottish physician and pharmacologist. Together with Gertrude B. Elion and George H. Hitchings, he shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1988 for pioneering strategies for rational drug-design, which, in his case, lead to the development of propranolol and cimetidine. Black established a Veterinary Physiology department at the University of Glasgow, where he became interested in the effects of adrenaline on the human heart. He went to work for ICI Pharmaceuticals in 1958 and, while there, developed propranolol, a beta blocker used for the treatment of heart disease. Black was also responsible for the development of cimetidine, an H2 receptor antagonist, a drug used to treat stomach ulcers.

Early life and education

Black was born on 14 June 1924 in Uddingston, Lanarkshire, the fourth of five sons of a Baptist family which traced its origins to Balquhidder, Perthshire. His father was a mining engineer. He was brought up in Fife, educated at Beath High School, Cowdenbeath, and, at the age of 15, won a scholarship to the University of St Andrews. His family had been too poor to send him to university and he had been persuaded to sit the St Andrews entrance exam by his maths teacher at Beath.

Until 1967, University College, Dundee was the site for all clinical medical activity for the University of St Andrews. He matriculated at University College (which eventually became the University of Dundee) in 1943 and graduated from University of St Andrews School of Medicine with an MB ChB in 1946. During his time at St Andrews, Black lived in St Salvator's Hall.

After graduating, he stayed at University College to join the physiology department as an assistant lecturer before taking a lecturer position at King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore that subsequently became part of the University of Malaya. Black had decided against a career as a medical practitioner as he objected to what he considered the insensitive treatment of patients at the time.

Career

Black had large debts upon his graduation from university, so he took a teaching job in Singapore for three years, before moving to London in 1950 and then on to join the University of Glasgow (Veterinary School) where he established the Veterinary Physiology Department and developed an interest in the way adrenaline affects the human heart, particularly in those suffering from angina. Having formulated a theory of an approach by which the effects of adrenaline might be annulled, he joined ICI Pharmaceuticals in 1958, remaining with the company until 1964, during which time he invented propranolol, which later became the world's best-selling drug. During this time Black pioneered a method of research whereby drug molecules were purposefully built instead of being synthesised first and then investigated for their potential medical uses. The discovery of propranolol was hailed as the greatest breakthrough in the treatment of heart disease since the discovery of digitalis.

At the same time, Black was developing a similar method of inventing drugs for treatment of stomach ulcers, but ICI did not wish to pursue the idea so Black resigned in 1964 and joined Smith, Kline and French where he worked for nine years until 1973. While there, Black developed his second major drug, cimetidine, which was launched under the brand name Tagamet in 1975 and soon outsold propranolol to become the world's largest-selling prescription drug.

Black was appointed professor, and head of department, of pharmacology at University College London in 1973 where he established a new undergraduate course in medicinal chemistry but he became frustrated by the lack of funding for research and accepted the post of director of therapeutic research at the Wellcome Research Laboratories in 1978. However he did not agree with his immediate boss there, Sir John Vane, and resigned in 1984. Black then became Professor of Analytical Pharmacology at the Rayne Institute of King's College London medical school, where he remained until 1992. He established the James Black Foundation in 1988 with funding from Johnson & Johnson and led a team of 25 scientists in drugs research, including work on gastrin inhibitors which can prevent some stomach cancers.

Black contributed to basic scientific and clinical knowledge in cardiology, both as a physician and as a basic scientist. His invention of propranolol, the beta adrenergic receptor antagonist that revolutionised the medical management of angina pectoris, is considered to be one of the most important contributions to clinical medicine and pharmacology of the 20th century. Propranolol has been described as the greatest breakthrough in heart disease treatments since the 18th century discovery of digitalis and has benefited millions of people. Black's method of research, his discoveries about adrenergic pharmacology, and his clarification of the mechanisms of cardiac action are all strengths of his work.

He was greatly involved in the synthesis of cimetidine, at the time a revolutionary drug for the treatment and prevention of peptic ulcers. Cimetidine was the first of a new class of drugs, the H2-receptor antagonists.

Chancellor of the University of Dundee

In 1980, Black's association with the University of Dundee was renewed when the institution recognised his many achievements by conferring him with the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws. In 1992 he accepted an offer to succeed the 16th Earl of Dalhousie as Chancellor of the University and was installed as Chancellor at the award ceremony held in Dundee Repertory Theatre on 29 April 1992. Appropriately the first degree he conferred was to Professor Robert Campbell Garry, who had been responsible for his original appointment at University College Dundee. Sir James remarked at this ceremony that by returning to Dundee he was "in a real sense, coming
home".

As Chancellor, Sir James Black did much to promote the University of Dundee and was a popular figure within the University. He was awarded a second honorary degree, that of Doctor of Science, in 2005. He retired from his post the following year, and his association with the University of Dundee was marked with launching of the £20 million Sir James Black Centre. The centre, intended to promote interdisciplinary research in the life sciences, was opened by Sydney Brenner in 2006. Sir James Black himself visited the centre in October 2006 and was reportedly excited and pleased by what he saw.

A portrait of Black in his chancellor's robes, by Helene Train, is held as part of the University's fine art collection. The portrait is currently displayed in the foyer of the Sir James Black Centre.

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Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-20 21:08:31

1474) Gertrude B. Elion

Gist

Life

Gertrude Elion was born in New York. When, as a teenager, she watched her maternal grandfather die of cancer, Elion decided to devote her life to fighting the disease. She studied chemistry at Hunter College and New York University, but, as a woman, had difficulty finding work as a chemist. During World War II a lack of chemists arose because many men had joined the war, which led Elion to find work at a laboratory. In the mid-1940s she moved to Burroughs Wellcome's research laboratory, now GlaxoSmithKline, where she remained until her death.

Work

Gertrude Elion's research revolutionized both the development of new pharmaceuticals and the field of medicine in general. Previously, pharmaceuticals had primarily been produced from natural substances. During the 1950s, Elion, together with George Hitchings, developed a systematic method for producing drugs based on knowledge of biochemistry and diseases. One of the first drugs produced by the pair was for leukemia and helped many children with the disease to survive. Other drugs they created have been used to fight malaria, infections, and gout, as well as help with organ transplantations.

Summary

Gertrude B. Elion (born Jan. 23, 1918, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Feb. 21, 1999, Chapel Hill, N.C.) was an American pharmacologist who, along with George H. Hitchings and Sir James W. Black, received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1988 for their development of drugs used to treat several major diseases.

Elion was the daughter of immigrants. She graduated from Hunter College in New York City with a degree in biochemistry in 1937. Unable to obtain a graduate research position because she was a woman, she found work as a lab assistant at the New York Hospital School of Nursing (1937), an assistant organic chemist at the Denver Chemical Manufacturing Company (1938–39), a chemistry and physics teacher in New York City high schools (1940–42), and a research chemist at Johnson & Johnson (1943–44). During this time she also took classes at New York University (M.S., 1941). Unable to devote herself to full-time studies, Elion never received a Ph.D.

In 1944 Elion joined the Burroughs Wellcome Laboratories (later part of Glaxo Wellcome; today known as GlaxoSmithKline). There she was first the assistant and then the colleague of Hitchings, with whom she worked for the next four decades. Elion and Hitchings developed an array of new drugs that were effective against leukemia, autoimmune disorders, urinary-tract infections, gout, malaria, and viral herpes. Their success was due primarily to their innovative research methods, which marked a radical departure from the trial-and-error approach taken by previous pharmacologists. Elion and Hitchings pointedly examined the difference between the biochemistry of normal human cells and those of cancer cells, bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens (disease-causing agents). They then used this information to formulate drugs that could kill or inhibit the reproduction of a particular pathogen, leaving the human host’s normal cells undamaged. The two researchers’ new emphasis on understanding basic biochemical and physiological processes enabled them to eliminate much guesswork and wasted effort typical previously in developing new therapeutic drugs.

Though Elion officially retired in 1983, she helped oversee the development of azidothymidine (AZT), the first drug used in the treatment of AIDS. In 1991 she was awarded a National Medal of Science and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Details

Gertrude Belle Elion (January 23, 1918 – February 21, 1999) was an American biochemist and pharmacologist, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George H. Hitchings and Sir James Black for their use of innovative methods of rational drug design for the development of new drugs. This new method focused on understanding the target of the drug rather than simply using trial-and-error. Her work led to the creation of the anti-retroviral drug AZT, which was the first drug widely used against AIDS. Her well known works also include the development of the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used to fight rejection in organ transplants, and the first successful antiviral drug, acyclovir (ACV), used in the treatment of herpes infection.

Early life and education

Elion was born in New York City on January 23, 1918, to parents Robert Elion, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant and a dentist, and Bertha Cohen, a Polish Jewish immigrant. Her family lost their wealth after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Elion was an excellent student who graduated from Walton High School at the age of 15. When she was 15, her grandfather died of stomach cancer, and being with him during his last moments inspired Elion to pursue a career in science and medicine in college. She was Phi Beta Kappa at Hunter College, which she was able to attend for free due to her grades, graduating summa cum laude in 1937 with a degree in chemistry. Unable to find a paying research job after graduating because she was female, Elion worked as a secretary and high school teacher before working in an unpaid position at a chemistry lab. Eventually, she saved up enough money to attend New York University and she earned her M.Sc. in 1941, while working as a high school teacher during the day. In an interview after receiving her Nobel Prize, she stated that she believed the sole reason she was able to further her education as a young female was because she was able to attend Hunter College for free. Her fifteen financial aid applications for graduate school were turned down due to gender bias, so she enrolled in a secretarial school, where she attended only six weeks before she found a job.

Unable to obtain a graduate research position, she worked as a food quality supervisor at A&P supermarkets and for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. She moved to a position at Johnson & Johnson that she hoped would be more promising, but ultimately involved testing the strength of sutures. In 1944, she left to work as an assistant to George H. Hitchings at the Burroughs-Wellcome pharmaceutical company (now GlaxoSmithKline) in Tuckahoe, New York. Hitchings was using a new way of developing drugs, by intentionally imitating natural compounds instead of through trial and error. Specifically, he was interested in synthesizing antagonists to nucleic acid derivatives, with the goal that these antagonists would integrate into biological pathways. He believed that if he could trick cancer cells into accepting artificial compounds for their growth, they could be destroyed without also destroying normal cells. Elion synthesized anti-metabolites of purines, and in 1950, she developed the anti-cancer drugs tioguanine and mercaptopurine.

She pursued graduate studies at night school at New York University Tandon School of Engineering (then Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute), but after several years of long-range commuting, she was informed that she would no longer be able to continue her doctorate on a part-time basis, but would need to give up her job and go to school full-time. Elion made a critical decision in her life, and stayed with her job and give up the pursuit of her doctorate. She never obtained a formal Ph.D., but was later awarded an honorary Ph.D. from New York University Tandon School of Engineering (then Polytechnic University of New York) in 1989 and an honorary S.D. degree from Harvard University in 1998.

