crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-20 22:28:28

1438) Aaron Klug

Summary

Aaron Klug (born August 11, 1926, Želva, Lithuania—died November 20, 2018) was a Lithuanian-born British chemist who was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his investigations of the three-dimensional structure of viruses and other particles that are combinations of nucleic acids and proteins and for the development of crystallographic electron microscopy.

Klug was taken by his parents from Lithuania to South Africa when he was three years old. He entered the University of the Witwatersrand at Johannesburg intending to study medicine, but he graduated with a science degree. He then began a doctoral program in crystallography at the University of Cape Town but left with a master’s degree upon receiving a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed his doctorate in 1953.

Klug then accepted a research fellowship at Birkbeck College of the University of London, undertaking the study of the structure of tobacco mosaic virus and other viruses. His discoveries were made in conjunction with his own development of the techniques of crystallographic electron microscopy, whereby series of electron micrographs, taken of two-dimensional crystals from different angles, can be combined to produce three-dimensional images of particles. Klug’s method has been widely used to study proteins and viruses. In 1958 he became director of the Virus Structure Research Group at Birkbeck. In 1962 (at the invitation of Francis Crick, who shared a Nobel Prize that year) Klug returned to Cambridge as a staff member of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. From 1986 to 1996 he was director of the lab, and he subsequently became emeritus scientist there; he retired in 2012. During this time he also served as president of the Royal Society (1995–2000). Klug was knighted in 1988.

Details

Sir Aaron Klug (11 August 1926 – 20 November 2018) was a British biophysicist and chemist. He was a winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.

Early life and education

Klug was born in Želva, in Lithuania, to Jewish parents Lazar, a cattleman, and Bella (née Silin) Klug, with whom he emigrated to South Africa at the age of two. He was educated at Durban High School. Paul de Kruif's 1926 book, Microbe Hunters, aroused his interest in microbiology.

Klug was part of the Hashomer Hatzair Jewish Zionist youth movement in South Africa.

He started to study microbiology, but then moved into physics and maths, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. He studied physics under Reginald W. James and obtained his Master of Science degree at the University of Cape Town. He was awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, which enabled him to move to England, completing his PhD in research physics at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1953.

Career and research

Following his PhD, Klug moved to Birkbeck College in the University of London in late 1953, and started working with virologist Rosalind Franklin in the lab of crystallographer John Bernal. This experience aroused a lifelong interest in the study of viruses, and during his time there he made discoveries in the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. In 1962 he moved to the newly built Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. Over the following decade Klug used methods from X-ray diffraction, microscopy and structural modelling to develop crystallographic electron microscopy in which a sequence of two-dimensional images of crystals taken from different angles are combined to produce three-dimensional images of the target. He studied the structure of transfer RNA, and found what is known as zinc fingers as well as the neurofibrils in Alzheimer's disease.

Also in 1962, Klug became a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was later made an Honorary Fellow of the College.

Between 1986 and 1996, Klug was director of the LMB. He served on the Advisory Council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering. He also served on the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute. He and Dai Rees approached the Wellcome Trust to found the Wellcome Sanger Institute, which was a key player in the Human Genome Project.

Awards and honours

Klug was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1981. He was knighted by Elizabeth II in 1988.[11] In 1969 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), the oldest national scientific institution in the world. He was elected its President (PRS) from 1995 to 2000. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1995 – as is customary for Presidents of the Royal Society. His certificate of election to the Royal Society reads:

Mathematical physicist and crystallographer distinguished for his contributions to molecular biology, especially the structure of viruses. Development of a theory of simultaneous temperature and phase changes in steels led him to apply related mathematical methods to the problem of diffusion and chemical reactions of gases in thin layers of haemoglobin solutions and in red blood cells. Then the late Rosalind Franklin introduced him to the x-ray study of tobacco mosaic virus to which he contributed by his application and further development of Cochran and Crick's theory of diffraction from helical chain molecules. Klug's most important work is concerned with the structure of spherical viruses. Together with D. Caspar he developed a general theory of spherical shells built up of a regular array of asymmetric particles. Klug and his collaborators verified the theory by x-ray and electron microscope studies, thereby revealing new and hitherto unsuspected features of virus structure.

Klug was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

In 2000, Klug received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2005, he was awarded South Africa's Order of Mapungubwe (gold) for exceptional achievements in medical science. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci), also in 2005.

In 2013, Israel's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev dedicated their centre for structural biology in Klug's name, Aaron Klug Integrated Centre for Biomolecular Structure. He, his family and the then-British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould, were in attendance. Klug was associated with the university and the town of Be'er Sheva, having visited them numerous times.

Personal life

Klug married Liebe Bobrow in 1948; they had two sons, one of whom predeceased them in 2000. He died on 20 November 2018 in Cambridge.

Though Klug had faced discrimination in South Africa, he remained religious and according to Sydney Brenner, he became more religious in his older age.

Additional Information

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1982 was awarded to Aaron Klug "for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes".

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-21 20:40:17

1439) Sune Bergström

Gist

Prostaglandins are hormone-like substances that control several important processes in the body. They are also active when the body is attacked. In the 1950s Sune Bergström succeeded in producing pure prostaglandins and in determining the chemical structures of two important examples, PGE and PGF. He also showed that these are formed through the conversion of unsaturated fatty acids. Prostaglandins are used as medicines; for example, to trigger contractions during childbirth, induce abortions, or reduce the risk of gastric ulcers during treatment using other pharmaceuticals.

Details

Karl Sune Detlof Bergström (10 January 1916 – 15 August 2004) was a Swedish biochemist. In 1975, he was appointed to the Nobel Foundation Board of Directors in Sweden, and was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University, together with Bengt I. Samuelsson. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane in 1982, for discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related substances.

Bergström was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1965, and its President in 1983. In 1965, he was also elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1966. He was also a member of both the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Bergström was awarded the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh in 1977. In 1985, he was appointed member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the Illis quorum in 1985.

In 1943, Bergström married Maj Gernandt. He had two sons, the businessman Rurik Reenstierna, with Maj Gernandt; and the evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo (winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine). Both sons were born in 1955, and Rurik learned about the existence of his half-brother Svante only around 2004.

Additional Information

Sune K. Bergström (born January 10, 1916, Stockholm, Sweden—died August 15, 2004, Stockholm) was a Swedish biochemist, corecipient with fellow Swede Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson and Englishman John Robert Vane of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. All three were honoured for their isolation, identification, and analysis of prostaglandins, which are biochemical compounds that influence blood pressure, body temperature, allergic reactions, and other physiological phenomena in mammals. Bergström was the first to demonstrate the existence of more than one such compound and to determine the elemental compositions of two of them.

Bergström was educated at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where he was awarded doctoral degrees in medicine and biochemistry in 1944. He held research fellowships at Columbia University and at the University of Basel and then returned to Sweden to accept a professorship of chemistry at the University of Lund.

In 1958 Bergström returned to the Karolinska Institute, where he became dean of the medical faculty in 1963 and rector in 1969. After retiring from teaching in 1981, he continued to conduct research. He was chairman of the Nobel Foundation (1975–87) and chairman of medical research at the World Health Organization (1977–82).

Bergström’s son Svante Pääbo was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research on hominin genomes and human evolution.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-23 16:35:18

1440) Bengt I. Samuelsson

Summary

Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson (born May 21, 1934, Halmstad, Sweden) is a Swedish biochemist, corecipient with fellow Swede Sune K. Bergström and Englishman John Robert Vane of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. The three scientists were honoured for their isolation, identification, and analysis of numerous prostaglandins, a family of natural compounds that influence blood pressure, body temperature, allergic reactions, and other physiological phenomena in mammals.

Samuelsson graduated from the University of Lund, where Bergström was one of his professors. He continued his studies at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, earning doctorates in biochemistry in 1960 and medicine in 1961. The following year he worked as a research fellow in the chemistry department at Harvard University, subsequently returning to the Karolinska Institute as a member of the faculty the same year. In 1967 Samuelsson taught at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of Stockholm, serving as a professor in veterinary medical chemistry until 1972, when he once again returned to the Karolinska Institute. Samuelsson was a visiting professor at Harvard in 1976 and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. The next year he succeeded Bergström as dean of the medical faculty at the Karolinska Institute, where in 1983 he was named rector, a position he held until 1995.

Samuelsson joined Bergström in research on prostaglandins, and in 1962 they became the first to determine the molecular structure of a prostaglandin. In 1964 they announced that prostaglandins are derived from arachidonic acid, an unsaturated fatty acid that is found in certain meats and vegetable oils. Samuelsson subsequently determined how arachidonic acid combines with oxygen to eventually form prostaglandins. In the 1970s he discovered several new prostaglandins, including thromboxane, which is involved in blood clotting and the contraction of blood vessels. Samuelsson’s later research explored leukotrienes, a group of lipids closely related to prostaglandins that are involved in mediating inflammation. In the 1980s and 1990s he investigated the affects of drugs on leukotriene pathways and studied novel agents capable of inhibiting the actions of leukotrienes.

Samuelsson, Bergström, and Vane received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1977. Samuelsson published numerous papers and books, among the latter of which were Leukotrienes and Other Lipoxygenase Products (1982; cowritten with Italian biochemist Rodolfo Paoletti), Prostaglandins and Related Compounds (1987), and Trends in Eicosanoid Biology (1990).

Details

Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson (born 21 May 1934) is a Swedish biochemist. He shared with Sune K. Bergström and John R. Vane the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related substances.

Education and early life

Samuelsson was born in Halmstad in southwest Sweden and studied at Stockholm University, where he became a professor in 1967.

Research and career

Discussing the role of prostaglandins in the body, Samuelsson explained, "It's a control system for the cells that participates in many biological functions. There are endless possibilities of manipulating this system in drug development."

His research interests were originally in cholesterol metabolism with importance to reaction mechanisms. Following the structural work on prostaglandins along with Sune Bergström he was interested mainly in the transformation products of arachidonic acid. This has led to the identification of endoperoxides, thromboxanes and the leukotrienes, and his group has chiefly been involved in studying the chemistry, biochemistry and biology of these compounds and their function in biological control systems. This research has implications in numerous clinical areas, especially in thrombosis, inflammation, and allergy.

This field has grown enormously since those days. Between 1981 and 1995 about three thousand papers per year were published that specifically used the expression "prostaglandins," or related terms such as "prostacyclins," "leukotrienes," and "thromboxanes," in their labels and titles.

Bengt Samuelsson has served as a director on the boards of Pharmacia AB, NicOx SA and Schering AG and is an advisor to the venture capital fund HealthCap.

Awards and honors

In 1975, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Sune K. Bergström. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1990.

Additional Information

Prostaglandins are hormone-like substances that control several important processes in the body. They are also active when the body is attacked. During the 1960s and 1970s Bengt Samuelsson showed in detail how prostaglandins form from unsaturated fatty acids and how they are converted. He also mapped different types of prostaglandins, such as endoperoxides, thromboxanes, and leukotrienes. Samuelson’s research has been important in the development of drugs used to treat many ailments, such as blood clots, inflammation, and allergies.

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Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-24 17:36:45

1441) John Vane

Summary

Sir John Robert Vane (born March 29, 1927, Tardebigg, Worcestershire, England—died November 19, 2004, Farnborough, Hampshire) was an English biochemist who, with Sune K. Bergström and Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1982 for the isolation, identification, and analysis of prostaglandins. These are biochemical compounds that influence blood pressure, body temperature, allergic reactions, and other physiological phenomena in mammals.

Vane graduated from the University of Birmingham in 1946 and earned a doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1953. He spent several years on the faculty of Yale University (1953–55) in the United States before returning to England to join the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences of the University of London. In 1973 he became research director of the Wellcome Research Laboratories in Beckenham, Kent, a post he held until 1985. In 1986 Vane founded the William Harvey Research Institute, attached to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, which funded cardiovascular research. He remained with the institute, in various positions, until his death.

As part of his Nobel Prize-winning work, Vane demonstrated that aspirin inhibits the formation of prostaglandins associated with pain, fever, and inflammation, thus providing a physiological rationale for the effectiveness of the world’s most widely used drug. He also discovered prostacyclin, an important prostaglandin that plays a vital role in the process of blood coagulation.

Vane, the recipient of numerous honours, was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982. He was knighted in 1984.

Details

Sir John Robert Vane (29 March 1927 – 19 November 2004) was a British pharmacologist who was instrumental in the understanding of how aspirin produces pain-relief and anti-inflammatory effects and his work led to new treatments for heart and blood vessel disease and introduction of ACE inhibitors. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982 along with Sune Bergström and Bengt Samuelsson for "their discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related biologically active substances".

Education and early life

Born in Tardebigge, Worcestershire, John Vane was one of three children and grew up in suburban Birmingham. His father, Maurice Vane, was the son of Jewish Russian immigrants and his mother, Frances Vane, came from a Worcestershire farming family. He attended a local state school from age 5, before moving on to King Edward's School in Edgbaston, Birmingham. An early interest in chemistry was to prove the inspiration for studying the subject at the University of Birmingham in 1944.

During his undergraduate studies, Vane became disenchanted with chemistry but still enjoyed experimentation. When Maurice Stacey, the Professor of Chemistry at Birmingham, was asked by Harold Burn to recommend a student to go to Oxford and study pharmacology, Vane jumped at the chance and moved to Burn's department in 1946. Under Burn's guidance, Vane found motivation and enthusiasm for pharmacology, writing: "[the] laboratory gradually became the most active and important centre for pharmacological research in the U.K. and the main school for training of young pharmacologists." Vane completed a Bachelor of Science degree in pharmacology and briefly went to work at the University of Sheffield, before coming back to Oxford to complete his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1953[4] supervised by Geoffrey Dawes.

Career and research

After completing his DPhil, Vane worked as an assistant professor the Department of Pharmacology at Yale University before moving back to the United Kingdom to take up a post as a senior lecturer in the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of London in 1955.

University of London

Vane held a post at the University of London for 18 years, progressing from senior lecturer to Professor of Experimental Pharmacology in 1966 (at the Royal College of Surgeons). During that time he developed certain bioassay techniques and focussed his research on both angiotensin-converting enzyme and the actions of aspirin, eventually leading to the publication with Priscilla Piper of the relationship between aspirin and the prostaglandins that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982.

Wellcome Foundation

In 1973, Vane left his academic post at the Royal College of Surgeons and took up the position as Director of Research at the Wellcome Foundation, taking a number of his colleagues with him who went on to form the Prostaglandin Research department. Under the leadership of Salvador Moncada, this group continued important research that eventually led to the discovery of prostacyclin.

Return to academia

In 1985, Vane returned to academic life and founded the William Harvey Research Institute at the Medical College of St Bartholomew's Hospital (now Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry. At the William Harvey Research Institute, Vane's work focused on selective inhibitors of COX-2, and the interplay between nitric oxide and endothelin in the regulation of vascular function.

Awards and honours

Vane was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1974. He was also awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Jagiellonian University Medical College (formerly Copernicus Academy of Medicine) in 1977, Paris Descartes University in 1978, Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1980 and the University of Aberdeen in 1983. He was awarded the Lasker Award in 1977 for the discovery of prostacyclin and was knighted in 1984 for his contributions to science. In 2000, Vane received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Personal life

John Vane married, in 1948, (Elizabeth) Daphne Page and had 2 daughters. He died on 19 November 2004 in Princess Royal University Hospital, Kent, from long-term complications arising from leg and hip fractures he sustained in May of that year. Lady Vane died in 2021.

