crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-01 15:21:25

2038) Louis Ignarro

Gist:

Life

Louis Ignarro was born in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were both Italian immigrants, and his father worked as a carpenter. Ignarro studied chemistry and pharmacology at Columbia University in New York and received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. After a period with Geigy Pharmaceuticals, in 1973 Ignarro joined Tulane University in New Orleans. Since 1985 he has been associated with UCLA in Los Angeles. Ignarro is married and has a daughter from a previous marriage.

Work

Ferid Murad’s studies of how nitroglycerin and nitric oxide (NO) cause blood vessels to expand inspired Louis Ignarro to conduct studies of his own at the end of the 1970s. He also looked for the substance that, according to Robert Furchgott, was formed in the innermost layer of blood vessels and produced a similar effect. Simultaneously with Furchgott, but independently of him, Ignarro revealed in 1986 that NO was this substance. The discovery has made possible new medications, such as those used to treat heart and cardiovascular diseases and impotence.

Summary

Louis Ignarro (born May 31, 1941, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) is an American pharmacologist who, along with Robert F. Furchgott and Ferid Murad, was co-awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that nitric oxide (NO) acts as a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system. This work uncovered an entirely new mechanism by which blood vessels in the body relax and widen.

Ignarro studied at Columbia University, earning a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy in 1962. He received a Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Minnesota in 1966. In 1979 he became a professor of pharmacology at Tulane University’s School of Medicine in New Orleans, a position he held until becoming a professor of pharmacology at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1985; he retired as professor emeritus in 2013.

Studies on the chemical compound for which Ignarro would win the Nobel Prize began to emerge in the 1970s and ’80s. First, in 1977, Murad showed that nitroglycerin and several related heart drugs increase the diameter of blood vessels in the body. Then, around 1980 Furchgott demonstrated that cells in the endothelium, or inner lining, of blood vessels produce an unknown signaling molecule, which he named endothelium-derived relaxing factor (EDRF). EDRF signals the smooth muscle cells in blood vessel walls to relax, thereby dilating the vessels.

Ignarro’s role in the study of nitric oxide was a series of analyses that finally identified the factor that Furchgott had named EDRF as nitric oxide. Ignarro’s research, conducted in 1986, was done independently of Furchgott’s work to identify EDRF. It was the first discovery that a gas could act as a signaling molecule in a living organism. Furchgott and Ignarro announced their findings at a scientific conference in 1986 and triggered an international boom in research on nitric oxide. The applications for nitric oxide, once its role was understood, were many. For instance, the principle behind the successful anti-impotence drug sildenafil citrate (Viagra) was based upon this research. Researchers suggested that nitric oxide could be a key to improved treatments for heart disease, shock, and cancer.

Murad and Ignarro collaborated on Nitric Oxide: Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Therapeutic Implications (1995). Ignarro wrote NO More Heart Disease: How Nitric Oxide Can Prevent—Even Reverse—Heart Disease and Strokes (2005). In addition, Ignarro served on the boards of various companies, including Herbalife’s nutrition advisory board.

Details

Louis Joseph Ignarro (born May 31, 1941) is an American pharmacologist. For demonstrating the signaling properties of nitric oxide, he was co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Robert F. Furchgott and Ferid Murad.

Currently, he is professor emeritus of pharmacology at the UCLA School of Medicine's department of molecular and medical pharmacology in Los Angeles, which he joined in 1985. Before relocating to California, he was a professor of pharmacology at Tulane University School of Medicine, New Orleans, for 12 years. Ignarro has also previously worked as a staff scientist, research department, for the pharmaceutical division of CIBA-GEIGY Corporation in New York.

Ignarro has published numerous research articles. He received the Basic Research Prize of the American Heart Association in 1998. This was in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the advancement of cardiovascular science. That same year, he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and the following year, into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Because nitric oxide is indirectly involved in the action of this drug, he is sometimes referred to as the "Father of Viagra".

He is the founder of the Nitric Oxide Society, and founder and editor-in-chief of Nitric Oxide Biology and Chemistry. Ignarro holds a B.S. in pharmacy, Columbia University, 1962, and a Ph.D. in pharmacology, University of Minnesota, School of Medicine, 1966. He also received a postdoctoral fellowship in chemical pharmacology from National Institutes of Health in 1968. He is a member of the scientific committee of Nicox, a French pharmaceutical company, a member of the Board of Directors of Antibe Therapeutics, a Canadian drug discovery company, a member of the Board of Directors of Operation USA, a non-profit organization, and is past member of the Nutritional Advisory Board for Herbalife, a multi-level marketing company.

Personal life

Louis J. Ignarro was born in 1941 in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Italian immigrants and his father was a carpenter in Torre del Greco, near Naples. Ignarro grew up in Long Beach, New York, which is a suburb of New York City on the south shore of Long Island. Ignarro received his first chemistry set as a gift at the age of 8.

Ignarro is married to anesthesiologist Dr. Sharon Ignarro and lives in Beverly Hills, California. He is an avid cyclist and marathoner, having completed 13 marathons. Ignarro has published multiple books for lay audiences about health and wellness focusing on the benefits of increasing nitric oxide production. He is a frequent public speaker on these and related topics.

Academic career

Ignarro attended Central Grade School and Long Beach High School. A strong interest in science led Ignarro to Columbia University where he studied chemistry and pharmacology and in 1962 received a bachelor's degree in pharmacy from the Columbia University College of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Ignarro then attended the University of Minnesota where he received a Ph.D. in pharmacology. His university studies also concentrated in chemistry, enzymology and cardiovascular physiology, which resulted in several published papers. While at the University of Minnesota, Ignarro studied under eventual Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Boyer.

Ignarro's work continued at the NIH in the fields he had studied, collaborating with many other scientists to discover regulatory mechanisms of the cardiovascular system that would lead to his most famous work. In 1968, Ignarro left the NIH to work for Geigy Pharmaceuticals. With this company, Ignarro helped develop new drugs and was able to continue research into new areas of pharmacology including cyclic GMP. After Geigy merged with Ciba Pharmaceuticals, Ignarro decided to move back to the world of academia, this time as a professor.

In 1973, Ignarro accepted a position of assistant professor of pharmacology at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. Tulane was chosen partially because it would provide a good environment for continued research into cyclic GMP. While studying cyclic GMP, Ignarro read a paper by Ferid Murad, who demonstrated that nitric oxide elevates cyclic GMP levels. Ignarro then speculated that nitric oxide could be the key to relaxing vascular smooth muscles. In turn, this led to his extensive research on the subject. Ignarro's research demonstrated that nitric oxide serves the functions of vasorelaxant and inhibitor of platelet aggregation, with both effects mediated by cyclic GMP.

Ignarro continued his research at Tulane. In 1984 he realized that the properties of nitric oxide were the same as those seen in the endothelium derived relaxing factor (EDRF) previously identified by Robert Furchgott three years earlier. The exact nature of the EDRF was up to this point unknown. Furchgott and Ignarro came to similar conclusions about nitric oxide as the EDRF around the same time, but it was Ignarro who presented hard experimental evidence in support of this notion at conferences during 1986 demonstrating that EDRF is nitric oxide.

During the decades since Ignarro and Furchgott's initial research, thousands of studies have been published about the effects of nitric oxide as the endothelium derived relaxing factor. This has led to the development of erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra and nutritional supplements designed for cardiovascular health and athletic performance.

In 1985, Ignarro moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles where he accepted a position at the UCLA School of Medicine and continues to research and teach.

Herbalife relationship

Ignarro has worked as a consultant for Herbalife since 2003 and later became a member of the company's Scientific Advisory Board. He has collaborated in developing nutritional supplements for cardiovascular health and athletic performance. Ignarro first worked with Herbalife to develop Niteworks, a dietary supplement designed to boost the body's own production of nitric oxide. Ignarro endorsed this product in exchange for a royalty agreement reported to have earned his consulting firm over $1 million in the first 12 months. Ignarro has continued to work with Herbalife to develop additional supplements focusing on nutrients such as Omega-3 fatty acid and CoQ10. As of 2012, Herbalife has made payments to Ignarro and his affiliated consulting firm of over $15 million.

Ignarro appears in videos promoting Niteworks and other Herbalife products, and is a frequent speaker at Herbalife events. Since partnering with Herbalife, Ignarro has spoken to more than five million people worldwide about nitric oxide and cardiovascular health.

Famous quotes

While testifying before Congress in 2000, Ignarro remarked: "Only in America could the son of an uneducated carpenter receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine".

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-02 17:29:54

2039) Ferid Murad

Gist:

Life

Ferid Murad’s father emigrated from Albania and his mother was American. Murad grew up in Whiting, Indiana, where his parents operated a restaurant. After studying at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, and doctoral studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, he has worked at several American universities, including the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Stanford University in California, where he did his Nobel Prize-awarded research. Murad is married and has five children.

Work

Ever since the days of Alfred Nobel, it has been known that nitroglycerin causes blood vessels to expand. Ferid Murad studied how nitroglycerin activated an enzyme that formed cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP), which in turn caused blood vessels to expand. In 1976 Murad was able to show that nitroglycerin produced this effect by emitting nitric oxide (NO). The discovery represented a new principle for transferring signals between cells; a gas as a signal-transferring molecule had never been observed before.

Summary

Ferid Murad (born September 14, 1936, Whiting, Indiana, U.S.—died September 4, 2023, Menlo Park, California) was an American pharmacologist who, along with Robert F. Furchgott and Louis J. Ignarro, was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that nitric oxide (NO) acts as a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system. Their combined work uncovered an entirely new mechanism for how blood vessels in the body relax and widen.

Murad received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Western Reserve University (later Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1965. In addition to his clinical practice, Murad taught pharmacology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville (1975–81), at Stanford University (1981–89), and then at Northwestern University (1988). While at Stanford he ventured into the private sector as a vice president of Abbott Laboratories (1988–92) and then became president of the Molecular Geriatrics Corporation (1993–95). He began teaching at the medical school of the University of Texas, Houston, in 1997. Murad moved to the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 2011.

In 1977 Murad showed that nitroglycerin and several related heart drugs induce the formation of nitric oxide and that the colourless, odourless gas acts to increase the diameter of blood vessels in the body. Furchgott and Ignarro built on this work. About 1980 Furchgott demonstrated that cells in the endothelium, or inner lining, of blood vessels produce an unknown signaling molecule, which he named endothelium-derived relaxing factor (EDRF). This molecule signals smooth muscle cells in blood vessel walls to relax, dilating the vessels. Ignarro’s research, conducted in 1986 and done independently of Furchgott’s work, identified EDRF as nitric oxide. These discoveries led to the development of the anti-impotence drug sildenafil citrate (Viagra) and had the potential to unlock new approaches for understanding and treating other diseases.

The Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which presented the prize, said that the identification of a biological role for nitric oxide was surprising for several reasons. Nitric oxide was known mainly as a harmful air pollutant, released into the atmosphere from automobile engines and other combustion sources. In addition, it was a simple molecule, very different from the complex neurotransmitters and other signaling molecules that regulate many biological events. No other gas is known to act as a signaling molecule in the body.

Murad was also the recipient of the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1996 for his discovery. Murad and Ignarro collaborated on Nitric Oxide: Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Therapeutic Implications (1995).