Personal life

Soon after graduating from Hunter College, Elion met Leonard Canter, an outstanding statistics student at City College of New York (CCNY). They planned to marry, but Leonard became ill. On June 25, 1941, he died from bacterial endocarditis, an infection of his heart valves. In her Nobel interview, she stated that this furthered her drive to become a research scientist and pharmacologist.

Elion never married or had children. However, her brother, whom she was close with, married and had three sons and a daughter that she took pride in being able to watch grow. She listed her hobbies as photography, travel, opera and ballet, and listening to music. After Burroughs Wellcome moved to Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, Elion moved to nearby Chapel Hill. She retired in 1983 from Burroughs Wellcome to spend more time traveling and attending the opera. She continued to make important scientific contributions after her retirement. One of her passions during this time was encouraging other women to pursue careers in science.

Gertrude Elion died in North Carolina in 1999, aged 81.

Career and research

While Elion had many jobs to support herself and put herself through school, Elion had also worked for the National Cancer Institute, American Association for Cancer Research, and World Health Organization, among other organizations. From 1967 to 1983, she was the head of the department of experimental therapy for Burroughs Wellcome. She officially retired from Burroughs and Wellcome in 1983.

She was affiliated with Duke University as adjunct professor of pharmacology and of experimental medicine from 1971 to 1983 and research professor from 1983 to 1999. During her time at Duke, she focused on mentoring medical and graduate students. She published more than 25 papers with the students she mentored at Duke.

Even after her retirement from Burroughs Wellcome, Gertrude continued almost full-time work at the lab. She played a significant role in the development of AZT, one of the first drugs used to treat HIV and AIDS. She also was crucial in the development of nelarabine, which she worked on until her death in 1999.

Rather than relying on trial and error, Elion and Hitchings discovered new drugs using rational drug design, which used the differences in biochemistry and metabolism between normal human cells and pathogens (disease-causing agents such as cancer cells, protozoa, bacteria, and viruses) to design drugs that could kill or inhibit the reproduction of particular pathogens without harming human cells. The drugs they developed are used to treat a variety of maladies, such as leukemia, malaria, lupus, hepatitis, arthritis, gout, organ transplant rejection (azathioprine), as well as herpes (acyclovir, which was the first selective and effective drug of its kind). Most of Elion's early work came from the use and development of purine derivatives.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-22 21:53:07

1475) George H. Hitchings

Gist

George Hitchings and Gertrude Elion's research revolutionized both the development of new pharmaceuticals and the field of medicine in general. Previously, pharmaceuticals had primarily been produced from natural substances. During the 1950s, Hitchings and Elion, developed a systematic method for producing drugs based on knowledge of biochemistry and diseases. One of the first drugs produced by the pair was for leukemia and helped many children with the disease to survive. Other drugs they created have been used to fight malaria, infections, and gout, as well as help with organ transplantations.

Summary

George Herbert Hitchings (born April 18, 1905, Hoquiam, Wash., U.S.—died Feb. 27, 1998, Chapel Hill, N.C.) was an American pharmacologist who, along with Gertrude B. Elion and Sir James W. Black, received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1988 for their development of drugs that became essential in the treatment of several major diseases.

Hitchings received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Washington and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Harvard University in 1933. He taught at Harvard until 1939, and in 1942 he joined the Burroughs Wellcome Laboratories, at which he conducted research until his retirement in 1975.

Over a span of nearly 40 years, Hitchings worked with Elion, who was first his assistant and then his colleague in research at Burroughs Wellcome. Together they designed a variety of new drugs that achieved their effects by interfering with the replication or other vital functions of specific pathogens (disease-causing agents) or cells. In the 1950s they developed thioguanine and 6-mercaptopurine (6MP), which became important treatments for leukemia. In 1957 their alteration of 6MP produced the compound azathioprine, which proved useful in treating severe rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune disorders and in suppressing the body’s rejection of transplanted organs. Their new drug allopurinol was an effective treatment for gout. Other important drugs that were developed by Hitchings and Elion include pyrimethamine, an antimalarial agent; trimethoprim, a treatment for urinary-tract and other bacterial infections; and acyclovir, the first effective treatment for viral herpes.
Details

George Herbert Hitchings (April 18, 1905 – February 27, 1998) was an American medical doctor who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir James Black and Gertrude Elion "for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment", Hitchings specifically for his work on chemotherapy.

Education and early life

Hitchings was born in Hoquiam, Washington, in 1905, and grew up there, in Berkeley, California, San Diego, Bellingham, Washington, and Seattle. He graduated from Seattle's Franklin High School, where he was salutatorian, in 1923, and from there went to the University of Washington, from which he graduated with a degree in chemistry cum laude in 1927, after having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior the year before. That summer, he worked at the university's Puget Sound Biological Station at Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, and received a master's degree the next year for his thesis based on that work.

From the University of Washington, Hitchings went to Harvard University as a teaching fellow, ending up at Harvard Medical School. Before getting his Ph.D. in 1933, he joined Alpha Chi Sigma in 1929.

Career and research

Following his PhD, he worked at Harvard and Case Western Reserve University. In 1942, he went to work for Wellcome Research Laboratories at Tuckahoe, where he began working with Gertrude Elion in 1944. Drugs Hitchings' team worked on included 2,6-diaminopurine (a compound to treat leukemia) and p-chlorophenoxy-2,4-diaminopyrimidine (a folic acid antagonist). According to his Nobel Prize autobiography,

The line of inquiry we had begun in the 1940s [also] yielded new drug therapies for malaria (pyrimethamine), leukemia (6-mercaptopurine and thioguanine), gout (allopurinol), organ transplantation (azathioprine) and bacterial infections (co-trimoxazole (trimethoprimA)). The new knowledge contributed by our studies pointed the way for investigations that led to major antiviral drugs for herpes infections (acyclovir) and AIDS (zidovudine).[citation
In 1967 Hitchings became vice president in Charge of Research of Burroughs-Wellcome. He became Scientist Emeritus in 1976. He also served as adjunct professor of pharmacology and of experimental medicine from 1970 to 1985 at Duke University.

Hitchings founded the Triangle Community Foundation in 1983. Hitchings is a member of the Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame.

Personal life

His first wife, Beverly Reimer Hitchings, died in 1985. Hitchings remarried in 1989 to Joyce Carolyn Shaver-Hitchings, MD. Dr. Shaver-Hitchings died in 2009.

Hitchings died on 27 February 1998 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-23 17:36:20

1476) Norman Ramsey Jr.

Gist

According to the laws of quantum mechanics, atoms can have only fixed energy levels. When there are transitions among different energy levels, electromagnetic radiation with certain frequencies is emitted or absorbed. After Isaac Isidor Rabi developed a method to determine these frequencies by passing a beam of atoms through a magnetic and electromagnetic field, Norman Ramsey refined the method in 1949 through the interference of two electromagnetic fields. This improved precision and became the basis for the atomic clock.

Summary

Norman Foster Ramsey (born August 27, 1915, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died November 4, 2011, Wayland, Massachusetts) was an American physicist who received one-half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1989 for his development of a technique to induce atoms to shift from one specific energy level to another. (The other half of the prize was awarded to Wolfgang Paul and Hans Georg Dehmelt.) Ramsey’s innovation, called the separated oscillatory fields method, found application in the precise measurement of time and frequency.

Ramsey studied physics at Columbia University, New York, and received a Ph.D. degree there in 1940. He also earned a D.Sc. degree from the University of Cambridge in 1954. After teaching at various American universities in the 1940s, he taught at Harvard University from 1947, becoming Higgins Professor of Physics there in 1966 and professor emeritus in 1986. Ramsey played an influential role in the founding of both the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.

In 1949 Ramsey perfected a method to study the structure of atoms by sending them through two separate oscillating electromagnetic fields. The rapid energy-level transitions thereby induced in a beam of atoms produced an interference pattern that could provide important data about the structure and behaviour of atoms. When synchronized with a microwave oscillator, the atoms’ oscillations could also be used to measure the passage of time with extreme accuracy, thus providing the basis for the modern cesium atomic clock, which sets present time standards. In the 1950s Ramsey helped develop the hydrogen maser, a microwave-emitting relative of the laser.

Details

Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. (August 27, 1915 – November 4, 2011) was an American physicist who was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the separated oscillatory field method (see Ramsey interferometry), which had important applications in the construction of atomic clocks. A physics professor at Harvard University for most of his career, Ramsey also held several posts with such government and international agencies as NATO and the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Among his other accomplishments are helping to found the United States Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermilab.

Early life

Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. was born in Washington, D.C., on August 27, 1915, to Minna Bauer Ramsey and Norman Foster Ramsey. His mother was the daughter of German immigrants and an instructor at the University of Kansas. His father, who was of Scottish descent, was a 1905 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and an officer in the Ordnance Department who rose to the rank of brigadier general during World War II, commanding the Rock Island math. He was raised as an Army brat, frequently moving from post to post, and lived in France for a time when his father was Liaison Officer with the Direction d'Artillerie and Assistant Military Attaché. This allowed him to skip a couple of grades along the way, so that he graduated from Leavenworth High School in Leavenworth, Kansas, at the age of 15.

Ramsey's parents hoped that he would go to West Point, but at 15, he was too young to be admitted. He was awarded a scholarship to the University of Kansas, but in 1930 his father was posted to Governors Island, New York. Ramsey therefore entered Columbia University in 1931 and began studying engineering. He became interested in mathematics and switched to this as his academic major. By the time he received his BA from Columbia in 1935, he had become interested in physics. Columbia awarded him a Kellett Fellowship to Cambridge University, where he studied physics at Cavendish Laboratory under Lord Rutherford and Maurice Goldhaber, and encountered notable physicists, including Edward Appleton, Max Born, Edward Bullard, James Chadwick, John math, Paul Dirac, Arthur Eddington, Ralph Fowler, Mark Oliphant and J. J. Thomson. At Cambridge, he took the tripos in order to study quantum mechanics, which had not been covered at Columbia, resulting in being awarded a second BA degree by Cambridge.

A term paper Ramsey wrote for Goldhaber on magnetic moments caused him to read recent papers on the subject by Isidor Isaac Rabi, and this stimulated an interest in molecular beams and in doing research for a PhD under Rabi at Columbia. Soon after Ramsey arrived at Columbia, Rabi invented molecular-beam resonance spectroscopy, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 1944. Ramsey was part of Rabi's team that also included Jerome Kellogg, Polykarp Kusch, Sidney Millman and Jerrold Zacharias. Ramsey worked with them on the first experiments making use of the new technique and shared with Rabi and Zacharias in the discovery that the deuteron was a magnetic quadrupole.[9] This meant that the atomic nucleus was not spherical, as had been thought. He received his PhD in physics from Columbia in 1940 and became a fellow at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., where he studied neutron–proton and proton–helium scattering.