Additional Information

Prostaglandins are hormone-like substances that govern several important processes in the body. They also come into play when the body is under attack. In 1971 John Vane showed that acetylsalicylic acid, a substance found in pain-relieving and fever-reducing medications like aspirin, works by inhibiting the formation of prostglandins. In 1976 Vane discovered the prostacyclin prostglandin, which expands the smallest blood vessels and, unlike certain other prostglandins, inhibits the formation of blood particles called platelets that cause blood to coagulate.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-25 18:17:29

1442) William Alfred Fowler

Summary

William Fowler (born August 9, 1911, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died March 14, 1995, Pasadena, California) was an American nuclear astrophysicist who, with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 for his role in formulating a widely accepted theory of element generation.

Fowler studied at the Ohio State University (B.S., 1933) and at the California Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1936), where he became an assistant professor in 1939 and a full professor in 1946. His theory of element generation, which he developed with Sir Fred Hoyle, Margaret Burbidge, and Geoffrey Burbidge in the 1950s, suggests that in stellar evolution elements are synthesized progressively from light elements to heavy ones, in nuclear reactions that also produce light and heat. With the collapse of more massive stars, the explosive rebound known as supernova occurs; according to theory, this phase makes possible the synthesis of the heaviest elements.

Fowler also worked in radio astronomy, proposing with Hoyle that the cores of radio galaxies are collapsed “superstars” emitting strong radio waves and that quasars are larger versions of these collapsed superstars.

Fowler received the National Medal of Science (1974) and the Legion of Honour (1989).

Details

William Alfred Fowler (August 9, 1911 – March 14, 1995) was an American nuclear physicist, later astrophysicist, who, with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is known for his theoretical and experimental research into nuclear reactions within stars and the energy elements produced in the process and was one of the authors of the influential B2FH paper.

Early life

On 9 August 1911, Fowler was born in Pittsburgh. Fowler's parents were John MacLeod Fowler and Jennie Summers Watson. Fowler was the eldest of his siblings, Arthur and Nelda.

The family moved to Lima, Ohio, a steam railroad town, when Fowler was two years old. Growing up near the Pennsylvania Railroad yard influenced Fowler's interest in locomotives. In 1973, he travelled to the Soviet Union just to observe the steam engine that powered the Trans-Siberian Railway plying the nearly 2,500-kilometre (1,600 mi) route that connects Khabarovsk and Moscow.

Education

In 1933, Fowler graduated from the Ohio State University, where he was a member of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity. In 1936, Fowler received a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

Career

In 1936, Fowler became a research fellow at Caltech. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1938. In 1939, Fowler became an assistant professor at Caltech.

Although an experimental nuclear physicist, Fowler's most famous paper was his collaboration with Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars" Significantly, Margaret Burbidge was first author, Geoffrey Burbidge second, Fowler third, and Cambridge cosmologist Fred Hoyle. That 1957 paper in Reviews of Modern Physics categorized most nuclear processes for origin of all but the lightest chemical elements in stars. It is widely known as the B2FH paper. Though the theory of Stellar Nucleosynthesis established in the paper was later cited by the Nobel Committee as the reason for his 1983 Nobel in Physics, Margaret Burbidge did not share in the award.

In 1942, Fowler became an associate professor at Caltech. In 1946, Fowler became a Professor at Caltech. Fowler, along with Lee A. DuBridge, Max Mason, Linus Pauling, and Bruce H. Sage, was awarded the Medal for Merit in 1948 by President Harry S. Truman.

Fowler succeeded Charles Lauritsen as director of the W. K. Kellogg Radiation Laboratory at Caltech, and was himself later succeeded by Steven E. Koonin. Fowler was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Gerald Ford.

Fowler was Guggenheim Fellow at St John's College, Cambridge in 1962–63. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1962, won the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society in 1963, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965, won the Vetlesen Prize in 1973, the Eddington Medal in 1978, the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1979, and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 (shared with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar) for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe .

Fowler's doctoral students at Caltech included Donald D. Clayton.

Personal life

A lifelong fan of steam locomotives, Fowler owned several working models of various sizes.

Fowler's first wife was Adriane Fay (née Olmsted) Fowler (1912–1988). They had two daughters, Mary Emily and Martha.

In December 1989, Fowler married Mary Dutcher (1919–2019), an artist, in Pasadena, California. On 11 March 1995, Fowler died from kidney failure in Pasadena, California. He was 83.

Additional Information

Stars in the universe form from clouds of gas and dust. When these clouds are pulled together by gravitational force, energy is released in the form of heat. And when a high enough temperature is reached, reactions among the atomic nuclei in the star’s interior begin. These reactions are what causes radiation from stars. In the 1950s William Fowler showed how these nuclear reactions also account for how various elements are formed. These processes have created the elements that make up our earth and other heavenly bodies in the universe.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-26 20:24:16

1443) Henry Taube

Gist

Most atoms can absorb or emit electrons and become electrically charged ions. Several metals can form ions with different charges. For example, chromium and cobalt can emit two or three electrons. In a water solution metallic ions can link up with other ions and molecules and form complexes. In these complexes, electrons can change from a metallic atom of one type to another. Around 1950 Henry Taube showed that this does not happen through a direct transition; instead a molecule serves as a bridge between the metallic atoms.

Summary

Henry Taube (born Nov. 30, 1915, Neudorf, Sask., Can.—died Nov. 16, 2005, Stanford, Calif., U.S.) was a Canadian-born American chemist, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1983 for his extensive research into the properties and reactions of dissolved inorganic substances, particularly oxidation-reduction processes involving the ions of metallic elements.

Taube was educated at the University of Saskatchewan (B.S., 1935; M.S., 1937) and the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., 1940). He later taught at Cornell University (1941–46) and the University of Chicago (1946–61) before joining the faculty of Stanford University in 1962; he was named professor emeritus in 1986. Taube became a U.S. citizen in 1942.

In the late 1940s Taube carried out experiments with isotopes to show that in water solution the ions of metals form chemical bonds with several molecules of water and that the stability and geometric arrangement of the resulting hydrates, or coordination compounds, vary widely, depending on the identity and oxidation state of the ion. He also helped develop other techniques for studying such substances, and he devised an interpretation of their properties in terms of their electronic configurations. Analogous coordination compounds form in the presence of ammonia, chloride ions, or numerous other chemical species, which are called ligands when they engage in these reactions.

The oxidation or reduction of one metal ion by another involves their exchange of one or more electrons. Many such reactions occur rapidly in aqueous solution despite the fact that the stable shells of water molecules or other ligands should keep the two ions from getting close enough for electron exchange to occur directly. Taube showed that, in an intermediate stage of the reaction, a chemical bond must form between one of the ions and a ligand that is still bonded to the other. This ligand acts as a temporary bridge between the two ions, and its bond to the original ion can later break in such a way as to effect—indirectly—the electron transfer that completes the reaction. Taube’s findings have been applied in selecting metallic compounds for use as catalysts, pigments, and superconductors and in understanding the function of metal ions as constituents of certain enzymes.

Taube was the recipient of numerous honours, including two Guggenheim fellowships (1949, 1955) and the National Medal of Science (1976). In 1959 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Details

Henry Taube, (November 30, 1915 – November 16, 2005) was a Canadian-born American chemist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his work in the mechanisms of electron-transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes." He was the second Canadian-born chemist to win the Nobel Prize, and remains the only Saskatchewanian-born Nobel laureate. Taube completed his undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Saskatchewan, and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. After finishing graduate school, Taube worked at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and Stanford University.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Taube also received many other major scientific awards, including the Priestley Medal in 1985 and two Guggenheim Fellowships early in his career (1949 and 1955), as well as numerous honorary doctorates. His research focused on redox reactions, transition metals and the use of isotopically labeled compounds to follow reactions. He had over 600 publications including one book, and had mentored over 200 students during his career. Taube and his wife Mary had three children; his son Karl is an anthropologist at the University of California Riverside.

Education

At 12, Taube left his hometown and moved to Regina to attend Luther College where he completed high school. After graduating, Taube stayed at Luther College and worked as laboratory assistant for Paul Liefeld, allowing him to take first year university classes. Taube attended the University of Saskatchewan, receiving his BSc in 1935 and his MSc in 1937. His thesis advisor at the University of Saskatchewan was John Spinks. While at the University of Saskatchewan, Taube studied with Gerhard Herzberg, who would be awarded the 1971 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He moved to University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his PhD studies in 1940. His PhD mentor was William C. Bray. Taube's graduate research focused on the photodecomposition of chlorine dioxide and hydrogen peroxide in solution.

Research and academic career:

Academic posts

After completing his education, Taube remained in the United States, becoming an instructor in chemistry at Berkeley until 1941. He initially wanted to return to Canada to work, but did not receive a response when he applied for jobs at the major Canadian universities. From Berkeley, he served as an instructor and assistant professor at Cornell University until 1946. During World War II, Taube served on the National Defense Research Committee. Taube spent time at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor, associate professor and as a full professor from 1946 to 1961. He served as chair of the chemistry department in Chicago from 1956 to 1959, but did not enjoy administrative work. After leaving Chicago, Taube worked as a professor at Stanford University until 1986, a position that allowed him to focus on research, while also teaching classes at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He became a Professor Emeritus at Stanford in 1986, but he continued to perform research until 2001, and visited his labs every day until his death in 2005. In addition to his academic duties, Taube also served as a consultant at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1956 until the 1970s.

Research interests

Taube's initial research at Cornell University focused on the same areas he studied as a graduate student, oxidizing agents containing oxygen and halogens, and redox reactions featuring these species. He used isotopically labeled oxygen-18 and radioactive chlorine to study these reactions. He was recognized by the American Chemical Society in 1955 for his isotope studies.

Taube's interest in coordination chemistry was sparked when he was chosen to develop a course on advanced inorganic chemistry while at the University of Chicago. He was unable to find much information in the textbooks available at the time. Taube realized that his work on the substitution of carbon in organic reactions could be related to inorganic complexes. In 1952, Taube published a key paper relating the rates of chemical reactions to electronic structure in Chemical Reviews. This research was the first to recognize the correlation between the rate of ligand substitution and the d-electron configuration of the metal. Taube's key discovery was the way molecules build a type of "chemical bridge" rather than simply exchanging electrons, as previously thought. Identifying this intermediate step explained why reactions between similar metals and ions occurred at different rates. His paper in Chemical Reviews was developed while on sabbatical in the late 1940s. An article in Science called this paper "one of the true classics in inorganic chemistry" after his Nobel Prize was announced. Taube researched ruthenium and osmium, both elements have a high capacity for back bonding. This type of electron donation was key when studying the way electrons are transferred between molecules in a chemical reaction.

When looking back on his research, Taube explained that he sometimes had difficulty finding graduate students willing to work on electron transfer reactions, as they preferred to work on more "exciting" projects in his laboratory focusing on the effects of isotopic tracers and kinetics. Taube felt that a "primary flaw" with his correlation between electron configuration and ligand substitution was that it was described mainly in terms of valence bond theory, as crystal field theory and ligand field theory were not well established when he published his work in 1952.

Awards and honors:

Nobel Prize

Taube was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on the mechanisms of electron transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes." He received his award on December 8, 1983, with the presentation speech being delivered by Ingvar Lindqvist of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. Taube's Nobel Lecture was entitled "Electron Transfer between Metal Complexes – Retrospective." His Nobel Prize was the second awarded to a Canadian-born chemist (the first one was William Giauque). His initial paper in Chemical Reviews was 30 years old at the time of his Nobel Prize victory, but the correlation he described between the rate of ligand substitution and electronic configuration for transition metal coordination complexes was still the predominant theory about the reaction chemistry of these compounds. After being awarded the Nobel Prize, Taube noticed a side benefit to the prestigious award – his students paid better attention in class.

Other awards

Taube was accepted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1959. In 1961, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. President Jimmy Carter presented Taube with the 1976 President's National Medal of Science "in recognition of contributions to the understanding of reactivity and reaction mechanisms in inorganic chemistry." He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1981. In 1985, Taube received the American Chemical Society's highest honor, the Priestley Medal, which is awarded to recognize "distinguished services to chemistry". He was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1949 and 1955. In 1965, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. Taube was made an honorary member of the College of Chemists of Catalonia and Beleares (1984), the Canadian Society of Chemists (1986), and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1988). He was also awarded an honorary fellowship in the Royal Society of Chemistry (1989) and the Indian Chemical Society (1989) and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1988. Taube received honorary degrees from many institutions, including the University of Saskatchewan (1973), the University of Chicago (1983), the Polytechnic Institute of New York (1984), the State University of New York Stony Brook (1985), the University of Guelph (1987), Seton Hall University (1988), the Lajos Kossuth University of Debrecen in Hungary (1988) and Northwestern University (1990). A Nobel Laureate Plaza on the University of Saskatchewan's campus in honor of Taube and Gerhard Herzberg was dedicated in 1997.

Personal life

Taube was born November 30, 1915, in Neudorf, Saskatchewan, as the youngest of four boys. His parents were ethnic Germans from Ukraine who had immigrated to Saskatchewan from Ukraine in 1911. Growing up, his first language was Low German. In the 18th century, Catherine the Great encouraged Central European farmers to settle in Russia. As the rights afforded to these settlers by Catherine were gradually diminished, many of the settlers headed to North America, with Saskatchewan offering good farmland, and other incentives for immigrants. Taube reflected fondly on his experiences growing up in Saskatchewan, noting: "Certainly, there is nothing about my first 21 years in Saskatchewan, taken in the context of those times that I would wish to be changed. The advantages that I enjoyed include: the marvelous experience of growing up on a farm, which taught me an appreciation of nature, and taught me also to discipline myself to get necessary jobs done..."

After completing his graduate studies, Taube became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1942. Taube married his wife Mary in 1952. They had three children, Karl, Heinrich, and Linda. His stepdaughter Marianna died of cancer in 1998. When he stopped his active research projects in 2001, Taube continued to be available as a reviewer and consultant, but his main goal was "enjoying life". Away from chemistry, Taube had varied interests including gardening and classical music, mainly opera. In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.

Taube died at his home in Palo Alto, California on November 16, 2005, at the age of 89.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-27 17:13:33

1444) Barbara McClintock

Gist

Life

Barbara McClintock grew up in Connecticut and New York in the United States. Her family had little money, so her interest in research was viewed with skepticism. It was more important for her to marry, her family thought. Despite this, with her father's support, McClintock began studying at Cornell's College of Agriculture in 1919, and her studies are where her interest remained. She never married, choosing to devote her life to research instead. She was shy and anything but a careerist, but at the same time she also realized the importance of what she had achieved, not least of all in her role as an example for other women.

Work

Many characteristics of organisms are determined by heredity– that is, by their genes–which are stored in the chromosomes inside their cells' nuclei. Barbara McClintock studied corn's hereditary characteristics, for example the different colors of its kernels. She studied how these characteristics are passed down through generations and linked this to changes in the plants' chromosomes. During the 1940s and 1950s McClintock proved that genetic elements can sometimes change position on a chromosome and that this causes nearby genes to become active or inactive.