Details

Ferid Murad (September 14, 1936 – September 4, 2023) was an American physician and pharmacologist, and a co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Early life

Ferid Murad was born in Whiting, Indiana, on September 14, 1936. His parents were Henrietta Josephine Bowman of Alton, Illinois, and Xhabir Murat Ejupi, an Albanian immigrant from Gostivar in present-day North Macedonia. who subsequently changed his name to John Murad after being processed at Ellis Island in 1913. His mother was from a Baptist family and ran away from home in 1935, aged 17, to marry his father, who was 39 and Muslim. Murad is the oldest of three boys. Murad and his brothers were raised as Catholics. He was later baptized an Episcopalian while in college. The family owned a small restaurant while Murad was growing up, and he spent his youth working at the family business.

In the eighth grade, he was asked to write an essay of his top three career choices, which he indicated as physician, teacher and pharmacist (in 1948, clinical pharmacology was not yet a discipline in medicine). He was a board-certified physician and internist doing both basic and clinical research with considerable teaching in medicine, pharmacology and clinical pharmacology and with a PhD in pharmacology.

Education

Murad competed successfully for a Rector Scholarship at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, a small and excellent liberal arts university on a tuition scholarship. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the pre-med program at DePauw University in 1958. During his senior year of college he began to apply to medical schools when his faculty advisor Forst Fuller, a professor in the biology department suggested that he consider a new MD-PhD program at Case Western Reserve University. A fraternity brother, Bill Sutherland, also advised that he consider this new combined degree program that his father Earl Sutherland, Jr initiated in Cleveland in 1957. The program paid full tuition for both degrees and provided a modest stipend of $2,000 per year. Murad ultimately decided to attend and became an early graduate of the first explicit MD and pharmacology Ph.D. program (which would later lead to the development of the prestigious Medical Scientist Training Program) obtaining his degrees from Case Western Reserve University in 1965. He was an Intern in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (1965–66), Resident in Internal Medicine (1966–67), Clinical Associate and Senior Assistant Surgeon, Public Health Service, National Heart and Lung Institute (1967–69) and Senior Staff Fellow there from 1969–70.

Career

Murad began his academic career by joining the University of Virginia, where he was made associate professor, Depts. of Internal Medicine and Pharmacology, School of Medicine in 1970, before becoming a full professor in 1975. From 1971–81 he was Director, Clinical Research Center, UVA School of Medicine and Director, Division of Clinical Pharmacology, Dept. of Internal Medicine, UVA School of Medicine (1973–81). Murad moved to Stanford University in 1981 where he was Chief of Medicine at the Palo Alto VA Medical Center (1981–86), Associate Chairman, Dept. of Medicine, Stanford University (1984–86), and Acting Chairman, Dept. of Medicine and Acting Division Chief, Division of Respiratory Medicine from 1986–88. In 1988 he was the American Heart Association, Ciba Award Recipient. Murad left his tenure at Stanford in 1988 for a position at Abbott Laboratories, where he served as a Vice President of Pharmaceutical Discovery until founding his own biotechnology company, the Molecular Geriatrics Corporation, in 1993. Murad went back to academics and joined the University of Texas Medical School at Houston to create a new department of integrative biology, pharmacology, and physiology in 1997. There, he was the chairman of Integrative Biology and Pharmacology, professor and director emeritus of The Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Disease, John S. Dunn Distinguished Chair in Physiology and Medicine, deputy director of The Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine, and later a professor at the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine. In April 2011, he moved to the George Washington University as a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Murad's key research demonstrated that nitroglycerin and related drugs worked by releasing nitric oxide into the body, which relaxed smooth muscle by elevating intracellular cyclic GMP. The missing steps in the signaling process were filled in by Robert F. Furchgott and Louis J. Ignarro of UCLA, for which the three shared the 1998 Nobel Prize (and for which Murad and Furchgott received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1996). In 1999, Murad and Furchgott received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences among other notable societies.

In 2015, Murad signed the Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change on the final day of the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. The declaration was signed by a total of 76 Nobel Laureates and handed to then-President of the French Republic, François Hollande, as part of the successful COP21 climate summit in Paris.

Murad was editing a book series published by Bentham Science Publishers titled Herbal medicine: Back to the Future; two volumes of which have already been published and a third volume was in preparation.

Death

Ferid Murad died in Menlo Park, California, on September 4, 2023, at the age of 86.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-03 15:55:40

2040) Gerard 't Hooft

Gist:

Work

According to modern physics, four fundamental forces exist in nature. Electromagnetic interaction is one of these. The weak interaction—responsible, for example, for the beta decay of nuclei—is another. In the 1960s, a unified theory was formulated for these two forces: the electroweak interaction. However, certain problems still remained to be solved. In the early 1970s, Gerardus t'Hooft and Martinus Veltman formulated and tested a mathematical theory that further explained the electroweak interaction.

Summary

Gerardus ’t Hooft (born July 5, 1946, Den Helder, Neth.) is a Dutch physicist, who was a corecipient with Martinus J.G. Veltman of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physics for their development of a mathematical model that enabled scientists to predict the properties of both the subatomic particles that constitute the universe and the fundamental forces through which they interact. Their work facilitated the finding of a new subatomic particle, the top quark.

In 1972 ’t Hooft earned his doctorate in physics at the University of Utrecht and five years later became a professor there. He also was a visiting professor at numerous other institutions, including Duke and Boston universities.

’T Hooft was a student of Veltman’s at the University of Utrecht, and at that time the fundamental theory of particle physics, known as the standard model, did not provide for detailed calculations of physical quantities. In the 1960s scientists had formulated the electroweak theory, which showed theoretically that two of the model’s fundamental forces, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, could be viewed as products of a single force, termed the electroweak force. The electroweak theory was without a mathematical foundation, however, and in 1969 ’t Hooft and Veltman undertook to change, or “renormalize,” it into a workable theory. In 1971 ’t Hooft published two articles that represented a major advance toward the goal. The two men then used a computer designed by Veltman to formulate the needed mathematical basis. With the information, they were able to identify the properties of the W and Z particles predicted by the theory. The ’t Hooft-Veltman model allowed scientists to calculate the physical properties of other particles, including the mass of the top quark, which was directly observed in 1995.

Details

Gerardus (Gerard) 't Hooft (born July 5, 1946) is a Dutch theoretical physicist and professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his thesis advisor Martinus J. G. Veltman "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions".

His work concentrates on gauge theory, black holes, quantum gravity and fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics. His contributions to physics include a proof that gauge theories are renormalizable, dimensional regularization and the holographic principle.

Biography:

Early life

Gerard 't Hooft was born in Den Helder on July 5, 1946, but grew up in The Hague. He was the middle child of a family of three. He comes from a family of scholars. His great uncle was Nobel prize laureate Frits Zernike, and his grandmother was married to Pieter Nicolaas van Kampen, a professor of zoology at Leiden University. His uncle Nico van Kampen was an (emeritus) professor of theoretical physics at Utrecht University, and his mother married a maritime engineer. Following his family's footsteps, he showed interest in science at an early age. When his primary school teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he replied, "a man who knows everything."

After primary school Gerard attended the Dalton Lyceum, a school that applied the ideas of the Dalton Plan, an educational method that suited him well. He excelled at science and mathematics courses. At the age of sixteen he won a silver medal in the second Dutch Math Olympiad.

Education

After Gerard 't Hooft passed his high school exams in 1964, he enrolled in the physics program at Utrecht University. He opted for Utrecht instead of the much closer Leiden, because his uncle was a professor there and he wanted to attend his lectures. Because he was so focused on science, his father insisted that he join the Utrechtsch Studenten Corps, a student association, in the hope that he would do something else besides studying. This worked to some extent; during his studies he was a coxswain with their rowing club "Triton" and organized a national congress for science students with their science discussion club "Christiaan Huygens".

In the course of his studies he decided he wanted to go into what he perceived as the heart of theoretical physics, elementary particles. His uncle had grown to dislike the subject and in particular its practitioners, so when it became time to write his doctoraalscriptie (former name of the Dutch equivalent of a master's thesis) in 1968, 't Hooft turned to the newly appointed professor Martinus Veltman, who specialized in Yang–Mills theory, a relatively fringe subject at the time because it was thought that these could not be renormalized. His assignment was to study the Adler–Bell–Jackiw anomaly, a mismatch in the theory of the decay of neutral pions; formal arguments forbid the decay into photons, whereas practical calculations and experiments showed that this was the primary form of decay. The resolution of the problem was completely unknown at the time, and 't Hooft was unable to provide one.

In 1969, 't Hooft started on his doctoral research with Martinus Veltman as his advisor. He would work on the same subject Veltman was working on, the renormalization of Yang–Mills theories. In 1971 his first paper was published. In it he showed how to renormalize massless Yang–Mills fields, and was able to derive relations between amplitudes, which would be generalized by Andrei Slavnov and John C. Taylor, and become known as the Slavnov–Taylor identities.

The world took little notice, but Veltman was excited because he saw that the problem he had been working on was solved. A period of intense collaboration followed in which they developed the technique of dimensional regularization. Soon 't Hooft's second paper was ready to be published, in which he showed that Yang–Mills theories with massive fields due to spontaneous symmetry breaking could be renormalized. This paper earned them worldwide recognition, and would ultimately earn the pair the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics.

These two papers formed the basis of 't Hooft's dissertation, The Renormalization procedure for Yang–Mills Fields, and he obtained his PhD degree in 1972. In the same year he married his wife, Albertha A. Schik, a student of medicine in Utrecht.

Career

After obtaining his doctorate 't Hooft went to CERN in Geneva, where he had a fellowship. He further refined his methods for Yang–Mills theories with Veltman (who went back to Geneva). In this time he became interested in the possibility that the strong interaction could be described as a massless Yang–Mills theory, i.e. one of a type that he had just proved to be renormalizable and hence be susceptible to detailed calculation and comparison with experiment.

According to 't Hooft's calculations, this type of theory possessed just the right kind of scaling properties (asymptotic freedom) that this theory should have according to deep inelastic scattering experiments. This was contrary to popular perception of Yang–Mills theories at the time, that like gravitation and electrodynamics, their intensity should decrease with increasing distance between the interacting particles; such conventional behaviour with distance was unable to explain the results of deep inelastic scattering, whereas 't Hooft's calculations could.

When 't Hooft mentioned his results at a small conference at Marseilles in 1972, Kurt Symanzik urged him to publish this result; but 't Hooft did not, and the result was eventually rediscovered and published by Hugh David Politzer, David Gross, and Frank Wilczek in 1973, which led to their earning the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1974, 't Hooft returned to Utrecht where he became assistant professor. In 1976, he was invited for a guest position at Stanford and a position at Harvard as Morris Loeb lecturer. His eldest daughter, Saskia Anne, was born in Boston, while his second daughter, Ellen Marga, was born in 1978 after he returned to Utrecht, where he was made full professor. In the academic year 1987–1988 't Hooft spent a sabbatical in the Boston University Physics Department along with Howard Georgi, Robert Jaffe and others arranged by the then new Department chair Lawrence Sulak.

In 2007 't Hooft became editor-in-chief for Foundations of Physics, where he sought to distance the journal from the controversy of ECE theory. 't Hooft held the position until 2016.

On July 1, 2011 he was appointed Distinguished professor by Utrecht University.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-04 15:37:58

2041) Martinus J. G. Veltman

Gist:

Work

According to modern physics, four fundamental forces exist in nature. Electromagnetic interaction is one of these. The weak interaction—responsible, for example, for the beta decay of nuclei—is another. In the 1960s, a unified theory was formulated for these two forces: the electroweak interaction. However, certain problems still remained to be solved. In the early 1970s, Martinus Veltman and Gerardus t'Hooft formulated and tested a mathematical theory that further explained the electroweak interaction.