World War II:

Radiation laboratory

The Northrop P-61 Black Widow night fighter was specifically designed to take advantage of the new radar.
In 1940, he married Elinor Jameson of Brooklyn, New York, and accepted a teaching position at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The two expected to spend the rest of their lives there, but World War II intervened. In September 1940 the British Tizard Mission brought a number of new technologies to the United States, including a cavity magnetron, a high-powered device that generates microwaves using the interaction of a stream of electrons with a magnetic field, which promised to revolutionize radar. Alfred Lee Loomis of the National Defense Research Committee established the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop this technology. Ramsey was one of the scientists recruited by Rabi for this work.

Initially, Ramsey was in Rabi's magnetron group. When Rabi became a division head, Ramsey became the group leader. The role of the group was to develop the magnetron to permit a reduction in wavelength from 150 centimetres (59 in) to 10 centimetres (3.9 in), and then to 3 centimetres (1.2 in) or X band. Microwave radar promised to be small, lighter and more efficient than older types. Ramsey's group started with the design produced by Oliphant's team in Britain and attempted to improve it. The Radiation Laboratory produced the designs, which were prototyped by Raytheon, and then tested by the laboratory. In June 1941, Ramsey travelled to Britain, where he met with Oliphant, and the two exchanged ideas. He brought back some British components, which were incorporated into the final design. A night fighter aircraft, the Northrop P-61 Black Widow, was designed around the new radar. Ramsey returned to Washington in late 1942 as an adviser on the use of the new 3 cm microwave radar sets that were now coming into service, working for Edward L. Bowles in the office of the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson.

Manhattan Project

In 1943, Ramsey was approached by Robert Oppenheimer and Robert Bacher, who asked him to join the Manhattan Project. Ramsey agreed to do so, but the intervention of the project director, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves Jr., was necessary in order to prise him away from the Secretary of War's office. A compromise was agreed to, whereby Ramsey remained on the payroll of the Secretary of War and was merely seconded to the Manhattan Project. In October 1943, Group E-7 of the Ordnance Division was created at the Los Alamos Laboratory with Ramsey as group leader, with the task of integrating the design and delivery of the nuclear weapons being built by the laboratory.

The first thing he had to do was determine the characteristics of the aircraft that would be used. There were only two Allied aircraft large enough: the British Avro Lancaster and the US Boeing B-29 Superfortress. The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) wanted to use the B-29 if at all possible, even though it required substantial modification. Ramsey supervised the test drop program, which began at Dahlgren, Virginia, in August 1943, before moving to Muroc Dry Lake, California, in March 1944. Mock-ups of Thin Man and Fat Man bombs were dropped and tracked by an SCR-584 ground-based radar set of the kind that Ramsey had helped develop at the Radiation laboratory. Numerous problems were discovered with the bombs and the aircraft modifications, and corrected.[17]

Ramsey's Los Alamos badge

Plans for the delivery of the weapons in combat were assigned to the Weapons Committee, which was chaired by Ramsey and answerable to Captain William S. Parsons. Ramsey drew up tables of organization and equipment for the Project Alberta detachment that would accompany the USAAF's 509th Composite Group to Tinian. Ramsey briefed the 509th's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, on the nature of the mission when the latter assumed command of the 509th. Ramsey went to Tinian with the Project Alberta detachment as Parsons's scientific and technical deputy. He was involved in the assembly of the Fat Man bomb and relayed Parsons's message indicating the success of the bombing of Hiroshima to Groves in Washington, D.C.

Research

At the end of the war, Ramsey returned to Columbia as a professor and research scientist. Rabi and Ramsey picked up where they had left off before the war with their molecular-beam experiments. Ramsey and his first graduate student, William Nierenberg, measured various nuclear magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole moments. With Rabi, he helped establish the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. In 1946, he became the first head of the Physics Department there. His time there was brief, for in 1947, he joined the physics faculty at Harvard University, where he would remain for the next 40 years, except for brief visiting professorships at Middlebury College, Oxford University, Mt. Holyoke College and the University of Virginia. During the 1950s, he was the first science adviser to NATO and initiated a series of fellowships, grants and summer school programs to train European scientists.

Ramsey's research in the immediate post-war years looked at measuring fundamental properties of atoms and molecules by use of molecular beams. On moving to Harvard, his objective was to carry out accurate molecular-beam magnetic-resonance experiments, based on the techniques developed by Rabi. However, the accuracy of the measurements depended on the uniformity of the magnetic field, and Ramsey found that it was difficult to create sufficiently uniform magnetic fields. He developed the separated oscillatory field method in 1949 as a means of achieving the accuracy he wanted.

Ramsey and his PhD student Daniel Kleppner developed the atomic-hydrogen maser, looking to increase the accuracy with which the hyperfine separations of atomic hydrogen, deuterium and tritium could be measured, as well as to investigate how much the hyperfine structure was affected by external magnetic and electric fields. He also participated in developing an extremely stable clock based on a hydrogen maser. From 1967 until 2019, the second has been defined based on 9,192,631,770 hyperfine transition of a cesium-133 atom; the atomic clock which is used to set this standard is an application of Ramsey's work. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 "for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks". The Prize was shared with Hans Georg Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul.

In collaboration with the Institut Laue–Langevin, Ramsey also worked on applying similar methods to beams of neutrons, measuring the neutron magnetic moment and finding a limit to its electric dipole moment. As president of the Universities Research Association during the 1960s he was involved in the design and construction of the Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. He also headed a 1982 National Research Council committee that concluded that, contrary to the findings of the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, acoustic evidence did not indicate the presence of a second gunman's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Later life

Ramsey eventually became the Eugene Higgins professor of physics at Harvard and retired in 1986. However, he remained active in physics, spending a year as a research fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) at the University of Colorado. He also continued visiting professorships at the University of Chicago, Williams College and the University of Michigan. In addition to the Nobel Prize in Physics, Ramsey received a number of awards, including the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1960, Davisson–Germer Prize in 1974, the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1984, the Rabi Prize in 1985, the Rumford Premium Prize in 1985, the Compton Medal in 1986, and the Oersted Medal and the National Medal of Science in 1988. In 1990, Ramsey received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2004, he signed a letter along with 47 other Nobel laureates endorsing John Kerry for President of the United States as someone who would "restore science to its appropriate place in government".

His first wife, Elinor, died in 1983, after which he married Ellie Welch of Brookline, Massachusetts. Ramsey died on November 4, 2011. He was survived by his wife Ellie, his four daughters from his first marriage, and his stepdaughter and stepson from his second marriage.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-25 18:52:45

1477) Hans Georg Dehmelt

Gist

The properties of atoms are determined by laws of quantum mechanics that say they can have only fixed energy levels and that electromagnetic radiation with certain frequencies is emitted or absorbed when there are transitions among different energy levels. Opportunities to study the properties and spectrums of atoms are improved if individual atoms can be isolated under constant conditions for longer periods. In the 1950s Hans Dehmelt developed a method for using magnetic fields to capture charged atoms—ions—in a trap.

Summary

Hans Georg Dehmelt (born September 9, 1922, Görlitz, Germany—died March 7, 2017, Seattle, Washington, U.S.) was a German-born American physicist who shared one-half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1989 with the German physicist Wolfgang Paul. (The other half of the prize was awarded to the American physicist Norman Foster Ramsey.) Dehmelt received his share of the prize for his development of the Penning trap, an electromagnetic device that can hold small numbers of ions (electrically charged atoms) and electrons for periods of time long enough to allow their properties to be studied with unprecedented accuracy.

Dehmelt served in the German army from 1940 until he was captured by U.S. forces in 1945. Having studied physics during the war under an army technical program, he resumed his studies thereafter at the University of Göttingen, graduating with a doctoral degree in physics in 1950. He went to the United States in 1952 and began teaching at the University of Washington in 1955. He became a full professor there in 1961, the year in which he also became a U.S. citizen. In 2002 he retired from the university as professor emeritus.

Dehmelt’s Penning trap, which he developed in 1955, can confine electrons and ions in a small space for long periods of time in relative isolation. In 1973 Dehmelt used his device to isolate a single electron for observation, an unprecedented feat that opened the way for the precise measurement of key properties of electrons. Dehmelt and his colleagues went on to develop methods for measuring atomic frequencies and individual quantum jumps (the transitions between atomic energy levels) with unprecedented precision. In the 1970s Dehmelt used his trap to measure an electron’s magnetic moment to an accuracy of four parts in a trillion, the most precise measurement of that quantity at the time. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1995.

Details

Hans Georg Dehmelt (9 September 1922 – 7 March 2017) was a German and American physicist, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989,[4] for co-developing the ion trap technique (Penning trap) with Wolfgang Paul, for which they shared one-half of the prize (the other half of the Prize in that year was awarded to Norman Foster Ramsey). Their technique was used for high precision measurement of the electron magnetic moment.

Biography

At the age of ten Dehmelt enrolled in the Berlinisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster, a Latin school in Berlin, where he was admitted on a scholarship. After graduating in 1940, he volunteered for service in the German Army, which ordered him to attend the University of Breslau to study physics in 1943. After a year of study he returned to army service and was captured during the Battle of the Bulge.

After his release from an American prisoner of war camp in 1946, Dehmelt returned to his study of physics at the University of Göttingen, where he supported himself by repairing and bartering old, pre-war radio sets. He completed his master's thesis in 1948 and received his PhD in 1950, both from the University of Göttingen. He was then invited to Duke University as a postdoctoral associate, emigrating in 1952. Dehmelt became an assistant professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington in 1955, an associate professor in 1958, and a full professor in 1961.

In 1955 he built his first electron impact tube in George Volkoff's laboratory at the University of British Columbia and experimented on paramagnetic resonances in polarized atoms and free electrons. In the 1960s, Dehmelt and his students worked on spectroscopy of hydrogen and helium ions. The electron was finally isolated in 1973 with David Wineland, who continued work on trapped ions at NIST.

He created the first geonium atom in 1976, which he then used to measure precise magnetic moments of the electron and positron with R. S. Van Dyck into the 1980s, work that led to his Nobel prize. In 1979 Dehmelt led a team that took the first photo of a single atom. He continued work on ion traps at the University of Washington, until his retirement in October 2002.

In May 2010, he was honoured as one of Washington's Nobel laureates by Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden at a special event in Seattle.

He was married to Irmgard Lassow, now deceased, and the couple had a son, Gerd, also deceased. In 1989 Dehmelt married Diana Dundore, a physician.

Dehmelt died on March 7, 2017, in Seattle, Washington, aged 94.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-27 17:01:34

1478) Wolfgang Paul

Gist

The properties of atoms are determined by laws of quantum mechanics that say they can have only fixed energy levels and that electromagnetic radiation with certain frequencies is emitted or absorbed when there are transitions among different energy levels. Opportunities to study the properties and spectrums of atoms are improved if individual atoms can be isolated under constant conditions for longer periods. In the 1950s Wolfgang Paul developed a method for using electrical currents and electromagnetic fields to capture charged atoms—ions—in a trap.

Summary

Wolfgang Paul (born Aug. 10, 1913, Lorenzkirch, Ger.—died Dec. 6/7, 1993, Bonn) was a German physicist who shared one-half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1989 with the German-born American physicist Hans G. Dehmelt. (The other half of the prize was awarded to the American physicist Norman F. Ramsey.) Paul received his share of the prize for his development of the Paul trap—an electromagnetic device that captures ions (electrically charged atoms) and holds them long enough for their properties to be accurately measured.