Summary

Barbara McClintock (born June 16, 1902, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.—died September 2, 1992, Huntington, New York) was an American scientist whose discovery in the 1940s and ’50s of mobile genetic elements, or “jumping genes,” won her the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983.

McClintock, whose father was a physician, took great pleasure in science as a child and evidenced early the independence of mind and action that she would exhibit throughout the rest of her life. After attending high school, she enrolled as a biology major at Cornell University in 1919. She received a B.S. in 1923, a master’s degree two years later, and, having specialized in cytology, genetics, and zoology, a Ph.D. in 1927. During graduate school she began the work that would occupy her entire professional life: the chromosomal analysis of corn (maize). She used a microscope and a staining technique that allowed her to examine, identify, and describe individual corn chromosomes.

In 1931 she and a colleague, Harriet Creighton, published “A Correlation of Cytological and Genetical Crossing-over in Zea mays,” a paper that established that chromosomes formed the basis of genetics. Based on her experiments and publications during the 1930s, McClintock was elected vice president of the Genetics Society of America in 1939 and president of the Genetics Society in 1944. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1933 to study in Germany, but she left early because of the rise of Nazism. When she returned to Cornell, her alma mater, she found that the university would not hire a female professor. The Rockefeller Foundation funded her research at Cornell (1934–36) until she was hired by the University of Missouri (1936–41).

In 1941 McClintock moved to Long Island, New York, to work at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she spent the rest of her professional life. In the 1940s, by observing and experimenting with variations in the coloration of kernels of corn, she discovered that genetic information is not stationary. By tracing pigmentation changes in corn and using a microscope to examine that plant’s large chromosomes, she isolated two genes that she called “controlling elements.” These genes controlled the genes that were actually responsible for pigmentation. McClintock found that the controlling elements could move along the chromosome to a different site, and that these changes affected the behaviour of neighbouring genes. She suggested that these transposable elements were responsible for new mutations in pigmentation or other characteristics.

McClintock’s work was ahead of its time and was for many years considered too radical—or was simply ignored—by her fellow scientists. Deeply disappointed with her colleagues, she stopped publishing the results of her work and ceased giving lectures, though she continued doing research. Not until the late 1960s and ’70s, after biologists had determined that the genetic material was DNA, did members of the scientific community begin to verify her early findings. When recognition finally came, McClintock was inundated with awards and honours, most notably the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. She was the first woman to be the sole winner of this award.

Details

Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992) was an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927. There she started her career as the leader of the development of maize cytogenetics, the focus of her research for the rest of her life. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. She developed the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas. One of those ideas was the notion of genetic recombination by crossing-over during meiosis—a mechanism by which chromosomes exchange information. She produced the first genetic map for maize, linking regions of the chromosome to physical traits. She demonstrated the role of the telomere and centromere, regions of the chromosome that are important in the conservation of genetic information. She was recognized as among the best in the field, awarded prestigious fellowships, and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.

During the 1940s and 1950s, McClintock discovered transposons and used it to demonstrate that genes are responsible for turning physical characteristics on and off. She developed theories to explain the suppression and expression of genetic information from one generation of maize plants to the next. Due to skepticism of her research and its implications, she stopped publishing her data in 1953.

Later, she made an extensive study of the cytogenetics and ethnobotany of maize races from South America. McClintock's research became well understood in the 1960s and 1970s, as other scientists confirmed the mechanisms of genetic change and protein expression that she had demonstrated in her maize research in the 1940s and 1950s. Awards and recognition for her contributions to the field followed, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to her in 1983 for the discovery of genetic transposition; as of 2023, she remains the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.

Early life

Barbara McClintock was born Eleanor McClintock on June 16, 1902, in Hartford, Connecticut, the third of four children born to homeopathic physician Thomas Henry McClintock and Sara Handy McClintock. Thomas McClintock was the child of British immigrants. Marjorie, the oldest child, was born in October 1898; Mignon, the second daughter, was born in November 1900. The youngest, Malcolm Rider (called Tom), was born 18 months after Barbara. When she was a young girl, her parents determined that Eleanor, a "feminine" and "delicate" name, was not appropriate for her, and chose Barbara instead. McClintock was an independent child beginning at a very young age, a trait she later identified as her "capacity to be alone". From the age of three until she began school, McClintock lived with an aunt and uncle in Brooklyn, New York, in order to reduce the financial burden on her parents while her father established his medical practice. She was described as a solitary and independent child. She was close to her father, but had a difficult relationship with her mother, tension that began when she was young.

The McClintock family moved to Brooklyn in 1908 and McClintock completed her secondary education there at Erasmus Hall High School; she graduated early in 1919. She discovered her love of science and reaffirmed her solitary personality during high school. She wanted to continue her studies at Cornell University's College of Agriculture. Her mother resisted sending McClintock to college for fear that she would be unmarriageable, a common attitude at the time. McClintock was almost prevented from starting college, but her father allowed her to just before registration began, and she matriculated at Cornell in 1919.

Education and research at Cornell

McClintock began her studies at Cornell's College of Agriculture in 1919. There, she participated in student government and was invited to join a sorority, though she soon realized that she preferred not to join formal organizations. Instead, McClintock took up music, specifically jazz. She studied botany, receiving a BSc in 1923. Her interest in genetics began when she took her first course in that field in 1921. The course was based on a similar one offered at Harvard University, and was taught by C. B. Hutchison, a plant breeder and geneticist. Hutchison was impressed by McClintock's interest, and telephoned to invite her to participate in the graduate genetics course at Cornell in 1922. McClintock pointed to Hutchison's invitation as a catalyst for her interest in genetics: "Obviously, this telephone call cast the die for my future. I remained with genetics thereafter." Although it has been reported that women could not major in genetics at Cornell, and therefore her MS and PhD—earned in 1925 and 1927, respectively—were officially awarded in botany, recent research has revealed that women were permitted to earn graduate degrees in Cornell's Plant Breeding Department during the time that McClintock was a student at Cornell.

During her graduate studies and postgraduate appointment as a botany instructor, McClintock was instrumental in assembling a group that studied the new field of cytogenetics in maize. This group brought together plant breeders and cytologists, and included Marcus Rhoades, future Nobel laureate George Beadle, and Harriet Creighton. Rollins A. Emerson, head of the Plant Breeding Department, supported these efforts, although he was not a cytologist himself.

She also worked as a research assistant for Lowell Fitz Randolph and then for Lester W. Sharp, both Cornell botanists.

McClintock's cytogenetic research focused on developing ways to visualize and characterize maize chromosomes. This particular part of her work influenced a generation of students, as it was included in most textbooks. She also developed a technique using carmine staining to visualize maize chromosomes, and showed for the first time the morphology of the 10 maize chromosomes. This discovery was made because she observed cells from the microspore as opposed to the root tip. By studying the morphology of the chromosomes, McClintock was able to link specific chromosome groups of traits that were inherited together. Marcus Rhoades noted that McClintock's 1929 Genetics paper on the characterization of triploid maize chromosomes triggered scientific interest in maize cytogenetics, and attributed to her 10 of the 17 significant advances in the field that were made by Cornell scientists between 1929 and 1935.

In 1930, McClintock was the first person to describe the cross-shaped interaction of homologous chromosomes during meiosis. The following year, McClintock and Creighton proved the link between chromosomal crossover during meiosis and the recombination of genetic traits. They observed how the recombination of chromosomes seen under a microscope correlated with new traits. Until this point, it had only been hypothesized that genetic recombination could occur during meiosis, although it had not been shown genetically. McClintock published the first genetic map for maize in 1931, showing the order of three genes on maize chromosome 9. This information provided necessary data for the crossing-over study she published with Creighton; they also showed that crossing-over occurs in sister chromatids as well as homologous chromosomes. In 1938, she produced a cytogenetic analysis of the centromere, describing the organization and function of the centromere, as well as the fact that it can divide.

McClintock's breakthrough publications, and support from her colleagues, led to her being awarded several postdoctoral fellowships from the National Research Council. This funding allowed her to continue to study genetics at Cornell, the University of Missouri, and the California Institute of Technology, where she worked with E. G. Anderson. During the summers of 1931 and 1932, she worked at the University of Missouri with geneticist Lewis Stadler, who introduced her to the use of X-rays as a mutagen. Exposure to X-rays can increase the rate of mutation above the natural background level, making it a powerful research tool for genetics. Through her work with X-ray-mutagenized maize, she identified ring chromosomes, which form when the ends of a single chromosome fuse together after radiation damage. From this evidence, McClintock hypothesized that there must be a structure on the chromosome tip that would normally ensure stability. She showed that the loss of ring-chromosomes at meiosis caused variegation in maize foliage in generations subsequent to irradiation resulting from chromosomal deletion. During this period, she demonstrated the presence of the nucleolus organizer region on a region on maize chromosome 6, which is required for the assembly of the nucleolus. In 1933, she established that cells can be damaged when nonhomologous recombination occurs. During this same period, McClintock hypothesized that the tips of chromosomes are protected by telomeres.

McClintock received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation that made possible six months of training in Germany during 1933 and 1934. She had planned to work with Curt Stern, who had demonstrated crossing-over in Drosophila just weeks after McClintock and Creighton had done so; however, Stern emigrated to the United States. Instead, she worked with geneticist Richard B. Goldschmidt, who was a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin. She left Germany early amidst mounting political tension in Europe, returned to Cornell, but found that the university would not hire a woman professor. In 1936, she accepted an Assistant Professorship offered to her by Lewis Stadler in the Department of Botany at the University of Missouri in Columbia. While still at Cornell, she was supported by a two-year Rockefeller Foundation grant obtained for her through Emerson's efforts.

Later years

McClintock spent her later years, post Nobel Prize, as a key leader and researcher in the field at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. McClintock died of natural causes in Huntington, New York, on September 2, 1992, at the age of 90; she never married or had children.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-28 17:13:51

1445) Carlo Rubbia

Gist

Life

Carlo Rubbia was born in Gorizia, Italy. His father was an engineer at the local telephone company and his mother was a teacher. After World War II, the area was annexed by Yugoslavia, after which Rubbia's family fled to Venice and later moved to Udine. After studying in Pisa, Rubbia spent a couple of years at Columbia University in New York. In 1960 he began working at the newly inaugurated European particle physics laboratory, CERN, with which he has been affiliated ever since. Rubbia has also worked at Harvard University. He is married with two children.

Work

According to modern physics, four fundamental forces are at work in nature. Weak interaction, which, for example, causes beta decay in atomic nuclei, is one of these. In theory, these forces are conveyed by particles—the weak interaction by W and Z particles. Carlo Rubbia proposed and led experiments that, by allowing protons and antiprotons to collide at very high speeds, would prove the existence of these particles. In this way, the existence of W and Z particles was verified in 1983.

Summary

Carlo Rubbia (born March 31, 1934, Gorizia, Italy) is an Italian physicist who in 1984 shared with Simon van der Meer the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of the massive, short-lived subatomic W particle and Z particle. These particles are the carriers of the so-called weak force involved in the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei. Their existence strongly confirms the validity of the electroweak theory, proposed in the 1970s, that the weak force and electromagnetism are different manifestations of a single basic kind of physical interaction.

Rubbia was educated at the Normal School of Pisa and the University of Pisa, earning a doctorate from the latter in 1957. He taught there for two years before moving to Columbia University as a research fellow. He joined the faculty of the University of Rome in 1960 and was appointed senior physicist at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN; now the European Organization for Nuclear Research), in Geneva, in 1962. In 1970 he was appointed professor of physics at Harvard University, and he subsequently divided his time between Harvard and CERN. In 1988 he left Harvard, and from 1989 to 1994 he served as director general of CERN. He subsequently held postings at various scientific institutes, and in 2013 he was declared senator for life in Italy.

In 1973 a research group under Rubbia’s direction provided one of the experimental clues that led to the formulation of the electroweak theory by observing neutral weak currents (weak interactions in which electrical charge is not transferred between the particles involved). These interactions differ from those previously observed and are direct analogues of electromagnetic interactions. The electroweak theory embodied the idea that the weak force can be transmitted by any of three particles called intermediate vector bosons.

Rubbia then proposed that the large synchrotron at CERN be modified so that beams of accelerated protons and antiprotons could be made to collide head-on, releasing energies great enough for the weak bosons to materialize. In 1983 experiments with the colliding-beam apparatus gave proof that the W and Z particles are indeed produced and have properties that agree with the theoretical predictions.

Further analysis of the results obtained in 1983 led Rubbia to conclude that in some decays of the W+ particle, the first firm evidence for the sixth quark, called top, had been found. The discovery of this quark confirmed an earlier prediction that three pairs of these particles should exist.

Details

Carlo Rubbia (born 31 March 1934) is an Italian particle physicist and inventor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Simon van der Meer for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN.

Early life and education

Rubbia was born in 1934 in Gorizia, an Italian town on the border with Slovenia. His family moved to Venice then Udine because of wartime disruption. His father was an electrical engineer and encouraged him to study the same, though he stated his wish to study physics. In the local countryside, he collected and experimented with abandoned military communications equipment. After taking an entrance exam for the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa to study physics, he failed to get into the required top ten (coming eleventh), so began an engineering course in Milan in 1953. Soon after, a Pisa student dropped out, presenting Rubbia with his opportunity. He gained a degree and doctorate in a relatively short time with a thesis on cosmic ray experimentation; his adviser was Marcello Conversi. At Pisa, he met his future wife, Marisa, also a Physics student.

Career and research:

Columbia University

Following his degree, he went to the United States to do postdoctoral research, where he spent about one and a half years at Columbia University performing experiments on the decay and the nuclear capture of muons. This was the first of a long series of experiments that Rubbia has performed in the field of weak interactions and which culminated in the Nobel Prize-winning work at CERN.

CERN

He moved back to Europe for a placement at the University of Rome before joining the newly founded CERN in 1960, where he worked on experiments on the structure of weak interactions. CERN had just commissioned a new type of accelerator, the Intersecting Storage Rings, using counter-rotating beams of protons colliding against each other. Rubbia and his collaborators conducted experiments there, again studying the weak force. The main results in this field were the observation of the structure in the elastic scattering process and the first observation of the charmed baryons. These experiments were crucial in order to perfect the techniques needed later for the discovery of more exotic particles in a different type of particle collider.

In 1976, he suggested adapting CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) to collide protons and antiprotons in the same ring – the Proton-Antiproton Collider. Using Simon van der Meers technology of stochastic cooling, the Antiproton Accumulator was also built. The collider started running in 1981 and, in early 1983, an international team of more than 100 physicists headed by Rubbia and known as the UA1 Collaboration, detected the intermediate vector bosons, the W and Z bosons, which had become a cornerstone of modern theories of elementary particle physics long before this direct observation. They carry the weak force that causes radioactive decay in the atomic nucleus and controls the combustion of the Sun, just as photons, massless particles of light, carry the electromagnetic force which causes most physical and biochemical reactions. The weak force also plays a fundamental role in the nucleosynthesis of the elements, as studied in theories of stars evolution. These particles have a mass almost 100 times greater than the proton. In 1984 Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer were awarded the Nobel Prize "for their decisive contributions to the large project, which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction".