Summary

Martinus J.G. Veltman (born June 27, 1931, Waalwijk, Netherlands—died January 4, 2021, Bilthoven) was a Dutch physicist, corecipient with Gerardus ’t Hooft of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physics for their development of a method of mathematically predicting the properties of both the subatomic particles that make up the universe and the fundamental forces through which they interact. Their work led to the discovery of a new subatomic particle, the top quark.

In 1963 Veltman received a doctorate in physics at the University of Utrecht and three years later joined the school’s faculty. In 1981 he moved to the United States to teach at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he became professor emeritus in 1997.

When Veltman met ’t Hooft, who was one of his students at the University of Utrecht, the fundamental theory of particle physics, termed the standard model, was incomplete in that it failed to provide for detailed calculations of physical quantities. In the 1960s Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg had shown theoretically that two of the fundamental forces involved in the model, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, could be viewed as manifestations of a single, underlying force, called the electroweak force. A mathematical foundation for the electroweak theory was lacking, however, and in 1969 Veltman and ’t Hooft began working to change, or “renormalize,” it into a workable theory free of nonsensical infinite quantities. With the help of a computer designed by Veltman, the two men provided the needed mathematical basis, which they used to identify the properties of the W and Z particles (massive carriers of the weak force) predicted by the theory. Using the Veltman-’t Hooft model to calculate the physical quantities of other particles, scientists were able to predict the mass of the top quark, which facilitated its direct observation in 1995.

Details

Martinus Justinus Godefriedus Veltman (27 June 1931 – 4 January 2021) was a Dutch theoretical physicist. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in physics with his former PhD student Gerardus 't Hooft for their work on particle theory.

Biography

Martinus Justinus Godefriedus Veltman was born in Waalwijk, Netherlands, on 27 June 1931. His father was the head of the local primary school. Three of his father's siblings were primary school teachers. His mother's father was a contractor and also ran a café. He was the fourth child in a family with six children. He started studying mathematics and physics at Utrecht University in 1948.

As a youth he had a great interest in radio electronics, which was a difficult hobby to work on because the occupying German army had confiscated most of the available radio equipment.

In 1955, he became an assistant to Prof. Michels of the Van Der Waals laboratory in Amsterdam. Michels was an experimental physicist, working in high pressure physics. His primary task was the upkeep of a large library collection and occasional lecture preparations for Michels.

His research career advanced when he moved to Utrecht to work under Léon Van Hove in 1955. He received his MSc degree in 1956, after which he was drafted into military service for two years, returning in February 1959. Van Hove then hired him as a doctoral researcher. He obtained his PhD degree in theoretical physics in 1963 and became professor at Utrecht University in 1966.

In 1960, Van Hove became director of the theory division at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, the European High Energy laboratory. Veltman followed him there in 1961. Meanwhile, in 1960, he married his wife Anneke, who gave birth to their daughter Hélène in the Netherlands, before moving to Geneva to live with Martinus. Hélène followed in her father's footsteps and in due time completed her particle physics thesis with Mary Gaillard at Berkeley, though she now works in the financial industry in London.

In 1963/64, during an extended stay at SLAC he designed the computer program Schoonschip for symbolic manipulation of mathematical equations, which is now considered the very first computer algebra system.

Veltman was closely involved in the 1963 CERN neutrino experiment, analyzing images as they were generated by the detectors. When no spectacular events came out, enthusiasm waned, and after a while Veltman and Bernardini were the only ones analyzing the images. As a result, Veltman became the spokesman for the group at the Brookhaven Conference in 1963.

In 1971, Gerardus 't Hooft, who was completing his PhD under the supervision of Veltman, renormalized Yang–Mills theory. They showed that if the symmetries of Yang–Mills theory were to be realized in the spontaneously broken mode, referred to as the Higgs mechanism, then Yang–Mills theory can be renormalized. Renormalization of Yang–Mills theory is a major achievement of twentieth century physics.

In 1980, Veltman became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1981, Veltman left Utrecht University for the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, from where he retired in 1996. He subsequently moved back to the Netherlands.

Eventually, he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1999 with 't Hooft, "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics". Veltman and 't Hooft joined in the celebrations at Utrecht University when the prize was awarded.

In 2003, Veltman published a book about particle physics for a broad audience, entitled Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics.

On 4 January 2021, Veltman died in his home in Bilthoven, the Netherlands.

Asteroid 9492 Veltman is named in his honor.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-05 16:33:34

2042) Ahmed Zewail

Gist:

Life

Ahmed Zewail was born in Damanhur, Egypt, and grew up in Alexandria. His father worked as a bicycle and motorbike fitter before becoming a government official. After studying at the university in Alexandria, Zewail moved to the US to undertake his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. After some time spent working at the University of California, Berkeley, Zewail transferred to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 1976, where he continues to work. Zewail is married with four children.

Work

Chemical reactions in which molecules held together by atoms meet and reorganize into new compounds are one of nature's most fundamental processes. This transition from one constellation to another happens very quickly. The process is possible because the atoms inside a molecule vibrate. The time between these vibrations is very short—10-100 femtoseconds. In the late 1980s Ahmed Zewail developed methods for studying chemical reactions in detail. By using laser technology to produce flashes of light just a few femtoseconds long, reactions can be mapped.

Summary

Ahmed H. Zewail (born February 26, 1946, Damanhur, Egypt—died August 2, 2016, Pasadena, California, U.S.) was an Egyptian-born chemist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1999 for developing a rapid laser technique that enabled scientists to study the action of atoms during chemical reactions. The breakthrough created a new field of physical chemistry known as femtochemistry. Zewail was the first Egyptian and the first Arab to win a Nobel Prize in a science category.

After receiving B.S. (1967) and M.S. (1969) degrees from Alexandria University, Zewail attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a doctorate in 1974. Two years later he joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, and in 1990 he was selected as the school’s first Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Physics. Zewail also served as a visiting professor at a number of institutions, including Texas A&M University, the University of Iowa, and American University at Cairo. He founded (2011) Zewail City of Science and Technology, a premier institute of technology in Cairo.

Because chemical reactions last only 10 to 100 femtoseconds (fs)—one femtosecond is 0.000000000000001 second, or {10}^{-15}—many believed it would be impossible to study the events that constitute a reaction. In the late 1980s, however, Zewail was able to view the motion of atoms and molecules by using a method based on new laser technology capable of producing light flashes just tens of femtoseconds in duration. During the process, known as femtosecond spectroscopy, molecules were mixed together in a vacuum tube in which an ultrafast laser beamed two pulses. The first pulse supplied the energy for the reaction, and the second examined the ongoing action. The characteristic spectra, or light patterns, from the molecules were then studied to determine the structural changes of the molecules. Zewail’s discovery enabled scientists to gain more control over the outcome of the chemical reaction, and it was expected to have many applications. Zewail also used elements of femtochemistry to invent a 4D electron microscope, with which operators were able to investigate the dynamics of atoms one billion times faster than they could with previous microscopes.

“With femtosecond spectroscopy we can for the first time observe in ‘slow motion’ what happens as the reaction barrier is crossed,” the Nobel Assembly said in its press release announcing Zewail as the winner of the 1999 prize for chemistry. “Scientists the world over are studying processes with femtosecond spectroscopy in gases, in fluids and in solids, on surfaces and in polymers. Applications range from how catalysts function and how molecular electronic components must be designed, to the most delicate mechanisms in life processes and how the medicines of the future should be produced.”

Details

Ahmed Hassan Zewail (February 26, 1946 – August 2, 2016) was an Egyptian-American chemist, known as the "father of femtochemistry". He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry and became the first Egyptian and Arab to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field, and the second African to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was the Linus Pauling Chair Professor of Chemistry, a professor of physics, and the director of the Physical Biology Center for Ultrafast Science and Technology at the California Institute of Technology.

Early life and education

Ahmed Hassan Zewail was born on February 26, 1946, in Damanhur, Egypt, and was raised in Desouk. He received Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in chemistry from Alexandria University before moving to the United States to complete his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Robin M. Hochstrasser.

Career

After completing his PhD, Zewail did postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by Charles B. Harris. Following this, he was awarded a faculty appointment at the California Institute of Technology in 1976, and eventually became the first Linus Pauling Chair in Chemical Physics there. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States on March 5, 1982. Zewail was the director of the Physical Biology Center for Ultrafast Science and Technology at the California Institute of Technology.

Zewail was nominated and participated in President Barack Obama's Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), an advisory group of the nation's leading scientists and engineers to advise the President and Vice President and formulate policy in the areas of science, technology, and innovation.

Research

Zewail's key work was a pioneer of femtochemistry—i.e. the study of chemical reactions across femtoseconds. Using a rapid ultrafast laser technique (consisting of ultrashort laser flashes), the technique allows the description of reactions on very short time scales – short enough to analyse transition states in selected chemical reactions.

Zewail became known as the "father of femtochemistry". He also made critical contributions in ultrafast electron diffraction, which uses short electron pulses rather than light pulses to study chemical reaction dynamics.

Political work

In a speech at Cairo University on June 4, 2009, US President Barack Obama proclaimed a new Science Envoy program as part of a "new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world." In January 2010, Ahmed Zewail, Elias Zerhouni, and Bruce Alberts became the first US science envoys to Islam, visiting Muslim-majority countries from North Africa to Southeast Asia.

When asked about rumors that he might contest the 2011 Egyptian presidential election, Ahmed Zewail said: "I am a frank man... I have no political ambition, as I have stressed repeatedly that I only want to serve Egypt in the field of science and die as a scientist."

During the 2011 Egyptian protests he announced his return to the country. Zewail said that he would join a committee for constitutional reform alongside Ayman Nour, Mubarak's rival at the 2005 presidential elections and a leading lawyer. Zewail was later mentioned as a respected figure working as an intermediary between the military regime ruling after Mubarak's resignation, and revolutionary youth groups such as the April 6 Youth Movement and young supporters of Mohamed ElBaradei. He played a critical role during this time as described by Egyptian Media.

Awards and honours

Zewail's work brought him international attention, receiving awards and honors throughout most of his career for his work in chemistry and physics. In 1999, Zewail became the first Egyptian to receive a science Nobel Prize when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Zewail gave his Nobel Lecture on "Femtochemistry: Atomic-Scale Dynamics of the Chemical Bond Using Ultrafast Lasers".

In 1999, he received Egypt's highest state honour, the Grand Collar of the Nile. Other notable awards include the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (1983), the King Faisal International Prize (1989), the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (1993), the Earle K. Plyler Prize (1993), the Herbert P. Broida Prize (1995), the Peter Debye Award (1996), the Tolman Award (1997), the Robert A. Welch Award (1997), the Linus Pauling Medal (1997), the Franklin Medal (1998) and the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (2000). In October 2006, Zewail received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science for "his pioneering development of the new field of femtoscience and for his seminal contributions to the revolutionary discipline of physical biology, creating new ways for better understanding the functional behavior of biological systems by directly visualizing them in the four dimensions of space and time." Zewail was awarded the Othmer Gold Medal (2009), the Priestley Medal (2011) from the American Chemical Society and the Davy Medal (2011) from the Royal Society.

In 1982 he was named as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Zewail became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1989, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993, and the American Philosophical Society in 1998. Zewail was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2001. He was also elected as a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences in 2001.

Zewail was made a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2005, the Ahmed Zewail Award for Ultrafast Science and Technology was established by the American Chemical Society and the Newport Corporation in his honor. In 2010 the journal Chemical Physics Letters established the Ahmed Zewail Prize in Molecular Sciences. In May 2010, Zewail gave the commencement address at Southwestern University. The Zewail City of Science and Technology, established in 2000 and revived in 2011, is named in his honour.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-06 16:53:13

2043) Günter Blobel

Gist:

Work

Proteins, molecules composed of chains of amino acids, play a crucial role in life processes in our cells. Proteins are continuously being transported through membranes or walls that both separate the cell from its surroundings and separate the inner parts of the cell, the organelles. In 1975 Günter Blobel showed that in certain cases amino acids in a protein serve as an address label that determines where a protein is to be delivered. Amino acid sequences determine whether a protein is to be passed through the membrane out of the cell or into an organelle or is to be built in the membrane.