Paul studied at technological institutes in Munich and Berlin and received a doctoral degree in physics from the Technical University in Berlin in 1939. He became a lecturer at the University of Göttingen in 1944 and was a full professor there from 1950. From 1952 he also taught at the University of Bonn.

The Paul trap, which he developed in the 1950s, used a radio-frequency current to maintain an alternating electric field that isolates and confines charged particles and atoms in a small space. The Paul trap allowed physicists to study atomic properties and test physical theories with high degrees of precision and became an important tool in modern spectroscopy. Paul also invented a way of separating ions of different masses and storing them in the Paul trap, using a principle that was subsequently widely applied in modern spectrometers.

Details

Wolfgang Paul (10 August 1913 – 7 December 1993) was a German physicist, who co-developed the non-magnetic quadrupole mass filter which laid the foundation for what is now called an ion trap. He shared one-half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 for this work with Hans Georg Dehmelt; the other half of the Prize in that year was awarded to Norman Foster Ramsey, Jr.

Early life

Wolfgang Paul was born on 10 August 1913 in Lorenzkirch, Germany. He grew up in Munich where his father was a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry. After the first few years at the Technical University of Munich, he changed to the Technical University of Berlin in 1934 where he finished his Diploma in 1937 at the group of Hans Geiger. He followed his doctorate adviser Hans Kopfermann to the University of Kiel and after being drafted to the air force he finished his PhD in 1940 at the Technical University of Berlin.

During World War II, he researched isotope separation, which is necessary to produce fissionable material for use in making nuclear weapons.

Academic career

For several years he was a private lecturer at the University of Göttingen with Hans Kopfermann. He became a professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Bonn and stayed there from 1952 until 1993. For two years from 1965 to 1967 he was director of the Division of Nuclear Physics at CERN.

Scientific results

He developed techniques for trapping charged particles in mass spectrometry by electric quadrupole fields in the 1950s. Paul traps are used extensively today to contain and study ions. He developed molecular beam lenses and worked on a 500 MeV electron synchrotron, followed by one at 2500 MeV in 1965. Later he worked on containing slow neutrons in magnetic storage rings, measuring the free neutron lifetime.

He humorously referred to Wolfgang Pauli as his imaginary part if their surnames were considered as complex numbers.

Göttingen Manifesto

In 1957, Paul was a signatory of the Göttingen Manifesto, a declaration of 18 leading nuclear scientists of West Germany against arming the West German army with tactical nuclear weapons.

Sons

His son Stephan Paul is a professor of experimental physics at the Technical University of Munich. His son Lorenz Paul is a professor of physics at the University of Wuppertal.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-29 17:31:12

1479) Sidney Altman

Gist

Enzymes are substances that speed up the chemical processes in organisms' cells without being consumed. It was long thought that all enzymes were proteins. Sidney Altman and Thomas Cech demonstrated that RNA can also function as an enzyme. In 1978, Altman studied an enzyme taken from the E. coli bacteria that has the ability to cleave RNA. This enzyme was a combination of a protein and RNA. Altman discovered that the enzyme lost its ability to cleave if the RNA was removed from the protein. Later, he also succeeded in proving that RNA alone had the same ability to cleave as the enzyme.

Summary

Sidney Altman (born May 7, 1939, Montreal, Quebec, Canada—died April 5, 2022, Rockleigh, New Jersey, U.S.) was a Canadian American molecular biologist who, with Thomas R. Cech, received the 1989 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their discoveries concerning the catalytic properties of RNA, or ribonucleic acid.

Altman received a B.S. in physics in 1960 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After a brief period as a graduate student in the physics department at Columbia University, Altman changed his course of study and enrolled in the graduate program in biophysics at the University of Colorado. There he studied chemical compounds called acridines, focusing primarily on how these compounds affect the replication of bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria). Altman received a Ph.D. in biophysics in 1967. He then was awarded a fellowship to work at Harvard University, where he conducted research on bacteriophages under the guidance of American molecular biologist Matthew Stanley Meselson. In 1969 Altman became a researcher at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, Eng. There he worked with British biophysicist Francis Crick and South African biologist Sydney Brenner and embarked on the research that would later lead to his Nobel Prize-winning discoveries. Altman joined the biology faculty at Yale University in 1971, where he became a full professor in 1980 and was the department chairman from 1983 to 1985. Altman also served as dean of the undergraduate Yale College from 1985 to 1989. He took U.S. citizenship in 1984 but concurrently retained his Canadian citizenship.

Altman’s initial investigations into RNA concerned a small molecule called transfer RNA (tRNA), which carries amino acids to organelles called ribosomes, where the amino acids are linked into proteins. He isolated and characterized a precursor molecule in the biochemical pathway leading to the synthesis of tRNA and subsequently identified an enzyme called ribonuclease P (RNase P), which cleaved a specific bond within the precursor molecule. This enzymatic cleavage enabled the tRNA synthetic pathway to advance to the next step. During purification of RNase P, Altman discovered that there was an RNA segment within the enzyme and that this segment served as the active, or catalytic, portion of the enzyme.

Altman was working independently of Cech when both discovered the catalytic properties of RNA. The old belief was that enzymatic activity—the triggering and acceleration of vital chemical reactions within living cells—was the exclusive domain of protein molecules. Altman’s and Cech’s revolutionary discovery was that RNA, traditionally thought to be simply a passive carrier of genetic codes between different parts of the living cell, could also take on active enzymatic functions. This knowledge opened up new fields of scientific research and biotechnology and caused scientists to rethink old theories of how cells function. It also led to new hypotheses about the history of the emergence of RNA on Earth and the possibility that RNA was the molecule that gave rise to Earth’s first life forms.

Details

Sidney Altman (May 7, 1939 – April 5, 2022) was a Canadian-American molecular biologist, who was the Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Chemistry at Yale University. In 1989, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas R. Cech for their work on the catalytic properties of RNA.

Family and education

Altman was born on May 7, 1939, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His parents, Ray (Arlin), a textile worker, and Victor Altman, a grocer, were Jewish immigrants to Canada, each coming from Eastern Europe as a young adult, in the 1920s. Altman's mother was from Białystok in Poland, and had come to Canada with her sister at the age of eighteen, learning English and working in a textile factory to earn money to bring the rest of their family to Quebec. Altman's father, born in Ukraine, had been a worker on a collective farm in the Soviet Union. He was sponsored to come to Canada as a farm worker, but later, as a husband and a father of two sons, he supported the family by running a small grocery store in Montreal. Sidney Altman was later to look back on his parents' lives as an illustration of the value of the work ethic: "It was from them I learned that hard work in stable surroundings could yield rewards, even if only in infinitesimally small increments."

As Altman reached adulthood, the family's financial situation had become secure enough that he was able to pursue a college education. He went to the United States to study physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at MIT, he was a member of the ice hockey team. After achieving his bachelor's degree from MIT in 1960, Altman spent 18 months as a graduate student in physics at Columbia University. Due to personal concerns and the lack of opportunity for beginning graduate students to participate in laboratory work, he left the program without completing the degree. Some months later, he enrolled as a graduate student in biophysics at the University of Colorado Medical Center. His project was a study of the effects of acridines on the replication of bacteriophage T4 DNA. He received his Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of Colorado in 1967 with thesis advisor Leonard Lerman; Lerman went in 1967 to Vanderbilt University, where Altman worked briefly as a researcher in molecular biology before leaving for Harvard.

Altman was married to Ann M. Körner (daughter of Stephan Körner) in 1972. They are the parents of two children, Daniel and Leah. Having lived primarily in the United States since departing Montreal to attend MIT in 1958, Altman became a U.S. citizen in 1984, maintaining dual citizenship as a Canadian citizen as well.

Career

After receiving his Ph.D., Altman embarked upon the first of two research fellowships. He joined Matthew Meselson's laboratory at Harvard University to study a DNA endonuclease involved in the replication and recombination of T4 DNA. Later, at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, Altman started the work that led to the discovery of RNase P and the enzymatic properties of the RNA subunit of that ribozyme. John D. Smith, as well as several postdoctoral colleagues, provided Altman with very good advice that enabled him to test his ideas. "The discovery of the first radiochemically pure precursor to a tRNA molecule enabled me to get a job as an assistant professor at Yale University in 1971, a difficult time to get any job at all".

Altman's career at Yale followed a standard academic pattern with promotion through the ranks until he became Professor in 1980. He was Chairman of his department from 1983 to 1985 and in 1985 became the Dean of Yale College for four years. On July 1, 1989, he returned to the post of Professor on a full-time basis. His doctoral students include Ben Stark.

While at Yale, Altman's Nobel Prize work came with the analysis of the catalytic properties of the ribozyme RNase P, a ribonucleoprotein particle consisting of both a structural RNA molecule and one (in prokaryotes) or more (in eukaryotes) proteins. Originally, it was believed that, in the bacterial RNase P complex, the protein subunit was responsible for the catalytic activity of the complex, which is involved in the maturation of tRNAs. During experiments in which the complex was reconstituted in test tubes, Altman and his group discovered that the RNA component, in isolation, was sufficient for the observed catalytic activity of the enzyme, indicating that the RNA itself had catalytic properties, which was the discovery that earned him the Nobel Prize. Although the RNase P complex also exists in eukaryotic organisms, his later work revealed that in those organisms, the protein subunits of the complex are essential to the catalytic activity, in contrast to the bacterial RNase P.

Recognition

Altman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988 and a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 1990.

Death

Altman died on April 5, 2022, in Rockleigh, New Jersey, after a long illness.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-07-02 00:13:24

1480) Thomas Cech

Gist

Enzymes are substances that speed up the chemical processes in organisms' cells without being consumed. It was long thought that all enzymes were proteins. Sidney Altman and Thomas Cech demonstrated that RNA can also function as an enzyme. In 1982, Cech studied the way RNA molecules from the microorganism Tetrahymena thermophila split into fragments. He discovered that RNA molecules inside a test tube split themselves using a complicated chemical reaction, despite the absence of a protein.

Summary

Thomas Robert Cech (born Dec. 8, 1947, Chicago, Ill., U.S.) is an American biochemist and molecular biologist who, with Sidney Altman, was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their discoveries concerning RNA (ribonucleic acid).

Cech attended Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa (B.A., 1970), and the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D., 1975, in chemistry). After serving as a National Cancer Institute fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1975–77), he joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Colorado in 1978, becoming a full professor in 1983. Concurrently he was an investigator for the National Institutes of Health from 1978 and for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1988.

Cech and Altman received a Nobel Prize for their independent discoveries that RNA, traditionally considered to be only a passive messenger of genetic information, can also take on an enzymatic role in which it catalyzes, or facilitates, intracellular chemical reactions essential to life. Before their discoveries, enzymatic activity had been attributed exclusively to proteins. Cech was the first person to show that an RNA molecule could catalyze a chemical reaction, and he published his findings in 1982. Altman, whose earlier research had pointed strongly to such a conclusion, conclusively demonstrated such enzymatic activity by an RNA molecule in 1983.