To achieve energies high enough to create these particles, Rubbia, together with David Cline and Peter McIntyre, proposed a radically new particle accelerator design. They proposed to use a beam of protons and a beam of antiprotons, their antimatter twins, counter rotating in the vacuum pipe of the accelerator and colliding head-on. The idea of creating particles by colliding beams of more "ordinary" particles was not new: electron-positron and proton-proton colliders were already in use. However, by the late 1970s / early 1980s those could not approach the needed energies in the centre of mass to explore the W/Z region predicted by theory. At those energies, protons colliding with anti-protons were the best candidates, but how to obtain sufficiently intense (and well-collimated) beams of anti-protons, which are normally produced impinging a beam of protons on a fixed target? Van den Meer had in the meantime developed the concept of "stochastic cooling", in which particles, like anti-protons could be kept in a circular array, and their beam divergence reduced progressively by sending signals to bending magnets downstream. Since decreasing the divergence of the beam meant to reduce transverse velocity or energy components, the suggestive term "stochastic cooling" was given to the scheme. The scheme could then be used to "cool" (to collimate) the anti-protons, which could thus be forced into a well-focused beam, suitable for acceleration to high energies, without losing too many anti-protons to collisions with the structure. Stochastic expresses the fact that signals to be taken resemble random noise, which was called "Schottky noise" when first encountered in vacuum tubes. Without van der Meer's technique, UA1 would never have had the sufficient high-intensity anti-protons it needed. Without Rubbia's realisation of its usefulness, stochastic cooling would have been the subject of a few publications and nothing else. Simon van de Meer developed and tested the technology in the proton Intersecting Storage Rings at CERN, but it is most effective on rather low intensity beams, such as the anti-protons which were prepared for use in the SPS when configured as a collider.

Harvard University

In 1970, Rubbia was appointed Higgins Professor of Physics at Harvard University, where he spent one semester per year for 18 years, while continuing his research activities at CERN. In 1989, he was appointed Director-General of the CERN Laboratory. During his mandate, in 1993, "CERN agreed to allow anybody to use the Web protocol and code free of charge … without any royalty or other constraint".

Gran Sasso Laboratory

Rubbia has also been one of the leaders in a collaboration effort deep in the Gran Sasso Laboratory, designed to detect any sign of decay of the proton. The experiment seeks evidence that would disprove the conventional belief that matter is stable. The most widely accepted version of the unified field theories predicts that protons do not last forever, but gradually decay into energy after an average lifetime of at least {10}^{32} years. The same experiment, known as ICARUS and based on a new technique of electronic detection of ionizing events in ultra-pure liquid argon, is aiming at the direct detection of the neutrinos emitted from the Sun, a first rudimentary neutrino telescope to explore neutrino signals of cosmic nature.

Rubbia further proposed the concept of an energy amplifier, a novel and safe way of producing nuclear energy exploiting present-day accelerator technologies, which is actively being studied worldwide in order to incinerate high activity waste from nuclear reactors, and produce energy from natural thorium and depleted uranium. In 2013 he proposed building a large number of small-scale thorium power plants.

Other organisational affiliations

Rubbia was principal Scientific Adviser of CIEMAT (Spain), a member of the high-level Advisory Group on global warming set up by EU's President Barroso in 2007 and of the board of trustees at the IMDEA Energy Institute. In 2009–2010, he was Special Adviser for Energy to the Secretary General of ECLAC, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, based in Santiago (Chile). In June 2010, Rubbia has been appointed Scientific Director of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam (Germany). He is a member of the Italy-USA Foundation. During his term as President of ENEA (1999–2005) he has promoted a novel method for concentrating solar power at high temperatures for energy production, known as the Archimede Project, which is being developed by industry for commercial use.

Personal life

Marisa and Carlo Rubbia have two children.

Awards and honors

In December 1984, Rubbia was nominated Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI.

On 30 August 2013, Rubbia was appointed to the Senate of Italy as a Senator for Life by President Giorgio Napolitano.

Asteroid 8398 Rubbia is named in his honor. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1984.

In 1984, Rubbia received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-29 16:31:51

1446) Simon van der Meer

Gist

Life

Simon van der Meer was born and raised in The Hague, Netherlands. His father was a teacher and his mother also came from a family of educators. After studying at the University of Technology, Delft, van de Meer spent several years working at the Philips Research Laboratory in Eindhoven. In 1956 he began working at the new European particle physics laboratory, CERN, where he remained for the rest of his career. Simon van der Meer was married with two children.

Work

According to modern physics, there are four fundamental forces in nature. The weak interaction, responsible for e.g. the beta-decay of nuclei is one of them. According to the theory forces are mediated by particles: the weak interaction by the so called heavy bosons W, Z, about 100 times more massive than the proton. Simon van der Meer developed a method to accumulate a large number of energetic antiprotons in an accelerator ring. These were used in experiment where antiprotons and protons of high energy were brought to collide. In these experiments W and Z particles were discovered in 1983.

Summary

Simon van der Meer (born Nov. 24, 1925, The Hague, Neth.—died March 4, 2011, Geneva, Switz.) was a Dutch physical engineer who in 1984, with Carlo Rubbia, received the Nobel Prize for Physics for his contribution to the discovery of the massive, short-lived subatomic particles designated W and Z that were crucial to the unified electroweak theory posited in the 1970s by Steven Weinberg, Abdus Salam, and Sheldon Glashow.

After receiving a degree in physical engineering from the Higher Technical School in Delft, Neth., in 1952, van der Meer worked for the Philips Company. In 1956 he joined the staff of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), near Geneva, where he remained until his retirement in 1990.

The electroweak theory provided the first reliable estimates of the masses of the W and Z particles—nearly 100 times the mass of the proton. The most promising means of bringing about a physical interaction that would release enough energy to form the particles was to cause a beam of highly accelerated protons, moving through an evacuated tube, to collide with an oppositely directed beam of antiprotons. CERN’s circular particle accelerator, four miles in circumference, was the first to be converted into a colliding-beam apparatus in which the desired experiments could be performed. Manipulation of the beams required a highly effective method for keeping the particles from scattering out of the proper path and hitting the walls of the tube. Van der Meer, in response to this problem, devised a mechanism that would monitor the particle scattering at a particular point on the ring and would trigger a device on the opposite side of the ring to modify the electric fields in such a way as to keep the particles on course.

Details

Simon van der Meer (24 November 1925 – 4 March 2011) was a Dutch particle accelerator physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Carlo Rubbia for contributions to the CERN project which led to the discovery of the W and Z particles, the two fundamental communicators of the weak interaction.

Biography

One of four children, Simon van der Meer was born and grew up in The Hague, the Netherlands, in a family of teachers. He was educated at the city's gymnasium, graduating in 1943 during the German occupation of the Netherlands. He studied Technical Physics at the Delft University of Technology, and received an engineer's degree in 1952. After working for Philips Research in Eindhoven on high-voltage equipment for electron microscopy for a few years, he joined CERN in 1956 where he stayed until his retirement in 1990.

Van der Meer was a relative of Nobel Prize winner Tjalling Koopmans – they were first cousins once removed. In the mid-1960s, Van der Meer married Catharina M. Koopman; they had a daughter and a son.

Work at CERN

In the 1950s, Van der Meer designed magnets for the 28 GeV Proton Synchrotron (PS). In 1961, he invented a pulsed focusing device, known as the ‘Van der Meer horn’. Such devices are necessary for long-base-line neutrino facilities and are used even today.

That was followed in the 1960s by the design of a small storage ring for a physics experiment studying the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. Soon after and in the following decade, Van der Meer did some very innovative work on the regulation and control of powersupplies for the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) and, later, the SPS.

Van der Meer's ISR Collider days in the 1970s led to his technique for luminosity calibration of colliding beams, first used at the ISR and still used today at the LHC, as well as in other colliders.

The Nobel Prize committee recognised Van der Meer's idea of stochastic cooling and its application at CERN in the late 1970s and 1980s, specifically in the Antiproton Accumulator, which supplied antiprotons to the Proton-Antiproton Collider.

During his work at the ISR, Van der Meer developed a technique using steering magnets to vertically displace the two colliding beams with respect to each other; this permitted the evaluation of the effective beam height, leading to an evaluation of the beam luminosity at an intersection point. The famous ‘Van der Meer scans’ are indispensable even today in the LHC experiments; without these, the precision of the calibration of the luminosity at the intersection points in the Collider would be much lower.

For the new SPS machine constructed in the early seventies, he proposed that the generation of the reference voltages for the bending and quadrupole supplies should be based on measurements of the field along the cycle, and gave an outline of the correction algorithms. His proposal resulted in the first ever computer-controlled closed-loop system for a geographically distributed system, as the 7 km circumference SPS was; this was a no simple feat for the early 1970s. Measurements of the main magnet currents were introduced only later, when the SPS had to run as a storage ring for the SPS p–pbar collider.

Van der Meer's accelerator knowledge and computer programming meant he developed very sophisticated applications and tools to control the antiproton source accelerators as well as the transfer of antiprotons to the SPS Collider for Nobel-winning discoveries. The AA and AC pbar source complex machines remained from 1987 to 1996 the most highly automated set of machines in CERN's repertoire of accelerators.

Nobel prize

Van der Meer invented the technique of stochastic cooling of particle beams. His technique was used to accumulate intense beams of antiprotons for head-on collision with counter-rotating proton beams at 540 GeV centre-of-mass energy or 270 GeV per beam in the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN. Such collisions produced W and Z bosons which could be detected for the first time in 1983 by the UA1 experiment, led by Carlo Rubbia. The W and Z bosons had been theoretically predicted some years earlier, and their experimental discovery was considered a significant success for CERN. Van der Meer and Rubbia shared the 1984 Nobel Prize for their decisive contributions to the project.

Van der Meer and Ernest Lawrence are the only two accelerator physicists who have won the Nobel prize.

Apart from his Nobel Prize Van der Meer also became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984.

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Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-30 16:30:08

1447) Robert Bruce Merrifield

Gist

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1984 was awarded to Robert Bruce Merrifield "for his development of methodology for chemical synthesis on a solid matrix".

Robert Bruce Merrifield, (1921-) is an American biochemist who won the 1984 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his method of producing peptides and proteins. He revolutionized the study of these complex materials by developing an automated laboratory technique for rapidly synthesizing peptide chains in large quantities, thus greatly advancing the fields of biochemistry, molecular biology, and pharmacology.

Summary

Bruce Merrifield (born July 15, 1921, Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.—died May 14, 2006, Cresskill, N.J.) was an American biochemist and educator, who in 1984 received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his development of a simple and ingenious method for synthesizing chains of amino acids, or polypeptides, in any predetermined order.

Merrifield graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1943 and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry there in 1949. That same year he joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University), New York City, where he became professor emeritus in 1992.

Merrifield’s innovative method, developed during the 1950s and ’60s, grew from his idea that the key to the synthesis of polypeptides was the anchoring of the first amino acid to an insoluble solid. Other amino acids could then be joined, one by one, to the fixed terminus. At the end of the sequence of steps, the completed chain could be easily detached from the solid. The process, which can be carried out by machine, proved highly efficient and of great significance for research on such substances as hormones and enzymes, as well as in the commercial manufacture of such drugs as insulin and such substances as interferon. Merrifield’s autobiography, Life During a Golden Age of Peptide Chemistry, was published in 1993.

Details

Robert Bruce Merrifield (July 15, 1921 – May 14, 2006) was an American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1984 for the invention of solid phase peptide synthesis.

Early life

He was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on 15 July 1921, the only son of George E. Merrifield and Lorene née Lucas. In 1923 the family moved to California where he attended nine grade schools and two high schools before graduating from Montebello High School in 1939. It was there that he developed an interest both in chemistry and in astronomy.

After two years at Pasadena Junior College he transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). After graduation in chemistry he worked for a year at the Philip R. Park Research Foundation taking care of an animal colony and assisting with growth experiments on synthetic amino acid diets. One of these was the experiment by Geiger that first demonstrated that the essential amino acids must be present simultaneously for growth to occur.

He returned to graduate school at the UCLA chemistry department with professor of biochemistry M.S. Dunn to develop microbiological methods for the quantitation of the pyrimidines. The day after graduating on 19 June 1949, he married Elizabeth Furlong and the next day left for New York City and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.

Career

At the institute, later Rockefeller University, he worked as an Assistant for Dr. D.W. Woolley on a dinucleotide growth factor he discovered in graduate school and on peptide growth factors that Woolley had discovered earlier. These studies led to the need for peptide synthesis and, eventually, to the idea for solid phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) in 1959. In 1963, he was sole author of a classic paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in which he reported a method he called "solid phase peptide synthesis". This article is the fifth most cited paper in the journal's history.

In the mid-60s Dr. Merrifield's laboratory first synthesized bradykinin, angiotensin, desamino-oxytocin and insulin. In 1969, he and his colleague Bernd Gutte announced the first synthesis of the enzyme ribonuclease A. This work proved the chemical nature of enzymes.

Dr. Merrifield's method greatly stimulated progress in biochemistry, pharmacology and medicine, making possible the systematic exploration of the structural basis of the activities of enzymes, hormones and antibodies. The development and applications of the technique continued to occupy his laboratory, where he remained active at the bench until recently. In 1993, Jeffrey I. Seeman published Life during a Golden Age of Peptide Chemistry, Merrifield's autobiography, in the series "Profiles, Pathways, and Dreams" for the American Chemical Society. He received the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities Award for outstanding contributions to Biomolecular Technologies in 1998.

The achievement of synthesizing ribonuclease A (with Bernd Gutte) was all the more significant in that it demonstrated that the linear sequence of amino acids joined in peptide bonds determined directly the tertiary structure of a peptide or protein. I.e. that information coded in one dimension can directly determine the three-dimensional structure of a molecule.

SPPS has been expanded to include solid phase synthesis of nucleotides and saccharides.

Personal life

After raising their 6 children, James, Nancy, Betsy, Cathy, Laurie and Sally, his wife Elizabeth (Libby), a biologist by training, joined the Merrifield laboratory at Rockefeller University where she worked for over 23 years.

After a long illness R. Bruce Merrifield died on May 14, 2006, at the age of 84 in his home in Cresskill, New Jersey. At the time of his death he was survived by his wife Libby, their 6 children and 16 grandchildren. Libby died on September 13, 2017.

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Jai Ganesh · 2024-05-01 16:35:42

1448) Niels Kaj Jerne

Gist

The immune system includes cells, lymphocytes and antibodies that neutralize substances foreign to the body, or antigens. In 1955 Niels Jerne asserted that all kinds of antibodies already have developed during the fetus stage and that the immune system functions through selection. In 1971 he asserted that lymphocytes teach themselves to recognize the body’s own substances in the thymus gland. His 1974 network theory is based on the idea that antibodies not only attach themselves to an antigen, but also can become attached to other antibodies. An immunological reaction arises when an antigen disturbs the system’s equilibrium.

Summary

Niels K. Jerne (born Dec. 23, 1911, London, Eng.—died Oct. 7, 1994, Castillon-du-Gard, France) was a Danish immunologist who shared the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with César Milstein and Georges Köhler for his theoretical contributions to the understanding of the immune system.