Summary

Günter Blobel (born May 21, 1936, Waltersdorf, Silesia, Germany [now Niegosławice, Poland]—died February 18, 2018, New York, New York, U.S.) was a German-born American cellular and molecular biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1999 for his discovery that proteins have signals that govern their movement and position in the cell.

Blobel received a medical degree at Eberhard-Karl University of Tübingen, Germany, in 1960 and in 1967 earned a Ph.D. in oncology at the University of Wisconsin. That year he joined the Rockefeller University protein laboratory in New York City, then led by George Palade. In 1976 Blobel became a professor at the university, and in 1992 he was named John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Professor. Blobel obtained U.S. citizenship in the 1980s.

While in Palade’s laboratory, Blobel began studying the transport and localization of proteins in cells. There are about one billion protein molecules in a cell, and they perform a wide variety of specific functions. Some are used inside cells as structural material for building new cell components, whereas others serve as enzymes that speed up biochemical reactions. Still others must be transported to the cell membrane so they can be exported outside the cell to circulate in the blood to other parts of the body. For two decades, however, scientists did not understand two critical details of protein processing: how newly produced proteins are routed to their correct location in the cell, and how proteins pass through the membrane that surrounds each organelle.

By 1980 Blobel had established the general principles underlying the mechanism by which proteins are targeted to specific organelles within a cell. Working in collaboration with other research groups, he conducted a series of experiments showing that each protein carries an address code within its molecular structure, a signal sequence that directs it to the proper locale inside the cell. The address code, which consists of a sequence of amino acids, specifies whether the protein will pass through the membrane of a specific organelle, become integrated into the membrane, or be exported out of the cell. Blobel also concluded that proteins enter organelles through a porelike channel that opens in the organelle’s outer membrane when the correct protein arrives at the organelle.

Blobel’s later research focused specifically on a porelike channel in the nuclear envelope (the membrane surrounding the cell nucleus). This channel came to be known as the nuclear pore complex (NPC). The NPC is one of the largest protein-based components found in cells and provides the main method of transport for proteins between the cytoplasm and the nucleus. Blobel was primarily concerned with determining the structure of the NPC and employed various methods to conduct this research, including X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. Blobel and his team of researchers discovered that the NPC is made up mostly of proteins called nucleoporins. The team also identified and described a number of NPC transport factors that recognize the signal sequences in proteins and enable the passage of these proteins into the nucleus. Blobel also studied lamins, which are proteins involved in providing structural support to the nucleus.

Blobel’s work shed light on diseases such as cystic fibrosis, in which dysfunctional ion transporters give rise to abnormalities in cellular enzyme and protein transport. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Blobel received several other awards during his career, including the Louisa Gross Horowitz Prize (1987) and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1993). Blobel also was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator (the HHMI is a philanthropic foundation that subsidizes biomedical research in the United States).

Details

Günter Blobel (May 21, 1936 – February 18, 2018) was a Silesian German and American biologist and 1999 Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell.

Biography

Günter Blobel was born in Waltersdorf in the Prussian Province of Lower Silesia, then located in eastern Germany. In January 1945 his family fled from native Silesia to Dresden to escape from the advancing Red Army. During the bombing of Dresden, Blobel, then 8, stayed with his family at a relative's farm to the west of the city. After the war, Blobel grew up and attended gymnasium in the Saxon town of Freiberg. He studied medicine and graduated from the University of Tübingen in 1960. After two years service in a medical internship, he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, following an older brother, enrolling in the University of Wisconsin–Madison and, joining the lab of Van R. Potter for his graduate work. Blobel matriculated in 1967 with a Ph.D. He then moved to Rockefeller University as a postdoctoral fellow with George Palade, and was soon appointed as a professor.

Blobel was appointed to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1986. Blobel was the sole recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of signal peptides. Signal peptides form an integral part of protein targeting, a mechanism for cells to direct newly synthesized protein molecules to their proper location by means of an "address tag" (i.e., a signal peptide) within the molecule.

Blobel died of cancer in Manhattan at New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center on February 18, 2018 at the age of 81. By the time of his death, Blobel was described as having "ushered cell biology into the molecular age" through his work on the fractionation and reconstitution of functional protein complexes and sub-cellular components in vitro.

Philanthropy

Blobel became well known for his direct and active support for the rebuilding of Dresden in Germany, becoming, in 1994, the founder and president of the nonprofit "Friends of Dresden, Inc." He donated all of the Nobel award money to the restoration of Dresden, in particular for the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche (completed in 2005) and the building of a new synagogue. In Leipzig he pursued a rebuilding of the Paulinerkirche, the university church of the University of Leipzig, which had been blown up by the communist regime of East Germany in 1968, arguing "this is a shrine of German cultural history, connected to the most important names in German cultural history." Gunter was also a founding member of the board of directors of Research Foundation to Cure AIDS, a U.S. not-for-profit research organization.

Personal life

Blobel lost his older sister to aerial bombing of a train she was on in 1945, shortly after the bombing of Dresden, while an older brother survived the war and became a veterinarian in the United States. Blobel worked at the Rockefeller University in New York City from 1968. He lived in Manhattan's Upper East Side with his wife, Laura Maioglio (owner of Barbetta). He was on the board of directors for Nestlé and the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute. Furthermore, he was Co-Founder and Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for Chromocell Corporation. He sat on the Selection Committee for Life Science and Medicine which chooses winners of the Shaw Prize. Blobel had a passion for opera and architecture, in addition to his passion for experimental science.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-07 15:47:29

2044) Jack Kilby

Gist:

Work

The discovery of the small electronic component, the transistor, created new opportunities to amplify and control electrical signals. New materials were used and transistors gradually became smaller. Independently of one another, in 1959 Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce showed that many transistors, resistors, and capacitors could be grouped on a single board of semiconductor material. The integrated circuit, or microchip, came to be a vital component in computers and other electronic equipment.

Summary

Jack Kilby (born Nov. 8, 1923, Jefferson City, Mo., U.S.—died June 20, 2005, Dallas, Texas) was an American engineer and one of the inventors of the integrated circuit, a system of interconnected transistors on a single microchip. In 2000, Kilby was a corecipient, with Herbert Kroemer and Zhores Alferov, of the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Education and early career

Kilby was the son of an electrical engineer and, like many inventors of his era, got his start in electronics with amateur radio. His interest began while he was in high school when the Kansas Power Company of Great Bend, Kansas, of which his father was president, had to rely on amateur radio operators for communications after an ice storm disrupted normal service. After serving as an electronics technician in the U.S. Army during World War II, Kilby enrolled in the electrical engineering program at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (B.S.E.E., 1947).

After graduation Kilby joined the Centralab Division of Globe Union, Inc., located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was placed in charge of designing and developing miniaturized electronic circuits. He also found time to continue his studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Extension Division (M.S.E.E., 1950). In 1952 Centralab sent Kilby to Bell Laboratories’ headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey, to learn about the transistor, which had been invented at Bell in 1947 and which Centralab had purchased a license to manufacture. Back at Centralab, Kilby began working on germanium-based transistors for use in hearing aids. He soon realized, however, that he needed the resources of a larger company to pursue the goal of miniaturizing circuits, and in 1958 he switched to another Bell licensee, Texas Instruments Incorporated of Dallas, Texas.

Career at Texas Instruments

Shortly after his arrival at Texas Instruments (TI), Kilby had his epoch-making “monolithic idea.” Kilby realized that, instead of connecting separate components, an entire electronic assembly could be made as one unit from one semiconducting material by overlaying it with various impurities to replicate individual electronic components, such as resistors, capacitors, and transistors. Soon Kilby had a working postage-stamp-size prototype manufactured from germanium, and in February 1959 TI filed a patent application for this “miniaturized electronic circuit”—the world’s first integrated circuit. Four months later, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation filed a patent application for essentially the same device, but based on a different manufacturing procedure. Ten years later, long after their respective companies had cross-licensed technologies, the courts gave Kilby credit for the idea of the integrated circuit but gave Noyce the patent for his planar manufacturing process, a method for evaporating lines of conductive metal (the “wires”) directly onto a silicon chip.

Although the original integrated circuit (IC) was Kilby’s most important invention, it was only one of more than 50 patents that he was awarded. Many of those patents concerned improvements in IC design and manufacturing, including those for the first IC-powered experimental computer that TI built for the U.S. Air Force in 1961 and for the ICs that TI designed and delivered to the Air Force in 1962 for use in the Minuteman ballistic missile guidance system. In 1965 Kilby invented the semiconductor-based thermal printer. In 1967 he designed the first IC-based electronic calculator, the Pocketronic, gaining himself and TI the basic patent that lies at the heart of all pocket calculators. The Pocketronic required dozens of ICs, making it too complicated and expensive to manufacture for consumers, but by 1972 TI had reduced the number of necessary ICs to one. The introduction in that year of the TI Datamath pocket calculator marked the beginning of the IC’s integration into the very fabric of everyday life. By 1976 the pocket calculator had made the slide rule a museum piece.

Honours and awards

Kilby began a leave of absence from TI in 1970 to pursue independent research, particularly in solar power generation, although he continued as a semiconductor consultant on a part-time basis. He also served (1978–84) as a professor of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station. Among his many honours, Kilby was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1969, the Charles Stark Draper Medal in 1989, and the National Medal of Technology in 1990. In 1997 TI dedicated its new research and development building in Dallas, the Kilby Center. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, breaking with a trend of recognizing only theoretical physicists, awarded half of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physics to Kilby for his work as an applied physicist.

Details

Jack St. Clair Kilby (8 November 1923 - 20 June 2005) was an American electrical engineer who took part, along with Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor, in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on 10 December 2000.

Kilby was also the co-inventor of the handheld calculator and the thermal printer, for which he had the patents. He also had patents for seven other inventions.

Early life

Jack Kilby was born in 1923 in Jefferson City, Missouri, to Hubert and Vina Freitag Kilby. Both parents had Bachelor of Science degrees from the University of Illinois. His father was a manager at a local utility company. Kilby grew up and attended school in Great Bend, Kansas, graduating from the Great Bend High School. Today road signs at the entrances to the town commemorate his time there, and the Commons Area at Great Bend High School has been named The Jack Kilby Commons Area.

Kilby received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was an honorary member of Acacia fraternity. In 1947, he received a degree in electrical engineering. He earned his Master of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1950, while working at Centralab, a division of Globe-Union corporation in Milwaukee.

Career

Kilby was vital to the invention of the integrated circuit. In mid-1958, as a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments (TI), he did not yet have the right to a summer vacation. Kilby spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design that was commonly called the "tyranny of numbers", and he finally came to the conclusion that the manufacturing of circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. On September 12, he presented his findings to company's management, which included Mark Shepherd. He showed them a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached, pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave, proving that his integrated circuit worked, and thus that he had solved the problem. U.S. Patent 3,138,743 for "Miniaturized Electronic Circuits", the first integrated circuit, was filed on February 6, 1959. It was notable for having different components (transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.) on one single substrate. Along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later), Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit.

Jack Kilby went on to pioneer military, industrial, and commercial applications of microchip technology. He headed teams that created the first military system and the first computer incorporating integrated circuits. He invented the handheld calculator (along with Jerry Merryman and James Van Tassel).