In 1997 Cech and his research team discovered telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT), the catalytic subunit of an enzyme called telomerase, which is responsible for regulating the length of telomeres. (Telomeres form the end segments of chromosomes.) Four years later his lab also located the “protection of telomeres protein” (POT1) that caps the end of a chromosome, protecting it from degradation and ensuring the maintenance of appropriate telomere length. These discoveries had major implications in understanding the underlying mechanisms of cancer, as the disease was thought to be due in large part to the production of telomerase and the subsequent failure of cells to die after a certain number of replications. This knowledge was also thought to lend important insight into the aging process, as telomere length becomes markedly shorter as an organism ages.

Cech served as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2000–09), during which time he was involved in the development of the institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus, opened in 2006 in Ashbury, Va. He continued in his capacity as an investigator for the institute after his tenure as president. In 2009 Cech was elected to the board of directors of Merck & Co., Inc., which three years earlier had purchased Sirna Therapeutics, a company that he had founded in 1993. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1995.

Details

Thomas Robert Cech (born December 8, 1947) is an American chemist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman, for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, suggesting that life might have started as RNA. He found that RNA can not only transmit instructions, but also that it can speed up the necessary reactions.

He also studied telomeres, and his lab discovered an enzyme, TERT (telomerase reverse transcriptase), which is part of the process of restoring telomeres after they are shortened during cell division.

As president of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he promoted science education, and he teaches an undergraduate chemistry course at the University of Colorado.

Early life and career

Cech was born to parents of Czech origin (his grandfather was Czech, his other grandparents were first-generation Americans) in Chicago. He grew up in Iowa City, Iowa. In junior high school, he knocked on the doors of geology professors at the University of Iowa, and asked them to discuss crystal structures, meteorites and fossils.

A National Merit Scholar, Cech entered Grinnell College in 1966. There he studied Homer's Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, constitutional history and chemistry. He married his organic chemistry lab partner, Carol Lynn Martinson, and graduated with a B.A. in 1970.

In 1975, Cech completed his PhD in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and in the same year, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he engaged in postdoctoral research. In 1978, he obtained his first faculty position at the University of Colorado where he lectured undergraduate students in chemistry and biochemistry, and where he remains on the faculty, currently as distinguished professor in the department of biochemistry. In 2000, Cech succeeded Purnell Choppin as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland. He also continued to head his biochemistry laboratory at the University of Colorado, Boulder. On April 1, 2008, Cech announced that he would step down as the president of HHMI, to return to teaching and research, in spring 2009. Returning to Boulder, Cech became the first executive director of the BioFrontiers Institute, a position he held until 2020. He also taught general chemistry to freshmen.

Cech is the author of a book The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets, published in June 2024.

Research

Cech's main research area is that of the process of transcription in the nucleus of cells. He studies how the genetic code of DNA is transcribed into RNA. In the 1970s, Cech had been studying the splicing of RNA in the unicellular organism Tetrahymena thermophila when he discovered that an unprocessed RNA molecule could splice itself. In 1982, Cech became the first to show that RNA molecules are not restricted to being passive carriers of genetic information – they can have catalytic functions and can participate in cellular reactions. RNA-processing reactions and protein synthesis on ribosomes in particular are catalysed by RNA. RNA enzymes are known as ribozymes and have provided a new tool for gene technology. They also have the potential to provide new therapeutic agents – for example, they have the ability to destroy and cleave invading, viral RNAs.

Cech's second area of research is on telomeres, the structure that protects the ends of chromosomes. Telomeres are shortened with every duplication of DNA, and must be lengthened again. He studies telomerase, the enzyme that copies the telomeric sequences and lengthens them. The active site protein subunits of telomerase comprise a new class of reverse transcriptases, enzymes previously thought to be restricted to viruses and transposable elements. Telomerase is activated in 90% of human cancers. Therefore, a drug that would inhibit its activity could be useful in treating cancer.

Awards

Cech's work has been recognised by many awards and prizes including: lifetime professorship by the American Cancer Society (1987), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University (1988), the Heineken Prize of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (1988), the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1988), the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1989, shared with Sidney Altman), the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1990 and the National Medal of Science (1995). In 1987, Cech was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences and in 1988 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Cech was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2001. In 2003, Cech gave the University of Colorado's George Gamow Memorial Lecture. In 2007, he received the Othmer Gold Medal for outstanding contributions to progress in chemistry and science.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-07-04 00:45:38

1481) J. Michael Bishop

Gist

The growth, division, and death of living cells are regulated by their genes. If these functions are out of balance, tumors can form. One reason for this may be the incorporation of virus genes into the genes of host cells. In the mid-1970s, Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus discovered virus genes that can cause cancer. However, they also found that these so-called oncogenes did not originally come from the virus, but from normal cells, and that these had been incorporated into the virus. Cancer can thereby occur through the activation of the organism's own genes–through a mutation, for example.

Summary

J. Michael Bishop (born February 22, 1936, York, Pennsylvania, U.S.) is an American virologist and cowinner (with Harold Varmus) of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1989 for achievements in clarifying the origins of cancer.

Bishop graduated from Gettysburg College (Pennsylvania) in 1957 and from Harvard Medical School in 1962. After spending two years in internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, he became a researcher in virology at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. In 1968 he joined the faculty of the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, becoming a full professor in 1972. From 1981 he also served as director of the university’s George F. Hooper Research Foundation. In 1998 Bishop was elected chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, and he held the post until 2009.

In 1970 Bishop teamed up with Varmus, and they set out to test the theory that healthy body cells contain dormant viral oncogenes that, when triggered, cause cancer. Working with the Rous sarcoma virus, known to cause cancer in chickens, Bishop and Varmus found that a gene similar to the cancer-causing gene within the virus was also present in healthy cells.

In 1976 Bishop and Varmus, together with two colleagues—Dominique Stehelin and Peter Vogt—published their findings, concluding that the virus had taken up the gene responsible for the cancer from a normal cell. After the virus had infected the cell and begun its usual process of replication, it incorporated the gene into its own genetic material. Subsequent research showed that such genes can cause cancer in several ways. Even without viral involvement, these genes can be converted by certain chemical carcinogens into a form that allows uncontrolled cellular growth.

Because the mechanism described by Bishop and Varmus seemed common to all forms of cancer, their work proved invaluable to cancer research. Today scientists suspect that nearly 1 percent of the human genome, which contains an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 genes, is made up of proto-oncogenes—genes that when altered or mutated from their original form have the ability to cause cancer in animals.

Bishop was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2003. That same year, he published How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science, a reflection on his life and work that also touches on historical aspects of science and on the intellectual environment of modern-day research.

Details

John Michael Bishop (born February 22, 1936) is an American immunologist and microbiologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Harold E. Varmus. He serves as an active faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he also served as chancellor from 1998 to 2009.

Education and early life

Bishop was born in York, Pennsylvania. He attended Gettysburg College as an undergraduate, where he was a brother of the Theta-Pi Zeta chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. He later attended Harvard University Medical School, where he earned an MD in 1962.

Career

Bishop began his career working for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the National Institutes of Health. He then spent a year working for the Heinrich Pette Institute in Hamburg, Germany before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco in 1968. Bishop has remained on the school's faculty since 1968, and was chancellor of the university from 1998 to 2009. He is director of the Bishop Lab.

He became the eighth chancellor of UCSF in 1998. He oversaw one of UCSF's major transition and growth periods, including the expanding Mission Bay development and philanthropic support recruitment. During his tenure, he unveiled the first comprehensive, campus-wide, strategic plan to promote diversity and foster a supportive work environment. During this time, UCSF also adopted a new mission: advancing health worldwide.

Research

Much of this work was conducted jointly with Harold Varmus in a notably long scientific partnership. Their best-known accomplishment was the identification of a cellular gene (c-src) that gave rise to the v-src oncogene of Rous Sarcoma Virus, a cancer-causing virus first isolated from a chicken sarcoma by Peyton Rous in 1910. Their discovery triggered the identification of many other cellular proto-oncogenes—progenitors of viral oncogenes and targets for mutations that drive human cancers.

Awards and honors

Bishop is best known for his Nobel-winning work on retroviral oncogenes. Working with Harold E. Varmus in the 1980s, he discovered the first human oncogene, c-Src. Their findings allowed the understanding of how malignant tumors are formed from changes to the normal genes of a cell. These changes can be produced by viruses, by radiation, or by exposure to some chemicals.

Bishop is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Bishop is also a recipient of National Medal of Science in 2003. That same year, his book "How to win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science" was published. He was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2008. In 2020, Bishop received from the UC Berkeley Academic Senate the Clark Kerr Award for distinguished leadership in higher education.

Archival collections

The University of California, San Francisco Archives and Special Collections houses a collection of J. Michael Bishop papers, including his laboratory research notebooks, writings, photographs, and other material.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-07-05 23:07:22

1482) Harold E. Varmus

Gist

The growth, division, and death of living cells are regulated by their genes. If these functions are out of balance, tumors can form. One reason for this may be the incorporation of virus genes into the genes of host cells. In the mid-1970s, Harold Varmus and Michael Bishop discovered virus genes that can cause cancer. However, they also found that these so-called oncogenes did not originally come from the virus, but from normal cells, and that these had been incorporated into the virus. Cancer can thereby occur through the activation of the organism's own genes–through a mutation, for example.

Summary

Harold Varmus (born December 18, 1939, Oceanside, New York, U.S.) is an American virologist and cowinner (with J. Michael Bishop) of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1989 for his work on the origins of cancer.

Varmus graduated from Amherst (Massachusetts) College (B.A.) in 1961, from Harvard University (M.A.) in 1962, and from Columbia University, New York City (M.D.), in 1966. He then joined the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, where he studied bacteria. In 1970 he went to the University of California, San Francisco, as a postdoctoral fellow. There he and Bishop began the research that was to win them the Nobel Prize.

Varmus and Bishop found that, under certain circumstances, normal genes in healthy cells of the body can cause cancer; these genes are called oncogenes. Oncogenes ordinarily control cellular growth and division, but, if they are picked up by infecting viruses or affected by chemical carcinogens, they can be rendered capable of causing cancer. This research, carried out with the aid of colleagues Dominique Stehelin and Peter Vogt in the mid-1970s, superseded a theory that cancer is caused by viral genes, distinct from a cell’s normal genetic material, that lie dormant in body cells until activated by carcinogens.