Jerne was born of Danish parents and grew up in the Netherlands. After studying physics for two years at the University of Leiden, he worked at the Danish State Serum Institute from 1943 to 1956. He received his medical degree from the University of Copenhagen in 1951, and in 1956 he was appointed chief medical officer of the World Health Organization, a position he held until 1962. During the 1960s he taught at the Universities of Geneva (Switzerland) and Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, U.S.), was professor of experimental therapy at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and was director of the Paul Ehrlich Institute, also in Frankfurt. He helped establish the Basel Institute for Immunology and served as its director from 1969 to 1980. After teaching for a year at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Jerne retired to Gard, France.

Considered one of the greatest theoreticians of modern immunological thought, Jerne is noted for three major concepts that explain various aspects of how the immune system defends the body against disease. The first of Jerne’s theories, proposed in 1955, dealt with how the body produces its vast array of antibodies (proteins that bind with the antigens of foreign substances to protect the body from infection). A commonly held belief at the time was that, when a foreign antigen entered the body, it stimulated the production of a specific antibody that could bind to it and eliminate it. Jerne postulated an alternative explanation, which stated that from early in its life the body has a full complement of antibodies, one of which can combine with and eliminate the antigen. This theory provided the basis for Frank Macfarlane Burnet’s clonal selection theory of 1957. Jerne’s second theory, put forth in 1971, postulates that the body learns in the thymus to distinguish between its own components and those that are foreign. The third, and perhaps most famous, of Jerne’s theories is the network theory, which he introduced in 1974. According to this concept, the immune system is a complex, self-regulating network that can turn itself on or off when necessary.

Details

Niels Kaj Jerne, (23 December 1911 – 7 October 1994) was a Danish immunologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 with Georges J. F. Köhler and César Milstein "for theories concerning the specificity in development and control of the immune system and the discovery of the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies".

Jerne is known for three significant ideas. Firstly, instead of the body producing antibodies in response to an antigen, Jerne postulated that the immune system already has the specific antibodies it needs to fight antigens. Secondly, it was known that the immune system learns to be tolerant to the individual's own self. Jerne postulated that this learning takes place in the thymus. Thirdly, it was known that T cells and B cells communicate with each other.

Jerne's network theory proposed that the active sites of antibodies are attracted to both specific antigens (idiotypes) and to other antibodies that bind to the same site. The antibodies are in balance, until an antigen disturbs the balance, stimulating an immune reaction.

Early years and Education

His ancestors had lived on the small Danish island of Fanø for centuries, but, in 1910, his parents moved to London where Jerne was born in 1911.

During the First World War his parents moved to the Netherlands and Jerne spent his youth in Rotterdam. After studying physics for two years at the Leiden University, Jerne moved to Copenhagen and changed his studies to the field of medicine. He graduated from the University of Copenhagen with a degree in medicine in 1947. Four years later, he was awarded the doctorate for his thesis, A Study of Avidity Based on Rabbit Skin Responses to Diphtheria Toxin-Antitoxin Mixtures.

Research positions

From 1943 to 1956 Jerne was a research worker at the Danish National Serum Institute and during this time he formulated a theory on antibody formation. It is said that Jerne got his revolutionary scientific idea while bicycling across the Langebro bridge in Copenhagen on his way home from work.

The antibody formation theory gave Jerne international recognition and in 1956 Jerne went to work for the World Health Organization in Geneva, where he served as the Head of the Sections of Biological Standards and of Immunology. He held this post for six years until moving to the United States and the University of Pittsburgh in 1962 to work as Professor of Microbiology and Chairman of the Department of Microbiology for four years. Jerne continued to do work for the World Health Organization as a member of the Expert Advisory Panel of Immunology from 1962 and onwards.

In 1966 Jerne moved back to Europe and took up the position of Professor of Experimental Therapy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. From 1966 to 1969 he was the Director of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, also in Frankfurt. In 1969 Jerne again switched jobs, this time to Basel in Switzerland, where he was the Director of the Basel Institute for Immunology until his retirement in 1980. During the 1970s and 1980s, Jerne was a pioneer in the development of immune network theory.

According to Jerne's biographer Thomas Söderqvist, Jerne was not a bench scientist, could not pipette accurately, and did not enjoy experimental work. His Nobel Prize was awarded for theories, rather than discoveries. Jerne developed the "natural selection theory of immunology", proposed by Paul Ehrlich 50 years earlier, although he was missing the clonal selection element proposed by David Talmage and then by Frank Macfarlane Burnet. It was met by skepticism among his colleagues at first, James Watson for example told Jerne bluntly that his theory "stinks".

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Jai Ganesh · 2024-05-10 17:07:32

1449) Georges J. F. Köhler

Gist

The immune system includes cells, lymphocytes and antibodies that neutralize substances foreign to the body, or antigens. We have millions of different antibodies, but each cell can produce only one kind of antibody. Sometimes a cell that forms a certain kind of antibody grows abnormally and a tumor is formed. In 1975 George Köhler and Cesar Milstein developed a method for combining such tumor cells with cells that are immune to a certain antigen so that antibodies of the same type—monoclonal antibodies—can be produced.

Summary

Georges Jean Franz Köhler (17 April 1946 – 1 March 1995) was a German biologist.

Together with César Milstein and Niels Kaj Jerne, Köhler won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984, "for work on the immune system and the production of monoclonal antibodies". Milstein and Köhler's technique for producing monoclonal antibodies laid the foundation for the exploitation of antibodies for diagnostics, therapeutics and many other scientific applications.

Career

Köhler was born in Munich. In April 1974 he started a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK where he began working with César Milstein to develop a laboratory tool that could help them investigate the mechanism that underlies the diversity of antibodies. It was during this work that they devised their hybridoma technique for the production of antibodies. Köhler continued his collaboration on the technique when he returned to Basel Institute for Immunology in April 1974. Köhler remained at the Basel Institute for another nine years, during which time he continued investigating antibody diversity and in the early 1980s began working on the development of transgenic mice as a tool to understand the mechanism that underlies self-tolerance. In 1986 Köhler became director of the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology where he worked until his death in 1995. He died in Freiburg im Breisgau as the consequence of a heart condition.

Personal life

Köhler's father, Karl, was a German, while his mother, Raymonde, belonged to a French family. He married Claudia Reintjes in 1968. His first meeting with Claudia was held when he was doing university studies while Claudia was a physician's assistant. They had three children: Katharina, Lucia and Fabian. He not only worked hard for refining antibodies but also gave his time to his family. George moonlighted as a taxi driver to support his family. Most of the time he spent with his children while driving a small tractor on roads and enjoying roller-skating in streets.

Details

Georges J.F. Köhler (born April 17, 1946, Munich, Ger.—died March 1, 1995, Freiburg im Breisgau) was a German immunologist who in 1984, with César Milstein and Niels K. Jerne, received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work in developing a technique for producing monoclonal antibodies—pure, uniform, and highly sensitive protein molecules used in diagnosing and combating a number of diseases.

Köhler obtained his doctoral degree in biology (1974) from the University of Freiburg in West Germany. From 1974 to 1976 he worked with Milstein at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. Together, in 1975, they discovered the technique for which they are known.

In the body’s immune system, cells called lymphocytes secrete various types of antibodies, whose function is to attach themselves to antigens (foreign substances) that have entered the body. The immune system maintains a vast variety of antibodies, with each type able to attach itself to a matching site on the surface of a particular type of antigen (e.g., a particular species or strain of bacteria). To prepare substantial quantities of antibodies, scientists used to inject an antigen into an animal, wait for antibodies to form, draw blood from the animal, and isolate the antibodies. The antibodies obtained by this procedure were almost never pure, because typical antigens possess many recognizable surface sites, each of which leads to formation of a different type of antibody.

Köhler and Milstein saw that if a way could be found to clone lymphocytes—to cause them to subdivide indefinitely in a culture medium—then the antibody molecules secreted by the resulting population would all be identical. Lymphocytes are short-lived, however, and cannot be cultivated satisfactorily. Köhler and Milstein solved this problem by inducing lymphocytes to fuse with the cells of a myeloma (a type of tumour), which can be made to reproduce indefinitely. The resulting hybrid cells produced a single species of antibody while perpetuating themselves indefinitely.

The development of monoclonal antibodies revolutionized many diagnostic procedures and led to new therapeutic agents for fighting disease, since monoclonal antibodies can be designed to target specific types of cells or other antigens and can be used to carry drugs to those cells.

Köhler worked at the Basel Institute for Immunology from 1976 to 1985. In 1985 he was appointed one of three directors of the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology in Freiburg.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-05-13 21:15:23

1450) Dudley R. Herschbach

Gist

Chemical reactions in which molecules comprised of atoms collide and form new compounds represent one of nature’s fundamental processes. At the end of the 1960s Dudley Herschbach and Yuan Lee began developing methods to carefully study the dynamics of chemical reactions. Beams of molecules with fixed amounts of energy were made to cross one another so that chemical reactions arose where the beams intersected. By measuring the movement, mass and energy of the molecules produced, the reactions can be mapped.

Summary

Dudley R. Herschbach (born June 18, 1932, San Jose, California, U.S.) is an American chemist and educator who, with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1986 for his pioneering use of molecular beams to analyze chemical reactions.

Herschbach attended Stanford University (B.S., M.S.) and received a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard University in 1958. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1959 until 1963, when he joined the faculty at Harvard University, where he became Francis B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science in 1976; he retired as professor emeritus in 2003.

In an attempt to discover in detail the changes that occur in chemical reactions, Herschbach applied a technique that was then becoming popular in elementary particle physics—molecular beam scattering. He invented what is known as the “crossed molecular beam technique,” in which beams of molecules are brought together at supersonic speed under carefully controlled conditions. This procedure enabled a detailed, molecule-by-molecule examination of the chemical reaction event.

Details

Dudley Robert Herschbach (born June 18, 1932) is an American chemist at Harvard University. He won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi "for their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes". Herschbach and Lee specifically worked with molecular beams, performing crossed molecular beam experiments that enabled a detailed molecular-level understanding of many elementary reaction processes. Herschbach is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Early life and education

Herschbach was born in San Jose, California on June 18, 1932. The eldest of six children, he grew up in a rural area. He graduated from Campbell High School, where he played football. Offered both athletic and academic scholarships to Stanford University, Herschbach chose the academic. His freshman advisor, Harold S. Johnston, hired him as a summer research assistant, and taught him chemical kinetics in his senior year. His master's research involved calculating Arrhenius A-factors for gas-phase reactions. Herschbach received a B.S. in mathematics in 1954 and an M.S. in chemistry in 1955 from Stanford University.

Herschbach then attended Harvard University, where he earned an A.M. in physics in 1956 and a Ph.D. in chemical physics in 1958 under the direction of Edgar Bright Wilson. At Harvard, Herschbach examined tunnel splitting in molecules, using microwave spectroscopy. He was awarded a three-year Junior Fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, lasting from 1957 to 1959.

Research

In 1959, Herschbach joined the University of California at Berkeley, where he was appointed an assistant professor of chemistry and became an associate professor in 1961. At Berkeley, he and graduate students George Kwei and James Norris constructed a cross-beam instrument large enough for reactive scattering experiments involve alkali and various molecular partners. His interest in studying elementary chemical processes in molecular-beam reactive collisions challenged an often-accepted belief that "collisions do not occur in crossed molecular beams". The results of his studies of K + CH3I were the first to provide a detailed view of an elementary collision, demonstrating a direct rebound process in which the KI product recoiled from an incoming K atom beam. Subsequent studies of K + Br2 resulted in the discovery that the hot-wire surface ionization detector they were using was potentially contaminated by previous use, and had to be pre-treated to obtain reliable results. Changes to the instrumentation yielded reliable results, including the observation that the K + Br2 reaction involved a stripping reaction, in which the KBr product scattered forward from the incident K atom beam. As the research continued, it became possible to correlate the electronic structure of reactants and products with the reaction dynamics.

In 1963, Herschbach returned to Harvard University as a professor of chemistry. There he continued his work on molecular-beam reactive dynamics, working with graduate students Sanford Safron and Walter Miller on the reactions of alkali atoms with alkali halides. In 1967, Yuan T. Lee joined the lab as a postdoctoral student, and Herschbach, Lee, and graduate students Doug MacDonald and Pierre LeBreton began to construct a "supermachine" for studying collisions such as Cl + Br2 and hydrogen and halogen reactions.

His most acclaimed work, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi, was his collaboration with Yuan T. Lee on crossed molecular beam experiments. Crossing collimated beams of gas-phase reactants allows partitioning of energy among translational, rotational, and vibrational modes of the product molecules—a vital aspect of understanding reaction dynamics. For their contributions to reaction dynamics, Herschbach and Lee are considered to have helped create a new field of research in chemistry. Herschbach is a pioneer in molecular stereodynamics, measuring and theoretically interpreting the role of angular momentum and its vector properties in chemical reaction dynamics.

In the course of his life's work in research, Herschbach has published over 400 scientific papers. Herschbach has applied his broad expertise in both the theory and practice of chemistry and physics to diverse problems in chemical physics, including theoretical work on dimensional scaling. One of his studies demonstrated that methane is, in fact, spontaneously formed at high-pressure and high-temperature environments such as those deep in the Earth's mantle; this finding is an exciting indication of abiogenic hydrocarbon formation, meaning that the actual amount of hydrocarbons available on Earth might be much larger than conventionally assumed under the assumption that all hydrocarbons are fossil fuels. His recent work also includes a collaboration with Steven Brams studying approval voting.

Science and education

Hershbach's teaching ranges from graduate seminars on chemical kinetics to an introductory undergraduate course in general chemistry that he taught for many years at Harvard, and described as his "most challenging assignment".

Herschbach has been a strong proponent of science education and science among the general public, and frequently gives lectures to students of all ages, imbuing them with his infectious enthusiasm for science and his playful spirit of discovery. Herschbach has also lent his voice to the animated television show The Simpsons for the episode "Treehouse of Horror XIV", where he is seen presenting the Nobel Prize in Physics to Professor Frink.

In October 2010, Herschbach participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program, where middle and high school students get to engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch. He is also a member of the Festival's advisory board. Herschbach has participated in the Distinguished Lecture Series of the Research Science Institute (RSI), a summer research program for high school students held at MIT.

Although still an active research professor at Harvard, he joined the Texas A&M University faculty September 1, 2005, as a professor of physics, teaching one semester per year in the chemical physics program. As of 2010, he holds the title of professor emeritus at Harvard and remains well known for his involvement as a lecturer and mentor in the Harvard research community. He and his wife Georgene Herschbach also served for several years as the co-Masters of Currier House, where they were highly involved in undergraduate life in addition to their full-time duties.

Public service

He is a board member of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and was the chairman of the board for Society for Science & the Public from 1992 to 2010. Herschbach is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.

He is also an Eagle Scout and recipient of the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award (DESA).

Family

Herschbach's wife, Georgene Herschbach, served as the Associate Dean of Harvard College for Undergraduate Academic Programs. Prior to retirement in 2009, she chaired Harvard College's influential Committee on Undergraduate Education.

Awards and honors

Herschbach is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Royal Chemical Society of Great Britain. In addition to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, he has received a wide variety of national and international awards. These include the National Medal of Science, the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry, the Linus Pauling Medal, the Irving Langmuir Award, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement, and the American Institute of Chemists Gold Medal.