In 1970, he took a leave of absence from TI to work as an independent inventor. He explored, among other subjects, the use of silicon technology for generating electrical power from sunlight. From 1978 to 1984 he held the position of Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University.

In 1983, Kilby retired from Texas Instruments.

Legacy

He died of cancer June 20, 2005 at the age of 81, in Dallas, Texas.

On December 14, 2005, Texas Instruments created the Historic TI Archives. The Jack Kilby family donated his personal manuscripts and his personal photograph collection to Southern Methodist University (SMU). The collection will be cataloged and stored at DeGolyer Library, SMU.

In 2008, the SMU School of Engineering, with the DeGolyer Library and the Library of Congress, hosted a year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of the birth of the digital age with Kilby's Nobel Prize-winning invention of the integrated circuit. Symposia and exhibits examined the many ways in which technology and engineers shaped the modern world. Kilby held an honorary doctorate of science from SMU and was a longtime associate of SMU through the Kilby Foundation.

Awards and honors

A statue of Jack Kilby stands in Texas Instruments Plaza on the campus of The University of Texas at Dallas.

Recognition of Kilby's outstanding achievements have been made by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), including the election to IEEE Fellow in 1966, the IEEE David Sarnoff Award in 1966, co-recipient of the first IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award in 1978, the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984 and the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1986. He was co-recipient of the Franklin Institute’s Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1966. In 1982 and 1989, he received the Holley Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He was elected to member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1967 and received the Academy's Vladimir K. Zworykin Award in 1975. Kilby received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1970 and was co-recipient of the first NAE's Charles Stark Draper Prize in 1989. The Kilby Award Foundation was founded in 1980 in his honor, and the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal was created in 1995. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2001.

Kilby was awarded the Stibitz-Wilson Award from the American Computer & Robotics Museum in 1997.

Kilby is also the recipient of the America's most prestigious honors in science and engineering: the National Medal of Science in 1969, and the National Medal of Technology in 1990. In 1982, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

In 1993, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize by the Inamori Foundation. He was awarded both the Washington Award, administered by the Western Society of Engineers and the Eta Kappa Nu Vladimir Karapetoff Award in 1999. In 2000, Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his breakthrough discovery, and delivered his personal view of the industry and its history in his acceptance speech.

Kilby was awarded nine honorary doctorate degrees from universities including Southern Methodist University, the University of Miami, University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Texas A&M University, Yale and Rochester Institute of Technology. The National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in Taiwan awarded Kilby with a certificate of Honorary Professorship in 1998.

The Kilby Labs, TI's research laboratory for silicon manufacturing and integrated circuit design, is named after him.

The Jack Kilby Computer Centre at the Merchiston Campus of Edinburgh Napier University in Edinburgh is also named in his honor.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-08 17:34:54

2045) Zhores Alferov

Gist:

Work

Semiconductors, materials with properties between those of electrical conductors and insulators, are the basis for most electronic components. Some components use heterostructures, in which semiconductor materials lie in thin sheets. In 1963, at the same time as but independently of Herbert Kroemer, Zhores Alferov built a heterostructure that acted as a laser. Semiconductor lasers have since become important for the transmission of signals in optical fibers and for storage and reading of data.

Summary

Zhores Alferov (born March 15, 1930, Vitebsk, Belorussia, U.S.S.R. [now in Belarus]—died March 1, 2019, St. Petersburg, Russia) was a Soviet physicist who, with Herbert Kroemer and Jack S. Kilby, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000 for their work that laid the foundation for the modern era of computers and information technology.

Alferov received a doctorate in physics and mathematics from the A.F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute (1970); he became director of the institute in 1987. In the 1950s he began work to develop fast optoelectronic and microelectronic components made from semiconductor heterostructures. (While most computer chips and other semiconductor components were made from one kind of material, such as silicon, heterostructure semiconductors were made from layers of different materials.) Using Kroemer’s theory, which suggested that a heterostructure transistor was superior to a conventional transistor, Alferov and his research team developed the first practical heterostructure electronic device in 1966. They then pioneered electronic components made from heterostructures, including the first heterostructure laser, which both Alferov and Kroemer had proposed independently in 1963. Heterostructure solid-state lasers made possible fibre-optic communications, and heterostructure devices were later used in communications satellites, bar-code readers, cellular telephone communications, and other products.

Details

Zhores Ivanovich Alferov (15 March 1930 – 1 March 2019) was a Soviet and Russian physicist and academic who contributed significantly to the creation of modern heterostructure physics and electronics. He shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of the semiconductor heterojunction for optoelectronics. He also became a politician in his later life, serving in the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, as a member of the Communist Party from 1995.

Early life and education

Alferov was born in Vitebsk, Byelorussian SSR, Soviet Union, to a Russian father, Ivan Karpovich Alferov, a factory manager, and a Jewish mother, Anna Vladimirovna Rosenblum. He was named after French socialist Jean Jaurès while his older brother was named Marx after Karl Marx. Alferov graduated from secondary school in Minsk in 1947 and enrolled in the Belarusian Polytechnic Academy. In 1952, he received his B.S. from the V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin) Electrotechnical Institute (LETI) in Leningrad. Starting in 1953, Alferov worked in the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. From the institute, he earned several scientific degrees: a Candidate of Sciences in Technology in 1961 and a Doctor of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics in 1970.

Alferov then served as the director of the Ioffe Institute from 1987 to 2003. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1972, and a full member in 1979. From 1989, he was Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences and President of its Saint Petersburg Scientific Center.

Research

Starting at Ioffe Institute in 1953, Alferov worked with a group led by Vladimir Tuchkevich, who became director of the Ioffe Institute in 1967, on planar semiconductor amplifiers for use in radio receivers. These planar semiconductor amplifiers would be referred to as transistors in the present day. Alferov's contribution included work on germanium diodes for use as a rectifier.

In the early 1960s, Alferov organized an effort at Ioffe Institute to develop semiconductor heterostructures. Semiconductor heterojunctions transistors enabled higher frequency use than their homojunction predecessors, and this capability plays a key role in modern mobile phone and satellite communications. Alferov and colleagues worked on GaAs and AlAs III-V heterojunctions. A particular focus was the use of heterojunctions to create semiconductor lasers capable of lasing at room temperature. In 1963, Alferov filed a patent application proposing double-heterostructure lasers; Herbert Kroemer independently filed a US patent several months later. In 1966, Alferov's lab created the first lasers based on heterostructures, although they did not lase continuously. Then in 1968, Alferov and coworkers produced the first continuous-wave semiconductor heterojunction laser operating at room temperature. This achievement came a month ahead of Izuo Hayashi and Morton Panish of Bell Labs also producing a continuous-wave room-temperature heterojunction laser.

It was for this work that Alferov received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Herbert Kroemer, "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and optoelectronics".

In the 1960s and 1970s Alferov continued his work on the physics and technology of semiconductor heterostructures in his lab at the Ioffe Institute. Alferov's investigations of injection properties of semiconductors and his contributions to the development of lasers, solar cells, LEDs, and epitaxy processes, led to the creation of modern heterojunction physics and electronics. The development of semiconductor heterojunctions revolutionized semiconductor design, and had a range of immediate commercial applications including LEDs, barcode readers and CDs. Hermann Grimmeiss of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards Nobel prizes, said: "Without Alferov, it would not be possible to transfer all the information from satellites down to the Earth or to have so many telephone lines between cities."

Alferov had an almost messianic conception of heterostructures, writing: "Many scientists have contributed to this remarkable progress, which not only determines in large measure the future prospects of solid state physics but in a certain sense affects the future of human society as well."

Scientific administration

In 1987, Alferov became the fifth director of the Ioffe Institute. In 1989, Alferov gained the administrative position of chairman of the Leningrad Scientific Center, now referred to as the St. Petersburg Scientific Center. In the Leningrad region, this scientific center is an overarching organization comprising 70 institutions, organizations, enterprises, and scientific societies.

Alferov worked to foster relationships between early educational institutions and scientific research institutions to train the next generation of scientists, citing Peter the Great's vision for the Russian Academy of Sciences to be organized with a scientific research core in close contact with a gymnasium (secondary school). In 1987, Alferov and colleagues at the Ioffe Institute established a secondary school in Saint Petersburg, the School of Physics and Technology, under the umbrella of the Ioffe charter. In 1997 Alferov founded the Research and Education Center at the Ioffe Institute and in 2002, this center officially became the Saint Petersburg Academic University after gaining a charter to award masters and PhD degrees.

In the 2000s, through his role in academic administration and in parliament, Alferov advocated for and worked to advance Russia's nanotechnology sector. The primary research charter of the Saint Petersburg Academic University, which Alferov founded, was the development of nanotechnology. Alferov provided a consistent voice in parliament in favor of increased scientific funding. In 2006, Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov announced the creation of a federal agency, Rosnanotekh to pursue nanotechnology applications.

Political activity

Alferov was elected to the Russian Parliament, the State Duma, in 1995 as a deputy for the political party Our Home – Russia, generally considered to be supportive of the policies of President Boris Yeltsin. In 1999 he was elected again, this time on the list of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. He was re-elected in 2003 and again in 2007, when he was placed second on the party's federal electoral list behind Gennady Zyuganov and ahead of Nikolai Kharitonov, even though he was not a member of the party.

Non-profit service

Alferov served on the advisory council of CRDF Global.

Illness and death

Since November 2018, Alferov suffered from hypertensive emergency. He died at the age of 88 on 1 March 2019.

Personal life

Alferov's wife was named Tamara Darskaya. Together they had two children, a son Ivan and a daughter Olga.

Alferov was an atheist and expressed objections to religious education. He was one of the signers of the open letter to President Vladimir Putin from members of the Russian Academy of Sciences against clericalisation of Russia.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-09 15:27:38

2046) Herbert Kroemer

Gist:

Work

Semiconductors, materials with properties between those of electrical conductors and insulators, are the basis for most electronic components. Some components use heterostructures, in which semiconductor materials lie in thin sheets. In 1957 Herbert Kroemer developed a proposal for a transistor built on heterostructures, and in 1963, at the same time as but independently of Zhores Alferov, Kroemer also built a heterostructure that acted as a laser. These components have since become important in telecommunications, for example.

Summary

Herbert Kroemer (born August 25, 1928, Weimar, Germany—died March 8, 2024) was a German-born physicist who, with Zhores Alferov and Jack S. Kilby, was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work that laid the foundation for the modern era of microchips, computers, and information technology.

After receiving a Ph.D. (1952) from Georg August University in Göttingen, Germany, Kroemer worked in the United States at RCA Laboratories (1954–57) in Princeton, New Jersey, and at Varian Associates (1959–66) in Palo Alto, California. In 1968 he became professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and in 1976 he joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he became professor emeritus in 2012.

In 1957 Kroemer carried out theoretical calculations showing that a heterostructure transistor would be superior to a conventional transistor, especially for certain high-frequency uses and other applications. (Most computer chips and other semiconductor components are made from one kind of material, whereas heterostructures are made of different materials.) Scientists later showed that he was correct—heterostructure transistors can operate at frequencies 100 times higher than conventional transistors, and they also work better as amplifiers. Alferov’s research team in the Soviet Union applied Kroemer’s theory, developing the first practical heterostructure electronic device in 1966. Alferov then pioneered electronic components, including the first heterostructure laser, which both men had proposed independently in 1963. Heterostructure devices made fiber-optic communications possible and are used in numerous everyday products, including computers and video players.