Varmus remained on the faculty of the University of California, where he became a professor of biochemistry and biophysics in 1982. That same year he received an Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for his investigations into the molecular genetics of cancer. He was director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1993 to 1999, during which time he significantly increased the budget provided for research. In January 2000 Varmus was appointed president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and he subsequently founded the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit organization dedicated to making medical and scientific literature freely available to the public. Varmus was a leading supporter of open-access journals and an adviser for Scientists and Engineers for America, a community of researchers and medical doctors committed to calling attention to science issues on a political level. In 2010 Varmus left Sloan Kettering and became director of the NIH’s National Cancer Institute, where he served until 2015. That year he joined the faculty at Weill Cornell Medicine, part of Cornell University.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Varmus was awarded the National Medal of Science (2001) for his work on oncogenes and for his work to revitalize scientific research in the United States. He published numerous research papers throughout his career, was a coauthor of Genes and the Biology of Cancer (1993; with Robert A. Weinberg), and a coeditor of Retroviruses (1997; with John M. Coffin and Stephen H. Hughes).

Details

Harold Eliot Varmus (born December 18, 1939) is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center.

He was a co-recipient (along with J. Michael Bishop) of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. He was also the director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999 and the 14th Director of the National Cancer Institute from 2010 to 2015, a post to which he was appointed by President Barack Obama.

Early life and education

Varmus was born on December 18, 1939, to Beatrice, a social service worker, and Frank Varmus, a physician, Jewish parents of Eastern European descent, in Oceanside, New York. In 1957, he graduated from Freeport High School in Freeport, New York, and enrolled at Amherst College, intending to follow in his father's footsteps as a medical doctor, but eventually graduating with a B.A. in English literature. He went on to earn an M.A. in English at Harvard University in 1962, before changing his mind once again and applying to medical schools. He was twice rejected from Harvard Medical School. That same year, he entered the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and later worked at a missionary hospital in Bareilly, India, and the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. As an alternative to serving militarily in the Vietnam War, Varmus joined the Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health in 1968. Working under Ira Pastan, he researched the regulation of bacterial gene expression by cyclic AMP. In 1970, he began postdoctoral research in Bishop's lab at University of California, San Francisco.

Scientific career and research accomplishments

To fulfill his national service obligations during the Vietnam War, Varmus became a member of the commissioned corps of the Public Health Service, working as a Clinical Associate in the laboratory of Ira Pastan at the National Institutes of Health from 1968 to 1970. During this first period of laboratory research, he and Pastan and their colleagues described aspects of the mechanism by which the lac operon of E. coli is regulated transcriptionally by cyclic AMP. In 1970, he and his wife, Constance Casey, moved to San Francisco, where he began post-doctoral studies with Michael Bishop at University of California, San Francisco under a fellowship from the California Division of the American Cancer Society. Appointed as an assistant professor in the UCSF Department of Microbiology and Immunology in 1972, he was promoted to professor in 1979 and became an American Cancer Society Research Professor in 1984.

During the course of his years at UCSF (1970 to 1993), Varmus's scientific work was focused principally on the mechanisms by which retroviruses replicate, cause cancers in animals, and produce cancer-like changes in cultured cells. Much of this work was conducted jointly with Michael Bishop in a notably long scientific partnership. Their best-known accomplishment was the identification of a cellular gene (c-Src) that gave rise to the v-Src oncogene of Rous sarcoma virus, a cancer-causing virus first isolated from a chicken sarcoma by Peyton Rous in 1910. Their discovery triggered the identification of many other cellular proto-oncogenes—progenitors of viral oncogenes and targets for mutations that drive human cancers. Much of this work and its consequences are described in his Nobel lecture and Bishop's, in Varmus's book The Art and Politics of Science, and in numerous histories of cancer research.

Other significant components of Varmus's scientific work over the past four and a half decades include descriptions of the mechanisms by which retroviral DNA is synthesized and integrated into chromosomes; discovery of the Proto-oncogene Wnt-1 with Roel Nusse; elucidation of aspects of the replication cycle of hepatitis B virus (with Donald Ganem); discovery of ribosomal frameshifting to make retroviral proteins (with Tyler Jacks); isolation of a cellular receptor for avian retroviruses (with John Young and Paul Bates); characterization of mutations of the epidermal growth factor receptor gene in human lung cancers, including a common mutation that confers drug resistance (with William Pao); and generation of numerous mouse models of human cancer. Notably, Varmus continued to conduct or direct laboratory work throughout his service in leadership positions at the NIH, MSKCC, and NCI.

Politics and government service

In the early 1990s, following the award of their Nobel Prize, Varmus and Bishop became active in the politics of science, working principally with UCSF colleagues Bruce Alberts and Marc Kirschner, and with the Joint Steering Committee (later renamed the Coalition for the Life Sciences). He also co-chaired Scientists and Engineers for Clinton-Gore during the 1992 presidential campaign.

National Institutes of Health directorship

After the resignation of NIH Director Bernadine Healy in April, 1993, Varmus was nominated for the post by President William J. Clinton in July, and confirmed by the Senate in November. As the NIH director, Varmus was credited with helping to nearly double the research agency's budget; but his tenure was also noted for appointments of outstanding scientists to serve as Institute Directors; for excellent relationships with members of Congress and the Administration; for leadership on clinical and AIDS research; for policy statements about stem cell research, cloning of organisms, gene therapy, and patenting; for promoting global health research, especially on malaria; and for construction of new facilities, including a new Clinical Center and a Vaccine Research Center at the NIH.

Between directorships

Varmus supported the presidential candidacies of Al Gore (2000) and John Kerry (2004). During the George W. Bush presidency, he gave lectures critical of the Administration's science policies. But he has also written a laudatory account of PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief), Bush's initiative to combat AIDS globally.

Varmus declared his support for Barack Obama's quest for the presidency early in 2008 and chaired the campaign's Science and Technology Committee. Following Obama's election, he was named by the president-elect as one of three co-chairs of PCAST (the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology). He resigned from that post to assume the directorship of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) on July 12, 2010, after being named to the post by President Obama.

National Cancer Institute directorship

On May 17, 2010, the White House announced that Varmus would become the 14th Director of the NCI, making him the first person to have served as director of an individual NIH Institute after being director of the entire NIH. In this capacity, despite diminishing budgets at all the Institutes including NCI, he started new administrative centers for cancer genomics and global health; initiated novel grant programs for "outstanding investigators," for "staff scientists," and for addressing "Provocative Questions." He also renamed the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research and started an initiative there to study RAS oncogenes.

On March 4, 2015, Varmus submitted his resignation to the president, effective March 31, 2015, announcing his intention to return to New York City as the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and as a senior associate at the New York Genome Center. Deputy NCI Director Douglas Lowy became acting director of the NCI on April 1, 2015.

During his tenure as NCI Director, Varmus took the unusual step of co-authoring with three non-governmental colleagues a critique of several practices prevalent in the biomedical research community. That essay has been the starting point for several subsequent efforts to reduce the hypercompetitive atmosphere in biomedical research.

Presidency of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

After leaving the NIH Directorship at the end of 1999, Varmus became the president and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City on January 1, 2000. During his ten and a half years at MSKCC, he was best known for enlarging the basic and translational research faculty; building a major new laboratory facility, the Mortimer E. Zuckerman Research Center; starting a new graduate school for cancer biology (the Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences); overseeing renovation and construction of many clinical facilities; and leading a major capital campaign. He also continued to run an active laboratory and to teach as a Member of the Sloan-Kettering Institute. On January 12, 2010, MSKCC reported that Varmus had asked the MSKCC Boards of Overseers and Managers "to begin a search for his successor." He left MSKCC on June 30, 2010, shortly before assuming the NCI directorship.

Publication practices in science

Near the end of his tenure as NIH director, Varmus became a champion of ways to more effectively use the Internet to enhance access to scientific papers. The first practical outcome was the establishment, with David Lipman of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at NIH, of PubMed Central, a public digital library of full-length scientific reports; in 2007, Congress directed NIH to ensure that all reports of work supported by the NIH appear in PubMed Central within a year after publication. Varmus and two colleagues, Patrick Brown at Stanford and Michael Eisen at UC Berkeley, were co-founders and leaders of the board of directors of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), a not-for-profit publisher of a suite of open access journals in the biomedical sciences.

Advisory roles

Varmus has been a frequent advisor to the US government, foundations, academic institutions and industry. Currently, he serves as a member of the Secretary of Energy's advisory board, the Global Health Advisory Board at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the board of directors of the International Biomedical Research Alliance, the Lasker Foundation Prize Jury, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT, and he chairs advisory groups for the Faculty of 1000 and the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health. In the past, he was chairman of the Grand Challenges in Global Health at the Gates Foundation, a member of the World Health Organization's Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, and an advisor to Merck & Co., Chiron Corporation, Gilead, and Onyx Pharmaceuticals. He has been chair of the World Health Organization's Science Council since its founding in 2021.

Varmus has criticized the high cost of many modern cancer drugs, which create barriers to treatment. He advocates for the genetic testing of cancers as a routine reimbursed procedure, and for wider use of the information that genetic testing of cancer can provide. He argues that widespread use of panel tests and exome analyses to identify cancer-causing mutations would be simpler and cheaper than full genome analysis. He has argued for the coverage of such services under Medicare and Medicaid on the grounds of Coverage with Evidence Development, since the data could be used to better evaluate test and treatments. He supports the creation of a database of information that can be correlated with clinical outcomes for use by all oncologists. He is hopeful that researchers will soon use new technologies to move beyond the study of primary tumors, where they have had considerable success, and explore how cancer initiates and the development of metastasic cancers.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-07-07 21:09:28

1483) Jerome Isaac Friedman

Gist

Normal matter consists of atoms possessing nuclei of protons and neutrons, surrounded by electrons. In a series of experiments conducted around 1970, Jerome Friedman, Henry Kendall, and Richard Taylor aimed high-energy electrons at protons and neutrons using a large accelerator. They studied how the electrons scattered during the collisions and how protons were sometimes converted into other particles. Their results supported the theory that protons and neutrons are composed of sub-particles, quarks.

Summary

Jerome Isaac Friedman (born March 28, 1930, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American physicist who, together with Richard E. Taylor and Henry W. Kendall, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1990 for their joint experimental confirmation of the fundamental particles known as quarks.

Friedman was educated at the University of Chicago, from which he received a Ph.D. degree in 1956. After conducting research there and at Stanford University, where he met Taylor and Kendall, he began teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960. He became a full professor there in 1967, head of the physics department in 1983, and professor emeritus in 2005.

Friedman conducted his prizewinning research jointly with Kendall and Taylor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center of Stanford University. In a series of experiments from 1967 to 1973, the three physicists used a particle accelerator to direct a beam of high-energy electrons at target protons and neutrons. They found that the manner in which the electrons scattered from the targets indicated that both protons and neutrons are composed of hard, electrically charged, pointlike particles. As the three men continued their experiments, it became clear that these particles corresponded to the fundamental particles called quarks, whose existence had been hypothesized in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig.