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Jai Ganesh · 2024-05-16 19:16:02

1451) Klaus von Klitzing

Gist

If an electrical current flows lengthwise through a metal band and a magnetic field is placed against the surface of the band at a right angle, a charge arises diagonally in the band. Known as the Hall effect, it comes about because the movement of the electrons is deflected by the magnetic field. In 1980, Klaus von Klitzing discovered the quantum Hall effect in an interface between a metal and a semiconductor in a very clean material. In this effect, changes in the magnetic field result in changes in what is known as Hall conductance that vary in steps of whole-number multiples of a constant.

Summary

Klaus von Klitzing (born June 28, 1943, Schroda [Sroda], German-occupied Poland) is a German physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1985 for his discovery that under appropriate conditions the resistance offered by an electrical conductor is quantized; that is, it varies by discrete steps rather than smoothly and continuously.

At the end of World War II, Klitzing was taken by his parents to live in West Germany. He attended the Technical University of Brunswick, graduating in 1969, and then earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Würzburg in 1972. In 1980 he became a professor at the Technical University of Munich, and in 1985 he became director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Physics in Stuttgart, Ger.

Klitzing demonstrated that electrical resistance occurs in very precise units by using the Hall effect. The Hall effect denotes the voltage that develops between the edges of a thin current-carrying ribbon placed between the poles of a strong magnet. The ratio of this voltage to the current is called the Hall resistance. When the magnetic field is very strong and the temperature very low, the Hall resistance varies only in the discrete jumps first observed by Klitzing. The size of those jumps is directly related to the so-called fine-structure constant, which defines the mathematical ratio between the motion of an electron in the innermost orbit around an atomic nucleus to the speed of light.

The significance of Klitzing’s discovery, made in 1980, was immediately recognized. His experiments enabled other scientists to study the conducting properties of electronic components with extraordinary precision. His work also aided in determining the precise value of the fine-structure constant and in establishing convenient standards for the measurement of electrical resistance.

Details

Klaus von Klitzing (born 28 June 1943, Schroda) is a German physicist, known for discovery of the integer quantum Hall effect, for which he was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Education

In 1962, Klitzing passed the Abitur at the Artland-Gymnasium in Quakenbrück, Germany, before studying physics at the Braunschweig University of Technology, where he received his diploma in 1969. He continued his studies at the University of Würzburg at the chair of Gottfried Landwehr, completing his PhD thesis entitled Galvanomagnetic Properties of Tellurium in Strong Magnetic Fields in 1972, and gaining habilitation in 1978.

Research and career

During his career Klitzing has worked at the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford and the Grenoble High Magnetic Field Laboratory in France (now LNCMI), where he continued to work until becoming a professor at the Technical University of Munich in 1980. He has been a director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart since 1985.

The von Klitzing constant, RK = h/e^2 = 25812.80745... Ω, is named in honor of Klaus von Klitzing's discovery of the quantum Hall effect, and is listed in the National Institute of Standards and Technology Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty. The inverse of the constant is equal to half the value of the conductance quantum.

More recently, Klitzing's research focuses on the properties of low-dimensional electronic systems, typically in low temperatures and in high magnetic fields.

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Jai Ganesh · 2024-05-17 18:43:28

1452) César Milstein

Gist

The immune system includes cells, lymphocytes and antibodies that neutralize substances foreign to the body, or antigens. We have millions of different antibodies, but each cell can produce only one kind of antibody. Sometimes a cell that forms a certain kind of antibody grows abnormally and a tumor is formed. In 1975 Cesar Milstein and George Köhler developed a method for combining such tumor cells with cells that are immune to a certain antigen so that antibodies of the same type—monoclonal antibodies—can be produced.

Summary

César Milstein (born October 8, 1927, Bahía Blanca, Argentina—died March 24, 2002, Cambridge, England) was an Argentine-British immunologist who in 1984, with Georges Köhler and Niels K. Jerne, received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work in the development of monoclonal antibodies.

Milstein attended the Universities of Buenos Aires (Ph.D., 1957) and Cambridge (Ph.D., 1960) and was on the staff of the National Institute of Microbiology in Buenos Aires (1957–63). Thereafter he was a member of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England, and held dual Argentine and British citizenship.

Artificial production of monoclonal antibodiesThe technique involves fusing certain myeloma cells (cancerous B cells), which can multiply indefinitely but cannot produce antibodies, with plasma cells (noncancerous B cells), which are short-lived but produce a desired antibody. The resulting hybrid cells, called hybridomas, grow at the rate of myeloma cells but also produce large amounts of the desired antibody. In this way researchers obtain large quantities of antibody molecules that all react against the same antigen. The essential production steps are shown here. In step 2, HGPRT is hypoxanthineguanine phosphoribosyltransferase, an enzyme that allows cells to grow on a medium containing HAT, or hydroxanthine, aminopterin, and thymidine. As shown in step 4, only hybridomas can live in the HAT medium; unfused myeloma cells, lacking HGPRT, die in the medium, as do unfused plasma cells, which are naturally short-lived.
Milstein studied antibodies—the proteins produced by mature B lymphocytes (plasma cells) that help the body eliminate infections. In his research he used myeloma cells, which are cancerous forms of plasma cells that multiply indefinitely. In 1975, working with Köhler, who was a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge, Milstein developed one of the most powerful tools of molecular biology: monoclonal antibody production, a technique that allows researchers to construct cells that produce great quantities of identical (monoclonal) antibodies, all targeted to recognize the same antigen. The procedure involves fusing long-lived myeloma cells that do not produce antibodies with short-lived plasma cells that produce a specific antibody. The resulting hybrid cells, called hybridomas, combine the longevity of the myeloma cell with the ability to produce a specific antibody and so are able to produce potentially unlimited amounts of the desired antibody. Monoclonal antibodies have a wide variety of clinical and research applications; for example, they are used in pregnancy tests, in diagnosing viral and bacterial diseases, and in blood cell and tissue typing.

Milstein received the Royal Medal (1982) and the Copley Medal (1989) from the Royal Society of London. In 1983 he became head of the Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry Division at the Medical Research Council laboratory. In 1994 Milstein was made a Companion of Honour.

Details

César Milstein, (8 October 1927 – 24 March 2002) was an Argentine biochemist in the field of antibody research. Milstein shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 with Niels Kaj Jerne and Georges J. F. Köhler for developing the hybridoma technique for the production of monoclonal antibodies.

Biography

Milstein was born in Bahía Blanca, Argentina. His parents were Máxima (Vanarks) and Lázaro Milstein, a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant. He graduated from the University of Buenos Aires and obtained a PhD under Professor Stopani (Professor of Biochemistry). Later he became a member of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England; he acquired British citizenship and had dual British-Argentinian nationality. In 1956, he received an award from the Sociedad Argentina de Investigation eon Bio Quimica (SAIB) for his work on enzyme kinetics with the enzyme aldehyde dehydrogenase. In 1958, funded by the British Council, he joined the Biochemistry Department at the University of Cambridge to work for a PhD under Malcolm Dixon on the mechanism of metal activation of the enzyme phosphoglucomutase. During this work, he collaborated with Frederick Sanger, whose group he joined with a short-term Medical Research Council appointment.

Career

The major part of Milstein's research career was devoted to studying the structure of antibodies and the mechanism by which antibody diversity is generated. It was as part of this quest that, in 1975, he worked with Georges Köhler (a postdoctoral fellow in his laboratory) to develop the hybridoma technique for the production of monoclonal antibodies—a discovery recognized by the award of the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. This discovery led to an enormous expansion in the exploitation of antibodies in science and medicine. The term hybridoma was coined by Leonard Herzenberg during his sabbatical in Milstein's laboratory between 1976 and 1977.

Milstein himself made many major contributions to improvements and developments in monoclonal antibody technology—especially in the use of monoclonal antibodies to provide markers that allow distinction between different cell types. In collaboration with Claudio Cuello, he helped lay the foundation for the use of monoclonal antibodies as probes for the investigation of the pathological pathways in neurological disorders as well as many other diseases. Milstein and Cuello's work also enabled the use of monoclonal antibodies to enhance the power of immuno-based diagnostic tests. In addition, Milstein foresaw the potential wealth of ligand-binding reagents that could result from applying recombinant DNA technology to monoclonal antibodies and inspired the development of the field of antibody engineering, which was to lead to safer and more powerful monoclonal antibodies for use as therapeutics.

Milstein's early work on antibodies focused on their diversity at the amino acid level, as well as on the disulfide bonds by which they were held together. Part of this work was done in collaboration with his wife, Celia. The emphasis of his research then shifted towards the mRNA encoding antibodies, where he was able to provide the first evidence for the existence of a precursor for these secreted polypeptides that contained a signal sequence. The development of the hybridoma technology coupled to advances in nucleic acid sequencing allowed Milstein to chart the changes that occurred in antibodies following antigen encounter. He demonstrated the importance of somatic hypermutation of immunoglobulin V genes in antibody affinity maturation. In this process, localized mutation of the immunoglobulin genes allows the production of improved antibodies, which make a major contribution to protective immunity and immunological memory. Much of his work in later years was devoted to characterizing this mutational process with a view to understanding its mechanism. He contributed a manuscript for publication on this topic less than a week before he died.

Quite apart from his own achievements, Milstein acted as a guide and inspiration to many in the antibody field, as well as devoting himself to assisting science and scientists in less developed countries. Milstein patented the production of monoclonal antibodies, and held three other patents.

Awards and honours

In addition to the Nobel Prize in 1984, Milstein was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1975, was a fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge, from 1980 to 2002, awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1980, won the Copley Medal in 1989, and became a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1995. In 1993, the Argentinian Konex Foundation granted him the Diamond Konex Award, one of the most prestigious cultural awards of Argentina, as the most important scientist in the last decade of his country.

Personal life

Milstein died early on 24 March 2002, in Cambridge, England, at age 74, as a result of a heart condition that he had suffered from for many years. His wife died in 2020 aged 92.

The film "Un fueguito, la historia de César Milstein" was released in 2010. Directed by Ana Fraile, the film was awarded Best Documentary by the Academy of Film in Argentina.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-05-18 22:03:43

1453) Herbert A. Hauptman

Gist

When mapping the molecular structure of molecules, it is important to study how X-rays, electromagnetic waves with a short wavelength, are bent by a crystal. What is important is the ray’s direction, intensity and phase—how the wave crests are displaced. During the first part of the 1950s, Herbert Hauptman and Jerome Karle developed a system of equations that used measurements of the rays’ intensity to determine their phases. This made direct determination of molecular structures possible.

Summary

Herbert A. Hauptman (born February 14, 1917, New York, New York, U.S.—died October 23, 2011, Buffalo, New York) was an American mathematician and crystallographer who, along with Jerome Karle, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1985. They developed mathematical methods for deducing the molecular structure of chemical compounds from the patterns formed when X-rays are diffracted by their crystals.

Hauptman was a classmate with Karle at City College of New York, from which they both graduated in 1937. Hauptman went on to study mathematics further at Columbia University (M.A., 1939) and at the University of Maryland (Ph.D., 1955). After World War II Hauptman was reunited with Karle at the Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, D.C.), where they began collaborating on the study of crystal structures. In 1970 Hauptman became a professor of biophysics at the State University of New York at Buffalo and joined the Medical Foundation of Buffalo (renamed in 1994 the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute), later serving as research director and president.

Hauptman and Karle devised mathematical equations to extract phase information from the intensity of spots resulting from the diffraction of X-rays deflected off crystals. Their equations made it possible to pinpoint the location of atoms within the crystal’s molecules based upon an analysis of the intensity of the spots. Their method was neglected for a number of years after its publication in about 1949, but gradually crystallographers began using it to determine the three-dimensional structure of thousands of small biological molecules, including those of many hormones, vitamins, and antibiotics. Before Hauptman and Karle developed their method, it took about two years to deduce the structure of a simple biological molecule, but by the 1980s, using powerful computers to perform the complex calculations needed, one could do it in about two days.

Details

Herbert Aaron Hauptman (February 14, 1917 – October 23, 2011) was an American mathematician and Nobel laureate. He pioneered and developed a mathematical method that has changed the whole field of chemistry and opened a new era in research in determination of molecular structures of crystallized materials. Today, Hauptman's direct methods, which he continued to improve and refine, are routinely used to solve complicated structures. It was the application of this mathematical method to a wide variety of chemical structures that led the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to name Hauptman and Jerome Karle recipients of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Life

He was born in to a Jewish family in New York City, the oldest child of Leah (Rosenfeld) and Israel Hauptman. He was married to Edith Citrynell since November 10, 1940, with two daughters, Barbara (1947) and Carol (1950).

He was interested in science and mathematics from an early age which he pursued at Townsend Harris High School, graduated from the City College of New York (1937) and obtained an M.A. degree in mathematics from Columbia University in 1939.

After the war he started a collaboration with Jerome Karle at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and at the same time enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1955 in physics, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. This combination of mathematics and physical chemistry expertise enabled them to tackle head-on the phase problem of X-ray crystallography. His work on this problem was criticized because, at the time, the problem was believed unsolvable. By 1955 he had received his Ph.D. in mathematics, and they had laid the foundations of the direct methods in X-ray crystallography. Their 1953 monograph, "Solution of the Phase Problem I. The Centrosymmetric Crystal", contained the main ideas, the most important of which was the introduction of probabilistic methods through a development of the Sayre equation.

In 1970 he joined the crystallographic group of the Medical Foundation of Buffalo of which he was research director in 1972. During the early years of this period he formulated the neighborhood principle and extension concept. These theories were further developed during the following decades.

In 2003, as an atheist and secular humanist, he was one of 22 Nobel laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.

Works

Hauptman has authored over 170 publications, including journal articles, research papers, chapters and books. In 1970, Hauptman joined the crystallographic group of the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute (formerly the Medical Foundation of Buffalo) of which he became research director in 1972. Until his death, he served as president of the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute as well as research professor in the department of biophysical sciences and adjunct professor in the department of computer science at the University at Buffalo. Prior to coming to Buffalo, he worked as a mathematician and supervisor in various departments at the Naval Research Laboratory from 1947. He received his B.S. from City College of New York, M.S. from Columbia University and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-05-19 14:43:20

1454) Yuan T. Lee

Gist

Yuan Tseh Lee (born 19 November 1936) is a Taiwanese chemist. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the first Taiwanese Nobel Prize laureate who, along with the Hungarian-Canadian John C. Polanyi and American Dudley R. Herschbach, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 "for their contributions to the dynamics of chemical elementary processes".

Lee's particular physical chemistry work was related to the use of advanced chemical kinetics techniques to investigate and manipulate the behavior of chemical reactions using crossed molecular beams. From 15 January 1994 to 19 October 2006, Lee served as the President of the Academia Sinica of Taiwan. In 2011, he was elected head of the International Council for Science.

Early life

Lee was born to a Hokkien family in Shinchiku City (modern-day Hsinchu city) in northern Taiwan, which was then under Japanese rule, to Lee Tze-fan, an artist, and Ts'ai P'ei C(ài Péi), an elementary school teacher from Goseikō Town , Taichū Prefecture (Wuqi, Taichung). Lee is a Hokkien with ancestry from Nan'an City, China. Lee played on the baseball and ping-pong teams of Hsinchu Elementary School, and later studied at the Hsinchu Senior High School, where he played tennis, trombone, and the flute.