Derails

Herbert Kroemer (August 25, 1928 – March 8, 2024) was a German-American physicist who, along with Zhores Alferov, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for "developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics". Kroemer was professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, having received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1952 from the University of Göttingen, Germany, with a dissertation on hot electron effects in the then-new transistor. His research into transistors was a stepping stone to the later development of mobile phone technologies.

Early life

Born to a working-class family in Weimar, Germany, Kroemer excelled in physics at school, letting him advance faster than his peers in the subject.

Career

Kroemer worked in a number of research laboratories in Germany and the United States and taught electrical engineering at the University of Colorado from 1968 to 1976. He joined the UCSB faculty in 1976, focusing its semiconductor research program on the emerging compound semiconductor technology rather than on mainstream silicon technology. Along with Charles Kittel he co-authored the textbook Thermal Physics, first published in 1980, and still used today. He is also the author of the textbook Quantum Mechanics for Engineering, Materials Science and Applied Physics.

Kroemer was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for conception of the semiconductor heterostructure transistor and laser, and for leadership in semiconductor materials technology. He was also elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003.

Kroemer always preferred to work on problems that are ahead of mainstream technology, inventing the drift transistor in the 1950s and being the first to point out that advantages could be gained in various semiconductor devices by incorporating heterojunctions. Most notably, though, in 1963 he proposed the concept of the double-heterostructure laser, which is now a central concept in the field of semiconductor lasers. Kroemer became an early pioneer in molecular beam epitaxy, concentrating on applying the technology to untried new materials.

Personal life

Kroemer was an atheist. He died on March 8, 2024, at the age of 95.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-10 15:35:39

2047) Alan J. Heeger

Gist

Heeger (born January 22, 1936, Sioux City, Iowa, U.S.) is an American chemist who, with Alan G. MacDiarmid and Shirakawa Hideki, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 for their discovery that certain plastics can be chemically modified to conduct electricity almost as readily as metals.

Work

Plastic material is composed of polymers—very large molecules that take the form of long chains of smaller molecules. Plastic usually does not conduct electricity, but at the end of the 1970s Alan Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid, and Hideki Shirakawa demonstrated that it is possible to produce conductive polymers. This requires alternating single and double bonds between carbon atoms in the chain and doping the polymers through the addition of suitable atoms so that free electrons or holes appear after the electrons. Conductive polymers can be used in electronics and other applications.

Summary

Alan J. Heeger (born January 22, 1936, Sioux City, Iowa, U.S.) is an American chemist who, with Alan G. MacDiarmid and Shirakawa Hideki, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 for their discovery that certain plastics can be chemically modified to conduct electricity almost as readily as metals.

After receiving a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1961, Heeger taught and conducted research at the University of Pennsylvania until 1982, when he became professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and director of its Institute for Polymers and Organic Solids; he stepped down as director in 1999. In 1990 Heeger founded the UNIAX Corporation to develop and manufacture light-emitting displays based on conducting polymers; UNIAX was acquired by the American corporation DuPont in 2000. In 2001 he cofounded Konarka Technologies to produce thin, flexible solar cells made of plastic; the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012 and was liquidated.

Heeger, MacDiarmid, and Shirakawa carried out their prizewinning work while studying polyacetylene, a polymer that was known to exist as a black powder. In 1977 the three men, collaborating at the University of Pennsylvania, exposed polyacetylene to iodine vapour. Their strategy was to introduce impurities into the polymer much as in the doping process used to tailor the conductive properties of semiconductors. Doping with iodine increased polyacetylene’s electrical conductivity by a factor of 10 million, which made it as conductive as some metals. The finding led scientists to discover other conductive polymers and contributed to the emerging field of molecular electronics.

Details

Alan Jay Heeger (born January 22, 1936) is an American physicist, academic and Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry.

Heegar was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2002 for co-founding the field of conducting polymers and for pioneering work in making these novel materials available for technological applications.

Life and career

Heeger was born in Sioux City, Iowa, into a Jewish family. He grew up in Akron, Iowa, where his father owned a general store. At age nine, following his father's death, the family moved to Sioux City.

Heeger earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1957, and a Ph.D in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. From 1962 to 1982 he was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1982 he commenced his present appointment as a professor in the Physics Department and the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research has led to the formation of numerous start-up companies including Uniax, Konarka, and Sirigen, founded in 2003 by Guillermo C. Bazan, Patrick J. Dietzen, Brent S. Gaylord. Alan Heeger was a founder of Uniax, which was acquired by DuPont.

He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 along with Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa "for their discovery and development of conductive polymers"; They published their results on polyacetylene a conductive polymer in 1977. This led to the construction of the Su–Schrieffer–Heeger model, a simple model for topological insulators.

He had won the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society in 1983 and, in 1995, the Balzan Prize for Science of Non-Biological Materials.

His sons are the neuroscientist David Heeger and the immunologist Peter Heeger.

In October 2010, Heeger participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch. Heeger is also a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board. Heeger has been a judge of the STAGE International Script Competition three times (2006, 2007, 2010).

"Perhaps the greatest pleasure of being a scientist is to have an abstract idea, then to do an experiment (more often a series of experiments is required) that demonstrates the idea was correct; that is, Nature actually behaves as conceived in the mind of the scientist. This process is the essence of creativity in science. I have been fortunate to have experienced this intense pleasure many times in my life." Alan J Heeger, Never Lose Your Nerve!

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-11 15:59:55

2048) Alan MacDiarmid

Gist:

Work

Plastic material is composed of polymers—very large molecules that take the form of long chains of smaller molecules. Plastic usually does not conduct electricity, but at the end of the 1970s Alan MacDiarmid, Alan Heeger, and Hideki Shirakawa demonstrated that it is possible to produce conductive polymers. This requires alternating single and double bonds between carbon atoms in the chain and doping the polymers through the addition of suitable atoms so that free electrons or holes appear after the electrons. Conductive polymers can be used in electronics and other applications.

Summary

Alan G. MacDiarmid (born April 14, 1927, Masterson, N.Z.—died Feb. 7, 2007, Drexel Hill, Pa., U.S.) was a New Zealand-born American chemist who, with Alan J. Heeger and Shirakawa Hideki, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 for their discovery that certain plastics can be chemically modified to conduct electricity almost as readily as metals.

MacDiarmid earned Ph.D.’s in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (1953) and the University of Cambridge (1955). He then joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, becoming full professor in 1964 and Blanchard Professor of Chemistry in 1988.

During a visit to Japan in the mid-1970s, MacDiarmid met Shirakawa, who reported that he and his colleagues had synthesized polyacetylene, a polymer that was known to exist as a black powder, into a metallic-looking material that still behaved as an insulator. In 1977 the two men and Heeger, collaborating at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to introduce impurities into the polymer much as in the doping process used to tailor the conductive properties of semiconductors. Doping with iodine increased polyacetylene’s electrical conductivity by a factor of 10 million, which made it as conductive as some metals. The discovery led scientists to uncover other conductive polymers. These polymers contributed to the emerging field of molecular electronics and were predicted to find application in computers.

MacDiarmid held some 20 patents and was the recipient of numerous awards. In 2001 he was made a member of the Order of New Zealand, the country’s highest honour.

Details

Alan Graham MacDiarmid (14 April 1927 – 7 February 2007) was a New Zealand-born American chemist, and one of three recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000.

Early life and education

MacDiarmid was born in Masterton, New Zealand as one of five children – three brothers and two sisters. His family was relatively poor, and the Great Depression made life difficult in Masterton, due to which his family shifted to Lower Hutt, a few miles from Wellington, New Zealand. At around age ten, he developed an interest in chemistry from one of his father's old textbooks, and he taught himself from this book and from library books.

MacDiarmid was educated at Hutt Valley High School and Victoria University of Wellington.

In 1943, MacDiarmid passed the University of New Zealand's University Entrance Exam and its Medical Preliminary Exam. He then took up a part-time job as a "lab boy" or janitor at Victoria University of Wellington during his studies for a BSc degree, which he completed in 1947. He was then appointed demonstrator in the undergraduate laboratories. After completing an MSc in chemistry from the same university, he worked as an assistant in its chemistry department. It was here that he had his first publication in 1949, in the scientific journal Nature. He graduated in 1951 with first class honours, and won a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He majored in inorganic chemistry, receiving his M.S. degree in 1952 and his PhD in 1953. He then won a Shell Graduate Scholarship, which enabled him to go to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he completed a second PhD in 1955.

Career and research

MacDiarmid worked in the School of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews in Scotland for a year as a member of the junior faculty. He then took a faculty position in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, where he became a full professor in 1964. MacDiarmid spent the greater part of his career on the chemistry faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked for 45 years. The first twenty years of his research there focused on silicon chemistry. He was appointed Blanchard Professor of Chemistry in 1988.

In 2002 MacDiarmid also joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas.

Conductive polymers

His best-known research was the discovery and development of conductive polymers—plastic materials that conduct electricity. He collaborated with the Japanese chemist Hideki Shirakawa and the American physicist Alan Heeger in this research and published the first results in 1977. The three of them shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.

The Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery that plastics can, after certain modifications, be made electrically conductive. The work progressed to yield important practical applications. Conductive plastics can be used for anti-static substances for photographic film and 'smart' windows that can exclude sunlight. Semi-conductive polymers have been applied in light-emitting diodes, solar cells and displays in mobile telephones. Future developments in molecular electronics are predicted to dramatically increase the speed while reducing the size of computers.

MacDiarmid also travelled around the world for speaking engagements that impressed upon listeners the value of globalising the effort of innovation in the 21st century. In one of his last courses, in 2001, MacDiarmid elected to lead a small seminar of incoming freshmen about his research activities. Overall, his name is on over 600 published papers and 20 patents.

Personal life

Towards the end of his life, MacDiarmid was ill with myelodysplastic syndrome. In early February 2007 he was planning to travel back to New Zealand, when he fell down the stairs in his home in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, and died on 7 February 2007. He is buried at Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill.

MacDiarmid's first wife, Marian Mathieu, who he had married in 1954, died in 1990. He is survived by four children: Heather McConnell, Dawn Hazelett, Duncan MacDiarmid and Gail Williams, from their marriage and nine grandchildren: Dr. Sean McConnell, Dr. Ryan McConnell, Rebecca McConnell, Dr. Clayton Hazelett, Wesley Hazelett, Langston MacDiarmid, Aubree Williams, Austin Williams and George Williams. MacDiarmid was also survived by his second wife, Gayl Gentile, whom he married in 2005; she died in 2014.

MacDiarmid was a first cousin of New Zealand expatriate painter Douglas MacDiarmid. The year after Alan received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Douglas painted a portrait Archived 11 November 2021 at the Wayback Machine of his cousin for the New Zealand Portrait Gallery.

MacDiarmid was also active as a naturist and nudist, and considered himself a sun-worshipper and keen waterskier.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-12 15:46:36

2049) Hideki Shirakawa

Summary

Shirakawa Hideki (born August 20, 1936, Tokyo, Japan) is a Japanese chemist who, with Alan G. MacDiarmid and Alan J. Heeger, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 for their discovery that certain plastics can be chemically altered to conduct electricity almost as readily as metals.

Shirakawa earned a Ph.D. from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1966. That same year he joined the faculty of the Institute of Materials Science at the University of Tsukuba, where he became professor of chemistry in 1982; he retired as professor emeritus in 2000.