Details

Jerome Isaac Friedman (born March 28, 1930) is an American physicist. He is institute professor and professor of physics, emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor, "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics.", work which showed an internal structure for protons later known to be quarks. Friedman sits on the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Life and career

Born in Chicago, Illinois to Lillian (née Warsaw) and Selig Friedman, a sewing machine salesman, Friedman's Jewish parents emigrated to the U.S. from Russia. Jerome Friedman excelled in art but became interested in physics after reading a book on relativity written by Albert Einstein. He turned down a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago in order to study physics at the University of Chicago. Whilst there he worked under Enrico Fermi, and eventually received his Ph.D. in physics in 1956. In 1960, he joined the physics faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1968–69, commuting between MIT and California, he conducted experiments with Henry W. Kendall and Richard E. Taylor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center which gave the first experimental evidence that protons had an internal structure, later known to be quarks. For this, Friedman, Kendall and Taylor shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is an institute professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Friedman is also a member of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

In 2003, he was one of 22 Nobel laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto. He is an atheist.

Friedman is one of the 20 American recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics to sign a letter addressed to President George W. Bush in May 2008, urging him to "reverse the damage done to basic science research in the Fiscal Year 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill" by requesting additional emergency funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Popular Culture

Prof Friedman appeared on an episode of Da Ali G Show, where Sacha Baron Cohen interviews Jerome as a fictional character called Ali G.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-07-08 22:14:17

1984) Henry Way Kendall

Gist

Normal matter consists of atoms possessing nuclei of protons and neutrons, surrounded by electrons. In a series of experiments conducted around 1970, Henry Kendall, Jerome Friedman, and Richard Taylor aimed high-energy electrons at protons and neutrons using a large accelerator. They studied how the electrons scattered during the collisions and how protons were sometimes converted into other particles. Their results supported the theory that protons and neutrons are composed of sub-particles, quarks.

Summary

Henry Way Kendall (born Dec. 9, 1926, Boston, Mass., U.S.—died Feb. 15, 1999, Wakulla Springs State Park, Fla.) was an American nuclear physicist who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize for Physics with Jerome Isaac Friedman and Richard E. Taylor for obtaining experimental evidence for the existence of the subatomic particles known as quarks.

Kendall received his B.A. from Amherst College in 1950 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955. After serving as a U.S. National Science Foundation Fellow at MIT, he taught and pursued research at Stanford University (1956–61). In 1961 he joined the faculty of MIT, becoming a full professor in 1967.

Kendall and his colleagues were cited by the Nobel committee for their “breakthrough in our understanding of matter” achieved while working together at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center from 1967 to 1973. There they used a particle accelerator to direct a beam of high-energy electrons at target protons and neutrons. The way in which the electrons scattered from the targets indicated that the protons and neutrons were not the solid, uniformly dense bodies to be expected if they were truly fundamental particles, but were instead composed of still smaller particles. This confirmed the existence of the quarks that were first hypothesized (independently) in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann at the California Institute of Technology and by George Zweig. Kendall also did research in nuclear structure, in high-energy electron scattering, and in meson and neutrino physics.

In addition to his scientific research, Kendall worked extensively with a variety of groups concerning the proper role and uses of science in society. He was a founder (1969) of the Union of Concerned Scientists and served as the group’s chairman from 1973. Kendall also worked as a consultant on defense for the U.S. government for many years and was one of the scientists who briefed U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1997 on the problems that might be encountered should significant global warming occur. Some of Kendall’s writings about his societal concerns include Energy Strategies—Toward a Solar Future (1980), Beyond the Freeze: The Road to Nuclear Sanity (1982), and The Fallacy of Star Wars (1984).

Details

Henry Way Kendall (December 9, 1926 – February 15, 1999) was an American particle physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 jointly with Jerome Isaac Friedman and Richard E. Taylor "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics."

Biography

Kendall was born in Boston to Evelyn Way and Henry P. Kendall, an industrialist. Kendall grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts and attended Deerfield Academy. He enrolled in the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in 1945, and served on a troop transport on the North Atlantic in the winter of 1945 – 1946.

In 1946, he enrolled at Amherst College where he majored in mathematics, graduating in 1950. While at Amherst, he operated a diving and marine salvage company during two summers. He co-authored two books, one on shallow water diving and the other on underwater photography.

He did graduate research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, involving an experimental study of positronium, and he obtained his PhD in 1955. He then spent the next two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He then spent five years in Robert Hofstadter's research group at Stanford University in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where he worked with Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor, studying the structure of protons and neutrons, using the university's 300 feet long linear electron accelerator. He developed a close working relationship with Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky at Stanford.

Kendall joined the faculty of the MIT Physics Department in 1961, where he remained until his death in 1999. He was named Julius A. Stratton Professor of Physics in 1991.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kendall worked in collaboration with researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) including Friedman and Taylor. These experiments involved scattering high-energy beams of electrons from protons and deuterons and heavier nuclei. At lower energies, it had already been found that the electrons would only be scattered through low angles, consistent with the idea that the nucleons had no internal structure. However, the SLAC-MIT experiments showed that higher energy electrons could be scattered through much higher angles, with the loss of some energy. These deep inelastic scattering results provided the first experimental evidence that the protons and neutrons were made up of point-like particles, later identified to be the up and down quarks that had previously been proposed on theoretical grounds. The experiments also provided the first evidence for the existence of gluons.

Kendall was not only a very accomplished physicist, but also a very skilled mountaineer and photographer. He did extensive rock climbing in Yosemite Valley, followed by expeditions to the Andes, Himalaya and Antarctica, photographing his experiences with large format cameras. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982. On April 7, 2012, the American Alpine Club inducted Kendall into its Hall of Mountaineering Excellence at an award ceremony in Golden, Colorado.

Service activities

Kendall was one of the founding members of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in 1969. He served as chairman of the board of the UCS from 1974 until his death in 1999. His public policy interests included avoiding nuclear war, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the B2 bomber, nuclear reactor safety and global warming.

He was also a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group.

Death

Kendall died while diving the cave at the Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park, Florida as a part of the Wakulla 2 Project. He bypassed two pre-dive checklists for his Cis-Lunar MK-5P Mixed Gas rebreather and entered the spring basin without his dive buddy from the National Geographic Society. Kendall missed turning on the oxygen supply to his rebreather and lost consciousness and drowned. The autopsy revealed a physiological issue that led to his disregarding the protocols.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-07-09 00:14:12

1985) Alexander Friedmann

Gist

Aleksandr Alexandrovich Friedmann : 1888-1925

Russian mathematician and astrophysicist best known for his mathematical model of an expanding universe. Albert Einstein's 1917 static model of the universe required an arbitrary "cosmological constant" to explain why the universe does not collapse. Friedmann argued that Einstein's model was inconsistent with general relativity. He discarded the cosmological constant and demonstrated that expansion or contraction of the universe was due solely to gravity. Friedmann models or universes laid the foundation for "big bang" theories.

Summary

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Friedmann (born June 17 [June 29, New Style], 1888, St. Petersburg, Russia—died Sept. 16, 1925, Leningrad [St. Petersburg]) was a Russian mathematician and physical scientist.

After graduating from the University of St. Petersburg in 1910, Friedmann joined the Pavlovsk Aerological Observatory and, during World War I, did aerological work for the Russian army. After the war he was on the staff of the University of Perm (1918–20) and then on the staffs of the Main Physical Observatory and other institutions until his death in 1925.

In 1922–24 Friedmann used Einstein’s general theory of relativity to formulate the mathematics of a dynamic (time-dependent) universe. (Einstein and Dutch mathematician Willem de Sitter had earlier studied static cosmologies.) In the Friedmann models, the average mass density is constant over all space but may change with time as the universe expands. His models, which included all three cases of positive, negative, and zero curvature, were crucial in the development of modern cosmology. Friedmann also calculated the time back to the moment when an expanding universe would have been a mere point, obtaining tens of billions of years; but it is not clear how much physical significance he attributed to this speculation. It may, however, still be considered a part of the prehistory of the big-bang theory. Friedmann also considered the possibility of a cyclical universe. In his other work, he was among the founders of the science of dynamic meteorology.

Details

Alexander Alexandrovich Friedmann (also spelled Friedman or Fridman; June 16 [O.S. June 4] 1888 – September 16, 1925) was a Russian and Soviet physicist and mathematician. He originated the pioneering theory that the universe is expanding, governed by a set of equations he developed known as the Friedmann equations.

Early life

Alexander Friedmann was born to the composer and ballet dancer Alexander Friedmann (who was a son of a baptized Jewish cantonist) and the pianist Ludmila Ignatievna Voyachek (who was a daughter of the Czech composer Hynek Vojáček). Friedmann was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church as an infant, and lived much of his life in Saint Petersburg.

Friedmann obtained his degree from St. Petersburg State University in 1910, and became a lecturer at Saint Petersburg Mining Institute.

From his school days, Friedmann found a lifelong companion in Jacob Tamarkin, who was also a distinguished mathematician.

World War I

Friedmann fought in World War I on behalf of Imperial Russia, as an army aviator, an instructor, and eventually, under the revolutionary regime, as the head of an airplane factory.

Professorship

Friedmann in 1922 introduced the idea of an expanding universe that contained moving matter. Correspondence with Einstein suggests that Einstein was unwilling to accept the idea of an evolving Universe and worked instead to revise his equations to support the static, eternal Universe of Newton's time. In 1929 Hubble published the redshift vs distance relationship showing that all the galaxies in the neighborhood recede at a rate proportional to their distance, formalizing an observation made earlier by Carl Wilhelm Wirtz. Unaware of Friedmann's work, in 1927 Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître independently formulated an evolving Universe.

In June 1925 Friedmann was given the job of the director of the Main Geophysical Observatory in Leningrad. In July 1925 he participated in a record-setting balloon flight, reaching the elevation of 7,400 m (24,300 ft).

Work

Friedmann's 1924 papers, including "Über die Möglichkeit einer Welt mit konstanter negativer Krümmung des Raumes" ("On the possibility of a world with constant negative curvature of space") published by the German physics journal Zeitschrift für Physik (Vol. 21, pp. 326–332), demonstrated that he had command of all three Friedmann models describing positive, zero and negative curvature respectively, a decade before Robertson and Walker published their analysis.

This dynamic cosmological model of general relativity would come to form the standard for both the Big Bang and Steady State theories. Friedmann's work supported both theories equally, so it was not until the detection of the cosmic microwave background radiation that the Steady State theory was abandoned in favor of the current favorite Big Bang paradigm.

The classic solution of the Einstein field equations that describes a homogeneous and isotropic universe was called the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric, or FLRW, after Friedmann, Georges Lemaître, Howard P. Robertson and Arthur Geoffrey Walker, who worked on the problem in the 1920s and 30s independently of Friedmann.

In addition to general relativity, Friedmann's interests included hydrodynamics and meteorology.

Physicists George Gamow, Vladimir Fock, and Lev Vasilievich Keller were among his students.

Personal life and death

In 1911, he married Ekaterina Dorofeeva, though he later divorced her. He married Natalia Malinina in 1923. They had a religious wedding ceremony, though both were far from religious. Together they had a son Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman (1925—1983), born after his father's death.

Friedmann died on September 16, 1925, from misdiagnosed typhoid fever. He had allegedly contracted the bacteria on return from his honeymoon in Crimea, when he ate an unwashed pear bought at a railway station.