He was exempted from the entrance examination and directly admitted to National Taiwan University. He earned a BSc in 1959. He earned his MS from National Tsing Hua University in 1961 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 under the supervision of Bruce H. Mahan. He was a member of the Chemistry International Board from 1977 to 1984.

Scientific career

Chemistry

In February 1967, he started working with Dudley Herschbach at Harvard University on reactions between hydrogen atoms and diatomic alkali molecules and the construction of a universal crossed molecular beams apparatus. After the postdoctoral year with Herschbach he joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1968. In 1974, he returned to Berkeley as professor of chemistry and principal investigator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, becoming a U.S. citizen the same year. Lee is a University Professor Emeritus of the University of California system.[7]

Nobel prize

One of the major goals of chemistry is the study of material transformations where chemical kinetics plays an important role. Scientists during the 19th century stated macroscopic chemical processes consist of many elementary chemical reactions that are themselves simply a series of encounters between atomic or molecular species. In order to understand the time dependence of chemical reactions, chemical kineticists have traditionally focused on sorting out all of the elementary chemical reactions involved in a macroscopic chemical process and determining their respective rates.

Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius studied this phenomenon during the late 1880s, and stated the relations between reactive molecular encounters and rates of reactions (formulated in terms of activation energies).

Other scientists at the time also stated a chemical reaction is fundamentally a mechanical event, involving the rearrangement of atoms and molecules during a collision. Although these initial theoretical studies were only qualitative, they heralded a new era in the field of chemical kinetics; allowing the prediction of the dynamical course of a chemical reaction.

In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, with the development of many sophisticated experimental techniques, it became possible to study the dynamics of elementary chemical reactions in the laboratory. Such as the analysis of the threshold operating conditions of a chemical laser or the spectra obtained using various linear or non-linear laser spectroscopic techniques.

Professor Lee's research focused on the possibility to control the energies of the reagents, and to understand the dependence of chemical reactivity on molecular orientation, among other studies related to the nature of reaction intermediates, decay dynamics, and identifying complex reaction mechanisms. To do so, Professor Lee used a breakthrough laboratory technique at the time, called the "crossed molecular beams technique", where the information derived from the measurements of angular and velocity distributions allowed him and his team to understand the dynamics of elementary chemical reactions.

Recent works

During his tenure, Lee has worked to create new research institutes, advance scientific research within Taiwan, and to recruit and cultivate top scholars for the Academic Sinica.

In 2010, Lee said that global warming would be much more serious than scientists previously thought, and that Taiwanese people needed to cut their per-capita carbon emissions from the current 12 tons per year to just three. This would take more than a few slogans, turning off the lights for one hour, or cutting meat consumption, noting: "We will have to learn to live the simple lives of our ancestors." Without such efforts, he said, "Taiwanese will be unable to survive long into the future".

He has been involved with the Malta Conferences, an initiative designed to bring together Middle Eastern scientists. As part of the initiative, he offered six fellowships to work on the synchrotron in Taiwan.

He is also a member of International Advisory Council in Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-05-22 17:42:46

1455) Jerome Karle

Jerome Karle (born Jerome Karfunkle; June 18, 1918 – June 6, 2013) was an American physical chemist. Jointly with Herbert A. Hauptman, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985, for the direct analysis of crystal structures using X-ray scattering techniques.

Early life and education

Karle was born in New York City, on June 18, 1918, the son of Sadie Helen (Kun) and Louis Karfunkle. He was born into a Jewish family with a strong interest in the arts. He had played piano as a youth and had participated in a number of competitions, but he was far more interested in science. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, and would later join Arthur Kornberg (awarded the Nobel in Medicine in 1959) and Paul Berg (a winner in Chemistry in 1980), as graduates of the school to win Nobel Prizes. As a youth, Karle enjoyed handball, ice skating, touch football and swimming in the nearby Atlantic Ocean.

He started college at the age of 15 and received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1937, where he took additional courses in biology, chemistry and math in addition to the required curriculum there. He earned a master's degree from Harvard University in 1938, having majored in biology.

As part of a plan to accumulate enough money to pay for further graduate studies, Karle took a position in Albany, New York with the New York State Department of Health, where he developed a method to measure dissolved fluoride levels, a technique that would become a standard for water fluoridation.

He enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1940 and met his future wife, Isabella Lugoski, who was sitting at an adjoining desk during his first course in physical chemistry. The two married in 1942. They were both supervised in their PhD studies by physical chemist Lawrence Brockway. Though Karle completed his studies in 1943, he was awarded his PhD the following year.

Jerome Karle was a former president of both the American Crystallographic Association (ACA) (1972) and the IUCr (1981-1984), as well as a co-recipient of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on direct methods. Among the many additional honors he received for his work, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1976,[9] the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1986, and the American Philosophical Society in 1990.

Research and Nobel Prize

Starting in 1943, after completing graduate studies, Karle worked on the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago with his wife Dr. Isabella Karle, one of the youngest scientists and few women on the project. In 1944, they returned to the University of Michigan, where Karle worked on a project for the United States Naval Research Laboratory. In 1946, they moved to Washington, D.C. to work for the Naval Research Laboratory.

Karle and Herbert A. Hauptman were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985 for their work in using X-ray scattering techniques to determine the structure of crystals, a technique that is used to study the biological, chemical, metallurgical and physical characteristics. They were able to employ the Sayre equation in centrosymmetric structure, developing the so-called direct methods. Through isolating the position of the atoms in a crystal, the molecular structure of the material being studied can be determined, allowing processes to be designed to duplicate the molecules being studied. This technique has played a major role in the development of new pharmaceutical products and other synthesized materials.

Karle and his wife retired from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory on July 31, 2009, after a combined 127 years of service to the United States Government, with Karle joining the NRL in 1944 and his wife two years later. At the time of his departure from government service, Karle held the chair of science as chief scientist of the Laboratory for the Structure of Matter. Retirement ceremonies for the Karles were attended by United States Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, who presented the couple with the Department of the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the Navy's highest form of recognition to civilian employees.

Personal

Karle was married to Isabella Helen Lugoski (1921-2017) with whom he had three daughters, all of whom work in scientific fields:

* Louise Karle (born 1946) is a theoretical chemist
* Jean Karle (born 1950) is an organic chemist
* Madeleine Karle (born 1955) is a museum specialist with expertise in the field of geology.

Death

Karle died of liver cancer on June 6, 2013, at the Leewood Healthcare Center in Annandale, Virginia. Karle is interred at the Columbia Gardens Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-05-23 17:33:58

1456) John Polanyi

Summary

John C. Polanyi (born Jan. 23, 1929, Berlin, Ger.) is a chemist and educator who, with Dudley R. Herschbach and Yuan T. Lee, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1986 for his contribution to the field of chemical-reaction dynamics.

Born to an expatriate Hungarian family, Polanyi was reared in England and attended Manchester University (Ph.D., 1952; D.Sc., 1964). He accepted a research position with the National Research Council of Canada in 1952 and began teaching at the University of Toronto in 1956, accepting the title of university professor in 1974.

Polanyi developed a technique that is known as infrared chemiluminescence based on the observation that molecules, when excited, emit infrared light. By means of spectroscopic analysis of the changes in emitted light that take place during a chemical reaction, he was able to trace the exchange of chemical bonds, thus helping to detail the disposal of excess energy that occurs during the process of chemical reaction.

Details

John Charles Polanyi (Hungarian: Polányi János Károly; born 23 January 1929) is a German-born Canadian chemist. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research in chemical kinetics.

Polanyi was born into the prominent Hungarian Polányi (Pollacsek) family in Berlin, Germany, prior to emigrating in 1933 to the United Kingdom where he was subsequently educated at the University of Manchester, and did postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Canada and Princeton University in New Jersey. Polanyi's first academic appointment was at the University of Toronto, and he remains there as of 2019.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Polanyi has received numerous other awards, including 33 honorary degrees, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry and the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. Outside his scientific pursuits, Polanyi is active in public policy discussion, especially concerning science and nuclear weapons. His father, Mihály (Michael), was a noted chemist and philosopher. His uncle, Károly (Karl) was a renowned political economist, best known for his seminal work, The Great Transformation. According to György Marx, he was one of "The Martians", a group of prominent Hungarian scientists who emigrated to the United States in the first half of the 20th century.

Education

Polanyi's family moved from Germany to Britain in 1933, partly as a result of the persecution of Jews under Adolf Hitler (Polanyi's father, who converted to Catholicism, was born Jewish). During World War II, Polanyi's father sent him to Canada for three years when he was 11, so he would be safe from German bombings. While living in Toronto, he attended the University of Toronto Schools. After returning to Britain, Polanyi finished high school and attended university at Manchester, where he received his undergraduate degree in 1949 and his PhD in 1952. Although his university education was focused in science, he was not convinced it was his calling after finishing high school, when he briefly considered a career as a poet. His father, Michael Polanyi, was a professor in the chemistry department during his first year of university, before transferring to a newly created position in the social studies department. Polanyi's supervisor during his graduate studies was Ernest Warhurst, a former student of his father's. After completing his PhD studies, Polanyi did postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Ontario from 1952 until 1954, where he worked with Edgar William Richard Steacie. From 1954 until 1956, he was a research associate at Princeton University.

Academic posts

John Polanyi started at the University of Toronto as a lecturer in 1956. He moved up the ranks quickly at the university, being promoted to assistant professor in 1957, associate professor in 1960 and becoming a full professor in 1962. In 1975, he was named University Professor, an honorary title he has retained since.

Research interests

Polanyi's PhD studies at Manchester University focused on measuring the strengths of chemical bonds using thermal dissociation, building on Warhurst's graduate studies using a sodium flame apparatus to determine the likelihood that a collision between a sodium atom and another molecule would lead to a chemical reaction. For the majority of his career, Polanyi's research has focused on chemical dynamics, attempting to determine the mechanics of a chemical reaction, and the properties of chemical species in the transition state. While at the National Research Council (NRC), Polanyi evaluated transition state theory for its predictive powers, coming to the conclusion that the theory was flawed, largely due to a lack of knowledge about the forces at play in the transition state. Near the end of his stay at NRC, Polanyi worked in Gerhard Herzberg's lab, using spectroscopy to examine vibrational and rotational excitation in iodine molecules. During Polanyi's time at Princeton University, he worked with Sir Hugh Taylor and his colleagues, Michael Boudart and David Garvin. He was influenced by studies conducted at Princeton looking at the vibrationally excited reaction products between atomic hydrogen and ozone.

When Polanyi moved to the University of Toronto, his first graduate students were looking for enhanced reaction rates with vibrationally excited hydrogen, as well as looking for the presence of vibrationally excited hydrogen chloride during the exothermic reaction of molecular chlorine with atomic hydrogen. Graduate student Kenneth Cashion was working with Polanyi when they made their first discoveries about chemiluminescence, the light emitted by an atom molecule when it is in an excited state. This work was first published in 1958.

In 2009, Polanyi and his colleagues published a paper in Nature Chemistry, entitled "Molecular dynamics in surface reactions." This more recent research could be influential in nanotechnology, building devices from single atoms and molecules. Polanyi's work still focuses on the basic workings of chemical reactions, but since his Nobel Prize win in 1986, his methods have changed. While in Sweden for the award ceremony, he encountered the three scientists who were awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics, who were honoured for their work in electron optics and scanning tunneling microscopy. This technology allowed Polanyi and his colleagues to monitor chemical reactions on a very small scale, rather than observing the energy being released using infrared technology. His lab at the University of Toronto currently has 4 scanning tunneling microscopes, valued at approximately $750,000 each.

In addition to his scientific pursuits, Polanyi has also always been keenly aware of the world at large. As a student, he edited a newspaper and displayed an interest in politics. Although his father was a scientist, he did not demonstrate an immediate affinity for chemistry. Beginning in the 1950s, Polanyi became involved in public affairs, especially concerning nuclear weapons. He founded Canada's Pugwash group in 1960, and served as the chairman for the group from its inception until 1978. Pugwash is a global movement that received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. Their goal is to reduce armed conflict and seek solutions to global problems. He has also been a supporter of "pure" science, and a critic of government policies that do not support such research. He is also a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reformation of the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system. Polanyi often accepts speaking engagements to discuss issues relating to social justice, peace and nuclear proliferation, despite his busy research schedule. He frequently comments on science and public policy issues via the Letters to the Editor and Opinion sections of The Globe and Mail newspaper. He currently serves on the National Advisory Board of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the research arm of Council for a Livable World.

Awards and honours:

Nobel Prize

Polanyi was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in chemical kinetics. He shared the prize with Dudley Herschbach of Harvard University and Yuan T. Lee of the University of California. The trio were honoured for "their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes." Polanyi's contributions were centred around the work he did developing the technique of infrared chemiluminescence. This technique was used to measure weak infrared emissions from a newly formed molecule in order to examine energy disposal during a chemical reaction. Polanyi's Nobel lecture upon receipt of the award was entitled "Some Concepts in Reaction Dynamics."

Polanyi had mixed feelings about the impact of the Nobel Prize on his research, feeling that his name on research proposals and papers often brought additional scrutiny, and also had people questioning his dedication to science after the honour. Polanyi said, "There is a very reasonable suspicion that you are so busy doing the things that Nobel Prize winners do that you are actually only giving half your mind to science."

His Nobel victory also signaled a change in his research direction. The 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Ernst Ruska, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer for their work in electron microscopes and scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM). This research piqued Polanyi's interest while he was in Sweden for the ceremony. After returning to Toronto, Polanyi and his colleagues looked into the technique and now have four STMs, which they use to picture chemical reactions at the molecular level, rather than using infrared detection and chemiluminescence.

Polanyi's Nobel medal is on display at Massey College (University of Toronto) where he is also a Senior Fellow.

Additional awards

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1971. In 1974, Polanyi was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 1979, he was promoted to Companion. He has received many other awards throughout his career, including the Marlow Medal of the Faraday Society in 1962, Centenary Medal of the British Chemical Society in 1965, the Steacie Prize for Natural Sciences in 1965 (shared), the Noranda Award of the Chemical Institute of Canada in 1967, the Henry Marshall Tory Medal of the Royal Society of Canada in 1977, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1982 (shared), the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize in 1988, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1989, and the John C. Polanyi Lecture Award of the Canadian Society for Chemistry in 1992. In 2007, Polanyi was awarded the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. The Royal Society of Chemistry honoured Polanyi as their 2010 Faraday Lectureship Prize.

Polanyi has received many honorary degrees from 25 institutions, including Waterloo in 1970, Harvard University in 1982, Ottawa in 1987, and Queen's in 1992. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry of the United Kingdom and the Chemical Institute of Canada.

Polanyi was pictured on a Canada Post first class postage stamp on 3 October 2011, issued to salute the International Year of Chemistry. In 1992, Polanyi was appointed to the Queen's Privy Council of Canada.

Polanyi was awarded the 2022 Andrei Sakharov Prize. The award cites Polanyi's seven decades of activism for a nuclear-weapons-free world, for upholding human rights and freedom of speech globally, for public education on the essential role of science in society, and for a visionary approach to bringing about a hopeful, peaceful future.