In 1974 Shirakawa and associates serendipitously synthesized polyacetylene, a polymer that was known to exist as a black powder, into a silvery film that possessed many properties of metal. In 1977 he began collaborating with MacDiarmid and Heeger at the University of Pennsylvania, where they exposed polyacetylene to iodine vapour. Their plan was to introduce impurities into the polymer much as in the doping process used to tailor the conductive properties of semiconductors. Doping with iodine increased polyacetylene’s electrical conductivity by a factor of 10 million, making it as conductive as some metals. Other conductive polymers were later discovered and were expected to play a significant role in the emerging field of molecular electronics.

Details

Hideki Shirakawa (Shirakawa Hideki, born August 20, 1936) is a Japanese chemist, engineer, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba and Zhejiang University. He is best known for his discovery of conductive polymers. He was co-recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Alan MacDiarmid and Alan Heeger.

Early life and education

Hideki Shirakawa was born in Tokyo, Japan, the second son of a military doctor. He had one elder and one younger brother and sister. Olympic marathoner champion Naoko Takahashi is his second cousin-niece. He lived in Manchukuo and Taiwan during childhood. Around third grade, he moved to Takayama, Gifu, which is the hometown of his mother.

Shirakawa graduated from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1961, and his doctorate in 1966. Afterward, he obtained the post of assistant in Chemical Resources Laboratory at Tokyo Tech.

Career

Emperor Akihito conferred the Order of Culture on Shirakawa (at the Imperial Palace on November 3, 2000)
While employed as an assistant at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) in Japan, Shirakawa developed polyacetylene, which has a metallic appearance. This result interested Alan MacDiarmid when MacDiarmid visited Tokyo Tech in 1975.

In 1976, he was invited to work in the laboratory of Alan MacDiarmid as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. The two developed the electrical conductivity of polyacetylene along with American physicist Alan Heeger.

In 1977 they discovered that doping with iodine vapor could enhance the conductivity of polyacetylene. The three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000 in recognition of the discovery. With regard to the mechanism of electric conduction, it is strongly believed that nonlinear excitations in the form of solitons play a role.

In 1979, Shirakawa became an assistant professor in the University of Tsukuba; three years later, he advanced to a full professor. In 1991 he was appointed as Tsukuba's Chief of Science and Engineering Department of Graduate School (until March, 1993), and as Tsukuba's Chief of Category #3 group (until March, 1997).

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Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-13 15:04:27

2050) Arvid Carlsson

Gist:

Life

Arvid Carlsson was born in Uppsala, Sweden, to parents who were both academics. He grew up in Lund, where his father had become a professor of history. Carlsson studied medicine and pharmacology at Lund University, where he later conducted his Nobel Prize-awarded research. He became a professor of pharmacology at the University of Gothenburg in 1959. Carlsson is married with five children, including daughter Maria, with whom he has conducted research.

Work

The body functions of man and animals are controlled by electric and chemical signals between the cells in our nervous system. Contacts between cells are called synapses, and special substances, called neurotransmitters, send the signals. Carlsson discovered a neurotransmitter called dopamine in the brain and described its role in our ability to move. This led to the realization that Parkinson's disease is caused by a lack of dopamine, allowing for the development of drugs for the disease.

Summary

Arvid Carlsson (born January 25, 1923, Uppsala, Sweden—died June 29, 2018, Gothenburg) was a Swedish pharmacologist who, along with Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel, was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research establishing dopamine as an important neurotransmitter in the brain. Carlsson’s work led to a treatment for Parkinson disease.

Carlsson received a medical degree from the University of Lund in 1951 and subsequently held teaching positions there until 1959, when he became professor of pharmacology at the University of Gothenburg. When Carlsson began his pioneering studies in the 1950s, scientists thought that dopamine worked only indirectly, by causing brain cells to make another neurotransmitter, noradrenaline. Using a sensitive test that he had devised, Carlsson detected particularly high levels of the compound in areas of the brain that controlled walking and other voluntary movements. In animal experiments he showed that depletion of dopamine impairs the ability to move. When Carlsson treated dopamine-depleted animals with the amino acid l-dopa, the symptoms disappeared, and the animals moved normally again. This led to the use of l-dopa as a treatment for Parkinson disease, and it eventually became the single most important medication for the disease. Carlsson’s work also contributed to an understanding of the relationship between neurotransmitters and mental states and led to the introduction of new antidepressant drugs.

Details

Arvid Carlsson (25 January 1923 – 29 June 2018) was a Swedish neuropharmacologist who is best known for his work with the neurotransmitter dopamine and its effects in Parkinson's disease. For his work on dopamine, Carlsson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000, together with Eric Kandel and Paul Greengard.

Early life and education

Carlsson was born on 25 January 1923 in Uppsala, Sweden, one of four siblings. His family moved to Lund after his father became a history professor at Lund University. Although his two older siblings followed their father's career path, he instead chose to study medicine at Lund, beginning in 1941.

In 1944, he participated in the task of examining prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, whom Swedish aristocrat Folke Bernadotte had managed to bring to Sweden, which was neutral during World War II. He received his MD and PhD in pharmacology in 1951.

Career

In 1951, Carlsson became an associate professor at Lund University. He spent five months as a research fellow for the pharmacologist Bernard Beryl Brodie at the National Heart Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, United States, and the change in his research focus to psychopharmacology eventually led to his Nobel Prize. In 1959 he became a professor at the University of Gothenburg.

In 1957 Katharine Montagu demonstrated the presence of dopamine in the human brain; later that same year Carlsson also demonstrated that dopamine was a neurotransmitter in the brain and not just a precursor for norepinephrine. Carlsson went on to develop a method for measuring the amount of dopamine in brain tissues. He found that dopamine levels in the basal ganglia, a brain area important for movement, were particularly high. He then showed that giving animals the drug reserpine caused a decrease in dopamine levels and a loss of movement control. These effects were similar to the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. By administering to these animals L-Dopa, which is the precursor of dopamine, he could alleviate the symptoms. These findings led other doctors to try using L-Dopa in patients with Parkinson's disease, and it was found to alleviate some of the symptoms in the early stages of the disease. L-Dopa is still the basis for most commonly used means of treating Parkinson's disease.

Carlson collaborated with the drug company Astra AB (now AstraZeneca) during the 1970s and the 1980s. He and his colleagues were able to derive the first marketed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), zimelidine, from brompheniramine. Zimelidine was later withdrawn from the market due to rare cases of Guillain–Barré syndrome, but Carlson's research paved the way for fluoxetine (Prozac), one of the most widely used prescription medicines in the world.

Carlsson was still an active researcher and speaker when he was over 90 years old and, together with his daughter Lena, he worked on OSU6162, a dopamine stabilizer which alleviates symptoms of post-stroke fatigue.

Honours and awards

Carlsson's research on the brain's chemical signals and the resulting treatment for Parkinson's disease earned him the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with Paul Greengard and Eric R. Kandel. He won many other awards including Israel's Wolf Prize in Medicine (1979), the Japan Prize (1994), and Italy's Feltrinelli Prize (1999). He was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1975. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Southern California in 2007.

Personal life

Carlsson married Ulla-Lisa Christoffersson in 1945 and they had three sons and two daughters. His daughter Maria was his lab manager and his daughter Lena was one of his collaborators.

He opposed the fluoridation of drinking water in Sweden. He was a vocal opponent of homeopathy and worked to prevent homeopathic preparations from being classified as medication in Sweden.

Carlsson died on 29 June 2018, at the age of 95.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-14 15:17:36

2051) Paul Greengard

Gist:

Work

The nervous systems of people and animals consist of many different cells. Between the cells, signals are conveyed by special substances, known as signal substances, through contacts or synapses. At the end of the 1960s, Paul Greengard clarified how several different signal substances work. Signal substances first influence a receiver or receptor on the surface of the cells. As a result certain protein molecules are transformed through the addition or removal of phosphate groups. This regulates various functions in the cells.

Summary

Paul Greengard (born December 11, 1925, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died April 13, 2019, New York, New York) was an American neurobiologist who, along with Arvid Carlsson and Eric Kandel, was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of how dopamine and other neurotransmitters work in the nervous system.

After receiving a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1953, Greengard became director of the biochemistry department at Geigy Research Laboratories (1959–67) in Ardsley, New York, and held professorships at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1961–70) and Yale University (1968–83). In 1983 he became professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at Rockefeller University.

When Greengard began his prizewinning work in the late 1960s, scientists recognized dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin as key neurotransmitters in a signaling process called slow synaptic transmission. Greengard showed that slow synaptic transmission involves a chemical reaction called protein phosphorylation; in that reaction a phosphate molecule is linked to protein, changing the protein’s function. Greengard worked out the signal transduction pathway that begins with dopamine. When dopamine attaches to receptors in a neuron’s outer membrane, it causes a rise in a second messenger, cyclic AMP. This molecule, in turn, activates an enzyme that adds phosphate molecules to other proteins in the neuron. Protein phosphorylation can affect the neuron in different ways, including its sensitivity to being triggered to fire off nerve signals. Greengard’s work helped provide a better understanding of certain neurological and psychiatric disorders and aided in the development of new drugs for their treatment.

Details

Paul Greengard (December 11, 1925 – April 13, 2019) was an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the molecular and cellular function of neurons. In 2000, Greengard, Arvid Carlsson and Eric Kandel were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system. He was Vincent Astor Professor at Rockefeller University, and served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Cure Alzheimer's Fund, as well as the Scientific Council of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. He was married to artist Ursula von Rydingsvard.

Biography

Greengard was born in New York City, the son of Pearl (née Meister) and Benjamin Greengard, a vaudeville comedian. His older sister was actress Irene Kane, who later became a writer by the name of Chris Chase; she died in 2013, aged 89. Their mother died in childbirth and their father remarried in 1927. The Greengard siblings' parents were Jewish, but their stepmother was Episcopalian. He and his sister were "brought up in the Christian tradition".

During World War II, he served in the United States Navy as an electronics technician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on an early warning system against Japanese kamikaze planes. After World War II, he attended Hamilton College where he graduated in 1948 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics. He decided against graduate school in physics because most post-war physics research was focusing on nuclear weapons, and instead became interested in biophysics.

Greengard began his graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in the lab of Haldan Keffer Hartline. Inspired by a lecture by Alan Hodgkin, Greengard began work on the molecular and cellular function of neurons. He received his PhD in 1953 and began postdoctoral work at the University of London, Cambridge University, and the University of Amsterdam. Greengard then became director of the Department of Biochemistry at the Geigy Research Laboratories.

After leaving Geigy in 1967, he worked briefly at Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Vanderbilt University before taking a position as Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Yale University. In 1983 he joined the faculty of The Rockefeller University. Greengard was a member of the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute. He was the acting chairman of the Fisher Center for Alzheimer's Research Foundation and served on the board of the Michael Stern Parkinson's Research Foundation, which later merged with The Michael J. Fox Foundation. Both internationally renowned foundations support the research conducted in the Greengard laboratory at The Rockefeller University.

He died on April 13, 2019.

Research

Greengard's research focused on events inside the neuron caused by neurotransmitters. Specifically, Greengard and his fellow researchers studied the behavior of second messenger cascades that transform the docking of a neurotransmitter with a receptor into permanent changes in the neuron. In a series of experiments, Greengard and his colleagues showed that when dopamine interacts with a receptor on the cell membrane of a neuron, it causes an increase in cyclic AMP inside the cell. This increase of cyclic AMP, in turn activates a protein called protein kinase A, which turns other proteins on or off by adding phosphate groups in a reaction known as phosphorylation. The proteins activated by phosphorylation can then perform a number of changes in the cell: transcribing DNA to make new proteins, moving more receptors to the synapse (and thus increasing the neuron's sensitivity), or moving ion channels to the cell surface (and thus increasing the cell's excitability). He shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Arvid Carlsson and Eric Kandel for his work on the central regulatory protein DARPP-32.