Legacy

The Moon crater Fridman is named after him.

Alexander Friedmann International Seminar is a periodical scientific event. The objective of the meeting is to promote contact between scientists working in the field of Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology, and related fields. The First Alexander Friedmann International Seminar on Gravitation and Cosmology devoted to the centenary of his birth took place in 1988.

During the 2022 COVID-19 protests in China, Tsinghua University students were seen displaying Friedmann's equation as if it were a protest slogan, which was understood as an evasion of censorship by punning multilingually on "free man" and referring to liberalization and opening via the expansion of the universe.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-07-11 16:32:37

1986) Richard E. Taylor

Gist

Normal matter consists of atoms possessing nuclei of protons and neutrons, surrounded by electrons. In a series of experiments conducted around 1970, Richard Taylor, Jerome Friedman, and Henry Kendall aimed high-energy electrons at protons and neutrons using a large accelerator. They studied how the electrons scattered during the collisions and how protons were sometimes converted into other particles. Their results supported the theory that protons and neutrons are composed of sub-particles, quarks.

Summary

Richard E. Taylor (born November 2, 1929, Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada—died February 22, 2018, Stanford, California, U.S.) was a Canadian physicist who in 1990 shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall for his collaboration in proving the existence of quarks, which are now generally accepted as being among the basic building blocks of matter.

Taylor attended the University of Alberta, where he received a bachelor’s degree (1950) and a master’s degree (1952). He received a doctorate from Stanford University in 1962. Taylor worked for a year at the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory before joining (1962) the faulty at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), where he became full professor in 1970 and professor emeritus in 2003.

While at SLAC, he and Friedman and Kendall conducted the series of experiments that confirmed the hypothesis that protons and neutrons are made up of quarks. This discovery was crucial to the formulation of the currently accepted theoretical description of matter and its interactions, known as the standard model.

Details

Richard Edward Taylor (2 November 1929 – 22 February 2018), was a Canadian physicist and Stanford University professor. He shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics with Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics."

Early life

Taylor was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta. He studied for his BSc (1950) and MSc (1952) degrees at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Newly married, he applied to work for a PhD degree at Stanford University, where he joined the High Energy Physics Laboratory.

His PhD thesis was on an experiment using polarised gamma rays to study pion production.

Research and career

After three years at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and a year at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, Taylor returned to Stanford. Construction of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) was beginning. In collaboration with researchers from the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Taylor worked on the design and construction of the equipment, and was involved in many of the experiments.

In 1971, Taylor was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship that allowed him to spend a sabbatical year at CERN.

The experiments run at SLAC in the late 1960s and early 1970s involved scattering high-energy beams of electrons from protons and deuterons and heavier nuclei. At lower energies, it had already been found that the electrons would only be scattered through low angles, consistent with the idea that the nucleons had no internal structure. However, the SLAC-MIT experiments showed that higher energy electrons could be scattered through much higher angles, with the loss of some energy. These deep inelastic scattering results provided the first experimental evidence that the protons and neutrons were made up of point-like particles, later identified to be the up and down quarks that had previously been proposed on theoretical grounds. The experiments also provided the first evidence for the existence of gluons. Taylor, Friedman and Kendall were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in 1990 for this work.

Death

Taylor died at his home in Stanford, California near the campus of Stanford University on 22 February 2018 at the age of 88.

Additional Information

(1929–2018). Canadian physicist Richard E. Taylor was instrumental in proving the existence of subatomic particles called quarks, which are now generally accepted as being among the basic building blocks of matter. In 1990 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Jerome Isaac Friedman and Henry Way Kendall for his collaboration in this field.

Richard Edward Taylor was born on November 2, 1929, in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. He attended the University of Alberta, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1950 and a master’s degree in 1952. Taylor received a doctorate from Stanford University in California in 1962. He worked for a year at the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. From 1962 to 1968 he was a staff member at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC; now SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory).

While at SLAC, Taylor, Friedman, and Kendall used a particle accelerator to direct a beam of high-energy electrons at target protons and neutrons. They found that the manner in which the electrons scattered from the targets indicated that both protons and neutrons are composed of hard, electrically charged, pointlike particles. As the three men continued their experiments, it became clear that these particles corresponded to the fundamental particles called quarks (the existence of which had been hypothesized independently in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann and by George Zweig). Taylor became an associate professor at Stanford in 1968, a full professor in 1970, and an emeritus professor in 2003. He died on February 22, 2018, in Stanford, California.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-07-12 21:41:58

1987) Elias James Corey

Gist

Nature is full of organic substances—a varied number of chemical compounds that contain the element carbon. At the end of the 1950s, E. J. Corey began developing a new approach to producing, or synthesizing, organic substances. The desired molecule was analyzed and viewed as a combination of smaller components united by essential bonds. The analysis was repeated until known and available molecules were obtained. From these, the desired molecule could then be assembled in several steps through chemical reactions.

Summary

Elias James Corey (born July 12, 1928, Methuen, Mass., U.S.) is an American chemist, director of a research group that developed syntheses of scores of complicated organic molecules and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his original contributions to the theory and methods of organic synthesis.

Early life and education

Corey was the fourth child of Elias Corey and Fatina Corey (née Hashan). His father died 14 months after the birth, prompting his mother to change the young child’s name from William to Elias. Despite the hardships that were imposed by the Great Depression, Corey was raised in a happy hardworking household that included his mother’s sister and her husband, both of whom functioned as second parents. Corey went to a Roman Catholic elementary school in nearby Lawrence and graduated from Lawrence Public High School in 1945. He entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) a few weeks later with an interest in electrical engineering. He soon became enamoured with chemistry, though, because of its intellectual richness and its relevance to human health. He focused on synthetic organic chemistry after taking a course on the subject from Arthur Cope in 1947. Corey obtained an undergraduate degree in 1948 and continued at MIT as a graduate student working on synthetic penicillins in the research group of John Sheehan. Corey completed his doctoral studies in late 1950, in time to accept a position the following January as an instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There he came under the influence of the noted organic chemists Roger Adams and Carl Marvel.

Career path

Corey began working on his own at Illinois by applying theories of electron density in molecules and transition states (known as molecular orbital theory) to make predictions about reaction products. Then, upon promotion to assistant professor in 1954, came the opportunity of supervising graduate students, and Corey established a research group to pursue a wide range of experimental projects involving the structure, stereochemistry, and synthesis of complex naturally occurring organic compounds. He achieved such success that he was promoted to full professor in 1956, at age 27. With the aid of a Guggenheim fellowship, Corey took a sabbatical in the fall of 1957. He went first to Harvard University at the invitation of the world’s best synthetic chemist, Robert B. Woodward, and then to Switzerland, England, and finally Sweden, where he was a guest of biochemist Sune Bergström. In 1959 he returned to Harvard, where he became a member of one of the world’s leading chemistry departments. In 1965 he became chairman of the department and was appointed Sheldon Emory Professor of Organic Chemistry.

Retrosynthetic analysis

In October 1957, Corey began to shape his many ideas on chemical synthesis into a coherent strategy that became known as retrosynthetic analysis. At that time the traditional way of designing laboratory syntheses of complicated organic molecules, utilized brilliantly by several chemists around the world, was to begin with simple (or at least readily available) building blocks that could be assembled by a sequence of reactions to form the desired target molecule.

Corey, on the other hand, planned his syntheses by theoretically breaking the target molecule into parts from which it could likely be made and then continuing the disassembly process until simple starting materials were arrived at. By retrosynthetic analysis each target molecule could be disassembled into several different synthetic schemes, every step of which was based on known reactions of related molecules. A combination of intelligent selection and experimental trial and error could then be applied to achieve a successful synthesis of the target molecule. This synthetic strategy subsequently became the norm for organic synthesis.

Before Corey, synthetic chemists had generally incorporated a certain amount of retrosynthetic insight into their reaction sequences, but none had made retrosynthetic thinking the core strategy of his syntheses.

Corey went on to pioneer the use of computers in retrosynthetic analysis to generate potential synthetic pathways, and such computer-assisted synthetic analysis has become widespread.

Other achievements

Through intelligent application of retrosynthetic techniques, Corey’s research group achieved successful syntheses of more than 100 natural products of widely differing and complex structural types. In the late 1960s, he synthesized a series of biochemically important molecules, the prostaglandins, and in the 1970s he followed with the leukotrienes, a group of biologically active fatty acids. Another remarkable achievement was the synthesis in 1988 of ginkgolide B, a substance found in trace amounts in the roots of the ginkgo tree that is responsible for the medicinal effects of a Chinese folk medicine employing ginkgo extract.

In 1989, in collaboration with Cheng Xue-Min, Corey published full details of his synthetic methodology and techniques in The Logic of Chemical Synthesis. The following year Corey was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

In order to achieve the laboratory syntheses of target molecules, Corey’s research group also developed dozens of original reagents and synthetic reactions, together with several molecules that have many of the properties of catalytic enzymes. Corey dubbed such valuable molecules molecular robots because of their ability to repetitively add molecular fragments in structurally predetermined ways.

Details

Elias James Corey (born July 12, 1928) is an American organic chemist. In 1990, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his development of the theory and methodology of organic synthesis", specifically retrosynthetic analysis.

Regarded by many as one of the greatest living chemists, he has developed numerous synthetic reagents, methodologies and total syntheses and has advanced the science of organic synthesis considerably.

Biography

E.J. Corey (the surname was anglicized from Levantine Arabic Khoury, meaning priest) was born to Lebanese Greek Orthodox Christian immigrants Fatima (née Hasham) and Elias Corey in Methuen, Massachusetts, 50 km (31 mi) north of Boston. His mother changed his name from William to "Elias" to honor his father, who died eighteen months after Corey's birth. His widowed mother, brother, two sisters, aunt and uncle all lived together in a spacious house, struggling through the Great Depression. As a young boy, Corey was independent and enjoyed sports such as baseball, football, and hiking. He attended a Catholic elementary school and Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

At the age of 16 Corey entered MIT, where he earned both a bachelor's degree in 1948 and a Ph.D. under Professor John C. Sheehan in 1951. Upon entering MIT, Corey's only experience with science was in mathematics, and he began his college career pursuing a degree in engineering. After his first chemistry class in his sophomore year he began rethinking his long-term career plans and graduated with a bachelor's degree in chemistry. Immediately thereafter, at the invitation of Professor John C. Sheehan, Corey remained at MIT for his Ph.D. After his graduate career he was offered an appointment at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he became a full professor of chemistry in 1956 at the age of 27. He was initiated as a member of the Zeta chapter of Alpha Chi Sigma at the University of Illinois in 1952. In 1959, he moved to Harvard University, where he is currently an emeritus professor of organic chemistry with an active Corey Group research program. He chose to work in organic chemistry because of "its intrinsic beauty and its great relevance to human health". He has also been an advisor to Pfizer for more than 50 years.

Among numerous honors, Corey was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1988, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1990, and the American Chemical Society's greatest honor, the Priestley Medal, in 2004.

Math Is Fun Forum

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