Family

Greengard had two sons from his first marriage, Claude and Leslie. Claude Greengard holds a PhD in mathematics from UC Berkeley, and is the Founder of Foss Hill Partners. Leslie holds an MD from the Yale School of Medicine and a PhD in computer science from Yale University, and is a professor of mathematics and computer science at and former director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU, a winner of the Steele Prize for a seminal contribution to research, a recipient of both a Packard Foundation Fellowship and an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and a member of both the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

In 1985, Greengard married sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard.

Discrimination complaints

In February 2018, a federal jury in the Southern District of New York found The Rockefeller University liable for discrimination based on race and national origin that occurred in 2007 in the lab of, and under the supervision of, Greengard.

Pearl Meister Greengard Prize

Paul Greengard used his Nobel Prize honorarium to help fund the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize, an award for women scientists. The award is named after his mother, who died during childbirth. It was established in 2004 to shine a spotlight on exceptional women in science, since, as Greengard observed, "[women] are not yet receiving awards and honors at a level commensurate with their achievements." The annual prize is awarded to an outstanding woman conducting biomedical research.

Jai Ganesh · Yesterday 16:06:46

2052) Eric Kandel

Gist:

Life

Eric Kandel was born in Vienna, Austria, where he lived until his family emigrated to New York in 1939 to escape the Nazi regime. He studied history and literature at Harvard University, before becoming interested in psychoanalysis, learning and memory. At New York University medical school he turned to the biological basis of the mind, and also met his future wife Denise Bystryn. Kandel has been a professor at Columbia University since 1974. Kandel has a keen interest in art as well as science, and published a book in 2012 titled The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present.

Work

The brain is made up of many nerve cells, which communicate by sending electrical and chemical signals to each other. These signals control our bodies and behaviour. Eric Kandel studied how memories are stored by these nerve cells. His breakthrough came in 1970 while he was at New York University studying a marine snail with a simple nervous system. Kandel found that as the snail learned, chemical signals changed the structure of the connections between cells, known as synapses, where the signals are sent and received. He went on to show that short-term and long-term memories are formed by different signals. This is true in all animals that learn, from molluscs to man.

Summary

Eric Kandel (born November 7, 1929, Vienna, Austria) is an Austrian-born American neurobiologist who, with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2000 for discovering the central role synapses play in memory and learning.

Kandel received a medical degree from New York University’s School of Medicine in 1956. Following residency in psychiatry and employment at Harvard University, he served as associate professor at New York University (1965–74). Beginning in 1974, Kandel held a series of professorships at Columbia University, where he also directed its Center for Neurobiology and Behavior until 1983. In 1984 he became an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Kandel’s award-winning research centred on the sea slug Apylsia, which has relatively few nerve cells, many of them very large and easy to study. The sea slug also has a protective reflex to guard its gills, which Kandel used to study the basic learning mechanisms. These experiments, combined with his later research on mice, established that memory is centred on the synapses, as changes in synaptic function form different types of memory. Kandel showed that weak stimuli give rise to certain chemical changes in synapses; these changes are the basis for short-term memory, which lasts minutes to hours. Stronger stimuli cause different synaptic changes, which result in a form of long-term memory that can remain for weeks.

Kandel’s books included The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain: From Vienna 1900 to the Present (2012) and The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves (2018). In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2006) was an autobiography.

Details

Eric Richard Kandel (born Erich Richard Kandel, November 7, 1929) is an Austrian-born American medical doctor who specialized in psychiatry, a neuroscientist and a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. He was a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard.

He is a Senior Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was also the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, which is now the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University. He currently serves on the Scientific Council of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. Kandel's popularized account chronicling his life and research, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, was awarded the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.

Early years

Eric's mother, Charlotte Zimels, was born in 1897 in Kolomyia, Pokuttya (modern Ukraine). She came from an Ashkenazi Jewish family. At that time Kolomyya was part of Austria-Hungary. His father, Hermann Kandel, was born in 1898 in Olesko, Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungary). At the beginning of World War I, his parents moved to Vienna, Austria, where they met and married in 1923.

Eric Kandel was born on November 7, 1929, in Vienna. Shortly after, Eric's father established a toy store. Although thoroughly assimilated and acculturated, the family sensed the Nazi danger and, unlike others, left Austria after the country had been annexed by Germany in March 1938 at great expense. As a result of Aryanization (Arisierung), attacks on Jews had escalated and Jewish property was being confiscated. When Eric was 9, he and his brother Ludwig, 14, boarded the Gerolstein at Antwerp, Belgium, and joined their uncle in Brooklyn on May 11, 1939, to be followed later by his parents.

After arriving in the United States and settling in Brooklyn, Kandel was tutored by his grandfather in Judaic studies and was accepted at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, from which he graduated in 1944. He attended Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School in the New York City school system.

Kandel's undergraduate major at Harvard was History and Literature. He wrote an undergraduate honors thesis on "The Attitude Toward National Socialism of Three German Writers: Carl Zuckmayer, Hans Carossa, and Ernst Jünger". While at Harvard, a place where psychology was dominated by the work of B. F. Skinner, Kandel became interested in learning and memory. However, while Skinner championed a strict separation of psychology, as its own level of discourse, from biological considerations such as neurology, Kandel's work is essentially centered on an explanation of the relationships between psychology and neurology.

The world of neuroscience was opened up to Kandel when he met Anna Kris, whose parents Ernst Kris and Marianne Rie were psychoanalysts. Sigmund Freud, a Vienna-based pioneer in revealing the importance of unconscious neural processes, was at the root of Kandel's interest in the biology of motivation and unconscious and conscious memory.

Medical school and early research

In 1952 he started at the New York University Medical School. By graduation he was firmly interested in the biological basis of the mind. During this time he met his future wife, Denise Bystryn. Kandel was first exposed to research in Harry Grundfest's laboratory at Columbia University. Grundfest was known for using the oscilloscope to demonstrate that conduction velocity during an action potential depends on axon diameter. The researchers Kandel interacted with were contemplating the technical challenges of intracellular recordings of the electrical activity of the relatively small neurons of the vertebrate brain.

After starting his neurobiological work in the difficult thicket of the electrophysiology of the cerebral cortex, Kandel was impressed by the progress that had been made by Stephen Kuffler using a much more experimentally accessible system: neurons isolated from marine invertebrates. After becoming aware of Kuffler's work in 1955, Kandel graduated from medical school and learned from Stanley Crain how to make microelectrodes that could be used for intracellular recordings of crayfish giant axons.

Karl Lashley, a well-known American neuropsychologist, had tried but failed to identify an anatomical locus for memory storage in the cortex of the brain. When Kandel joined the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the US National Institutes of Health in 1957, William Beecher Scoville and Brenda Milner had recently described the patient HM, who had lost the ability to form new memories after removal of his hippocampus. Kandel took on the task of performing electrophysiological recordings from hippocampal pyramidal neurons. Working with Alden Spencer, he found electrophysiological evidence for action potentials in the dendritic trees of hippocampal neurons. The team also noticed the spontaneous pacemaker-like activity of these neurons, as well as a robust recurrent inhibition in the hippocampus. They provided the first intracellular records of the electrical activity that underlies the epileptic spike (the intracellular paroxysmal depolarizing shift) and the epileptic runs of spikes (the intracellular sustained depolarization). But, with respect to memory, there was nothing in the general electrophysiological properties of hippocampal neurons that suggested why the hippocampus was special for explicit memory storage.

Kandel began to realize that memory storage must rely on modifications in the synaptic connections between neurons and that the complex connectivity of the hippocampus did not provide the best system for study of the detailed function of synapses. Kandel was aware that comparative studies of behavior, such as those by Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch had revealed that simple forms of learning were found even in very simple animals. Kandel felt it would be productive to select a simple animal model that would facilitate electrophysiological analysis of the synaptic changes involved in learning and memory storage. He believed that, ultimately, the results would be found to be applicable to humans. This decision was not without risk: many senior biologists and psychologists believed that nothing useful could be learned about human memory by studying invertebrate physiology.

In 1962, after completing his residency in psychiatry, Kandel went to Paris to learn about the marine mollusk Aplysia californica from Ladislav Tauc. Kandel had realized that simple forms of learning such as habituation, sensitization, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning could readily be studied with ganglia isolated from Aplysia. "While recording the behavior of a single cell in a ganglion, one nerve axon pathway to the ganglion could be stimulated weakly electrically as a conditioned [tactile] stimulus, while another pathway was stimulated as an unconditioned [pain] stimulus, following the exact protocol used for classical conditioning with natural stimuli in intact animals."[citation needed] Electrophysiological changes resulting from the combined stimuli could then be traced to specific synapses. In 1965 Kandel published his initial results, including a form of presynaptic potentiation that seemed to correspond to a simple form of learning.

Faculty member at New York University Medical School

Kandel took a position in the Departments of Physiology and Psychiatry at the New York University Medical School, eventually forming the Division of Neurobiology and Behavior. Working with Irving Kupferman and Harold Pinsker, he developed protocols for demonstrating simple forms of learning by intact Aplysia. In particular, the researchers showed that the now famous gill-withdrawal reflex, by which the slug protects its tender gill tissue from danger, was sensitive to both habituation and sensitization. By 1971 Tom Carew had joined the research group and helped extend the work from studies restricted to short-term memory to experiments that included physiological processes required for long-term memory.

By 1981, laboratory members including Terry Walters, Tom Abrams, and Robert Hawkins had been able to extend the Aplysia system into the study of classical conditioning, a finding that helped close the apparent gap between the simple forms of learning often associated with invertebrates and more complex types of learning more often recognized in vertebrates. Along with the fundamental behavioral studies, other work in the lab traced the neuronal circuits of sensory neurons, interneurons, and motor neurons involved in the learned behaviors. This allowed analysis of the specific synaptic connections that are modified by learning in the intact animals. The results from Kandel's laboratory provided solid evidence for the mechanistic basis of learning as "a change in the functional effectiveness of previously existing excitatory connections." Kandel's winning of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was a result of his work with Aplysia on the biological mechanisms of memory storage.

Molecular changes during learning

Starting in 1966 James Schwartz collaborated with Kandel on a biochemical analysis of changes in neurons associated with learning and memory storage. By this time it was known that long-term memory, unlike short-term memory, involved the synthesis of new proteins. By 1972 they had evidence that the second messenger molecule cyclic AMP (cAMP) was produced in Aplysia ganglia under conditions that cause short-term memory formation (sensitization). In 1974 Kandel moved his lab to Columbia University and became founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior. It was soon found that the neurotransmitter serotonin, acting to produce the second messenger cAMP, is involved in the molecular basis of sensitization of the gill-withdrawal reflex. By 1980, collaboration with Paul Greengard resulted in demonstration that cAMP-dependent protein kinase, also known as protein kinase A (PKA), acted in this biochemical pathway in response to elevated levels of cAMP. Steven Siegelbaum identified a potassium channel that could be regulated by PKA, coupling serotonin's effects to altered synaptic electrophysiology.

In 1983 Kandel helped form the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute at Columbia devoted to molecular neural science. The Kandel lab then sought to identify proteins that had to be synthesized to convert short-term memories into long-lasting memories. One of the nuclear targets for PKA is the transcriptional control protein CREB (cAMP response element binding protein). In collaboration with David Glanzman and Craig Bailey, Kandel identified CREB as being a protein involved in long-term memory storage. One result of CREB activation is an increase in the number of synaptic connections. Thus, short-term memory had been linked to functional changes in existing synapses, while long-term memory was associated with a change in the number of synaptic connections.

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