Legacy

In honour of Polanyi's Nobel Prize win, the Ontario government established the "John Charles Polanyi Prizes". These prizes are each worth $20,000, and are awarded to young researchers in the province in a postdoctoral fellowship or who have recently started a faculty appointment at an Ontario university. The prizes are awarded in similar categories to the Nobel Prizes, broadly defined as: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Economics and Literature.

Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) created the John C. Polanyi award to recognize a researcher or researchers whose work in an NSERC-supported field has led to an outstanding advance in the field. The research must have been conducted in Canada, and have been at least partially supported by NSERC funding. The award consists partially of a $250,000 grant for the winner. The inaugural winner of the John C. Polanyi Award was the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. In 2011, the award was presented to Victoria M. Kaspi, an astrophysicist at McGill University.

Polanyi started publishing his scientific research in 1953. As of 2010, he has published over 250 scientific papers. His writing is not limited to his scientific interests, as he has published over 100 articles on policy, the impact of science on society and armament control. In 1970, he produced a film entitled Concepts in Reaction Dynamics, and he co-edited a book called The Dangers of Nuclear War.

In 2010, the Toronto District School Board voted to change the name of Sir Sandford Fleming Academy to the John Polanyi Collegiate Institute to coincide with a move to a new location. The new school opened in September 2011.

Personal life

Polanyi was born in 1929 to Michael and Magda Elizabeth Kemény Polanyi in Berlin, Germany. His father was born in 1891, in Hungary. His uncle, Karl was an economist, noted for his criticism of market capitalism. His brother George was noted for his defence of market capitalism. His paternal grandfather, Mihaly Pollacsek, built railways. Mihaly Pollacsek Magyarised the family's name to Polanyi, but did not change his own name. The Polanyi's were non-observant Jews, although Michael Polanyi became a Christian.

In 1958, Polanyi married Anne Ferrar Davidson (1929–2013). He has two children – a daughter, Margaret, born in 1961 and a son, Michael, born in 1963. His daughter is a journalist, and his son is a political scientist who started his career as a physicist. Polanyi is currently married to portrait artist Brenda Bury. Outside his scientific and policy endeavours, Polanyi's interests include art, literature and poetry. He was an avid white water canoeist in his younger days, but has replaced that with walking and skiing.

John%20Charles%20Polanyi.jpg

Jai Ganesh · 2024-05-24 17:19:16

1457) Michael Stuart Brown

Gist

Cholesterol is an important component in the body’s cells and plays an important role in several biochemical processes. Too much cholesterol in the blood can cause problems, however, by forming strictures in blood vessels. In 1973 Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein discovered the receptor, or receiver, in cells that takes in cholesterol and clarified how the conversion of cholesterol is regulated by our genes and other substances. The discoveries became the basis for statins, medications that reduce cholesterol levels in the blood.

Summary

Michael S. Brown (born April 13, 1941, New York, N.Y., U.S.) is an American molecular geneticist who, along with Joseph L. Goldstein, was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their elucidation of a key link in the metabolism of cholesterol in the human body.

Brown graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 1962 and received his M.D. from that university’s medical school in 1966. He became friends with Goldstein when they were both working as interns at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston during 1966–68. After conducting research at the National Institutes of Health from 1968 to 1971, he became an assistant professor at the Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas, where he was reunited with his colleague Goldstein.

In Dallas the two men began their collaborative research on the genetic factors that are responsible for high levels of cholesterol in the bloodstream. They compared the cells of normal persons with those of persons having familial hypercholesterolemia, which is an inherited tendency to get abnormally high blood cholesterol levels and, as a result, atherosclerosis and other circulatory ailments.

Brown and Goldstein were able to trace a genetic defect in the afflicted persons that resulted in their lacking or being deficient in cell receptors for low-density lipoproteins (LDL), which are the primary cholesterol carrying particles. Their research established that these cell receptors draw the LDL particles into the cells as a prelude to breaking them down, and thus remove them from the bloodstream. The two men also discovered that the cell capture of such lipoproteins inhibits the further production of new LDL receptors by the cells, thus explaining how high-cholesterol diets overwhelm the body’s natural capacity for withdrawing cholesterol from the bloodstream.

Brown later collaborated with Goldstein in research to develop new drugs effective in lowering blood cholesterol levels and in researching the basic genetic code behind the LDL receptor. From 1977 he was professor and director of the Center for Genetic Diseases at the Southwestern Medical School, where in 1985 he was elevated to regental professor. In 1984 Brown and Goldstein were awarded the Louisa Gross Horowitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry, and in 1988 Brown was awarded the National Medal of Science.

In the 1990s Brown and Goldstein discovered sterol regulatory element binding proteins (SREBPs), transcription factors that control the uptake and synthesis of cholesterol and fatty acids. In their follow-up studies they uncovered the mechanism by which SREBPs are activated to regulate the metabolism of lipids. In 2003 they were awarded the Albany Medical Prize. Brown and Goldstein shared a laboratory, where they conducted their research jointly.

Details

Michael Stuart Brown (born April 13, 1941) is an American geneticist and Nobel laureate. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Joseph L. Goldstein in 1985 for describing the regulation of cholesterol metabolism.

Education and early life

Brown was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Evelyn, a homemaker, and Harvey Brown, a textile salesman. His family is Jewish. He graduated from Cheltenham High School (Wyncote, Pennsylvania). Brown graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962 and received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1966.

Career and research

Moving to the University of Texas Michael liked vann Warner Health Science Center in Dallas, now the UT Southwestern Medical Center, Brown and colleague Joseph L. Goldstein researched cholesterol metabolism and discovered that human cells have low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptors that extract cholesterol from the bloodstream. The lack of sufficient LDL receptors is implicated in familial hypercholesterolemia, which predisposes heavily for cholesterol-related diseases. In addition to explaining the underlying pathology of this disease, their work uncovered a fundamental aspect of cell biology - receptor-mediated endocytosis. Their findings led to the development of statin drugs, the cholesterol-lowering compounds that today are used by 16 million Americans and are the most widely prescribed medications in the United States. Their discoveries are improving more lives every year, both in the US and around the world. New federal cholesterol guidelines will triple the number of Americans taking statin drugs to lower their cholesterol, reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke for countless people. Following these important advances, their team of dedicated researchers elucidated the role of lipid modification of proteins (protein prenylation) in cancer. In 1984 he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Joseph L. Goldstein (co-recipient of 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine). In 1988, Brown received the National Medal of Science for his contributions to medicine.

In 1993, their trainees Xiaodong Wang and Michael Briggs purified the sterol regulatory element binding proteins (SREBPs). Since 1993, Brown, Goldstein, and their colleagues have described the unexpectedly complex machinery by which cells maintain the necessary levels of fats and cholesterol in the face of varying environmental circumstances.

Brown holds the W. A. (Monty) Moncrief Distinguished Chair in Cholesterol and Arteriosclerosis Research; is a Regental Professor of the University of Texas; holds the Paul J. Thomas Chair in Medicine.

Brown is also on the Prix Galien USA Committee that "recognizes the technical, scientific and clinical research skills necessary to develop innovative medicines".

Jai Ganesh · 2024-05-25 15:40:32

1458) Joseph L. Goldstein

Summary

(born 1940). American molecular geneticist Joseph L. Goldstein, along with colleague Michael S. Brown, was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for research on the metabolism of cholesterol in the human body.

Joseph Leonard Goldstein was born on April 18, 1940, in Sumter, South Carolina. He received his B.S. degree from Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, in 1962 and his medical degree from the Southwestern Medical School of the University of Texas at Dallas in 1966. Goldstein became friends with Brown when they were both working as interns at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1966 to 1968. Goldstein then conducted research under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health from 1968 to 1972, studying genetically predisposing factors that caused the accumulation of blood cholesterol in people prone to heart attacks. He returned to teach at the Southwestern Medical School in Dallas in 1972 and was there reunited with Brown.

In the course of their research, the two men discovered that low-density lipoproteins (LDL), which are primary cholesterol-carrying particles, are withdrawn from the bloodstream into the body’s cells by receptors on the cells’ surface. The genetic absence of these LDL receptors was found to be the cause of familial hypercholesterolemia, a disorder in which the body’s tissues are incapable of removing cholesterol from the bloodstream. The new understanding of cell receptors’ role in the regulation of cholesterol levels in the bloodstream spurred the successful use of drugs and the manipulation of diet in lowering blood cholesterol levels.

From 1976 Goldstein was professor of medicine and from 1977 chairman of the department of molecular genetics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas; he was named regental professor of the University of Texas in 1985. In the 1990s Goldstein and Brown made another groundbreaking advance in cholesterol research when they discovered sterol regulatory element binding proteins (SREBPs). They found that SREBPs controlled the synthesis of cholesterol and fatty acids, and in subsequent studies they elucidated the mechanism of activation that enables SREBPs to regulate lipid metabolism. In 2003 Goldstein and Brown were honored with an Albany (New York) Medical Center Prize for their work on SREBPs.

Details

Joseph Leonard Goldstein (born April 18, 1940) is an American biochemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1985, along with fellow University of Texas Southwestern researcher, Michael Brown, for their studies regarding cholesterol. They discovered that human cells have low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptors that remove cholesterol from the blood and that when LDL receptors are not present in sufficient numbers, individuals develop hypercholesterolemia and become at risk for cholesterol related diseases, notably coronary heart disease. Their studies led to the development of statin drugs.

Life and career

Goldstein was born in Kingstree, South Carolina, the son of Fannie (Alpert) and Isadore E. Goldstein, who owned a clothing store. His family is Jewish. Goldstein received his BSci from Washington and Lee University in 1962, and his MD from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in 1966. Upon completion of his residency, Goldstein moved to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, where he worked in biochemical genetics. In 1972, Goldstein relocated back to the Southwestern Medical Center, accepting a post as the head of the Division of Medical Genetics.

At the Southwestern Medical Center Goldstein collaborated extensively with Michael Brown, a fellow researcher at the center who had also worked at the NIH. From 1973 to 1985, Goldstein and Brown together published over one hundred major papers. They are both listed in Thomson Reuters’ index of highly cited authors. Frequently mentioned as a candidate for nationally prominent positions in scientific administration, Goldstein, like his colleague Michael Brown, chose to continue hands-on research.

In 1993, their postdoctoral trainees, Wang Xiaodong and Michael Briggs, purified the Sterol Regulatory Element-Binding Proteins (SREBPs), a family of membrane-bound transcription factors. Since 1993, Goldstein, Brown, and their colleagues have described the unexpectedly complex machinery that proteolytically releases the SREBPs from membranes, thus allowing their migration to the nucleus where they activate all the genes involved in the synthesis of cholesterol and fatty acids. The machinery for generating active SREBPs is tightly regulated by a negative feedback mechanism, which explains how cells maintain the necessary levels of fats and cholesterol in the face of varying environmental circumstances.

Goldstein is chair, Molecular Genetics at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Together, Goldstein and Brown lead a research team that typically includes a dozen doctoral and postdoctoral trainees. They have trained over 145 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and six of their former postdoctoral fellows (Thomas C. Südhof, Wang Xiaodong, Helen H. Hobbs, David W. Russell, Monty Krieger, and Russell DeBose-Boyd) have been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Former postdoctoral fellow Thomas C. Südhof received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology and Helen H. Hobbs received the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

In 1988 Goldstein received a National Medal of Science in the field of molecular genetics, and in 2003 Goldstein and Brown won the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research in recognition for their further work in understanding cholesterol and also the discovery of an insulin-sensitive regulator, which potentially could be used to develop treatments for diabetes mellitus. Goldstein is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine and he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1991.

Goldstein was appointed as chairman of the Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards jury in 1995, and was a recipient of the award ten years earlier. Since 2000, Goldstein has authored a series of essays on the deep relationship between art and science that appear in the annual Nature Medicine supplement that accompanies the Lasker Awards.

Among his professional activities, Goldstein is a member of the Board of Trustees of The Howard Hughes Medical Institute and of The Rockefeller University, where he was elected as a Life Trustee in 2015. He also serves as chairman of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the Broad Institute, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He previously served on The Board of Scientific Governors of the Scripps Research Institute, a nonprofit institute that conducts biomedical research.

Additional Information

Joseph L. Goldstein (born April 18, 1940, Sumter, S.C., U.S.) is an American molecular geneticist who, along with Michael S. Brown, was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their elucidation of the process of cholesterol metabolism in the human body.

Goldstein received his B.S. degree from Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Va., in 1962 and obtained his medical degree from the Southwestern Medical School of the University of Texas at Dallas in 1966. Goldstein became friends with Brown when they were both working as interns at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1966 to 1968. Goldstein then conducted research under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health from 1968 to 1972, studying genetically predisposing factors that caused the accumulation of blood cholesterol in people prone to heart attacks. He returned to teach at the Southwestern Medical School in Dallas in 1972 and was there reunited with his colleague Brown.

The two men then began a concerted study of the processes affecting the accumulation of cholesterol in the bloodstream. In the course of their research they discovered that low-density lipoproteins (LDL), which are primary cholesterol-carrying particles, are withdrawn from the bloodstream into the body’s cells by receptors on the cells’ surface. The genetic absence of these LDL receptors was found to be the cause of familial hypercholesterolemia, a disorder in which the body’s tissues are incapable of removing cholesterol from the bloodstream. The new understanding of cells receptors’ role in the regulation of cholesterol levels in the bloodstream spurred the successful use of drugs and the manipulation of diet in lowering blood cholesterol levels.

From 1976 Goldstein was professor of medicine and from 1977 chairman of the department of molecular genetics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas; he was named regental professor of the University of Texas in 1985. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Goldstein and Brown have received numerous awards for their research on cholesterol and lipoproteins, including the Louisa Gross Horowitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry (1984), the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1985), and the National Medal of Science (1988).

In the 1990s the two scientists made another groundbreaking advance in cholesterol research when they discovered a new family of transcription factors called sterol regulatory element binding proteins (SREBPs). Goldstein and Brown found that SREBPs controlled the synthesis of cholesterol and fatty acids, and in subsequent studies they elucidated the mechanism of activation that enables SREBPs to regulate lipid metabolism. In 2003 Goldstein and Brown were honoured with an Albany Medical Center Prize for their work on SREBPs.

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Jai Ganesh · 2024-05-26 16:11:28

1459) Stanley Cohen (biochemist)

Gist

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1986 was awarded jointly to Stanley Cohen and Rita Levi-Montalcini "for their discoveries of growth factors".

Summary

Stanley Cohen (born November 17, 1922, Brooklyn, New York, New York, U.S.—died February 5, 2020, Nashville, Tennessee) was an American biochemist who, with Rita Levi-Montalcini, shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his researches on substances produced in the body that influence the development of nerve and skin tissues.

Cohen was educated at Brooklyn College (B.A., 1943), Oberlin College (M.A., 1945), and at the University of Michigan, where he received a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1948. He joined Levi-Montalcini at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, as a researcher in 1952. His training as a biochemist enabled him to help isolate nerve growth factor, a natural substance that Levi-Montalcini had found stimulated the growth of nerve cells and fibres. Cohen found another cell growth factor in the chemical extracts that contained the nerve growth factor. He discovered that this substance caused the eyes of newborn mice to open and their teeth to erupt several days sooner than normal. Cohen termed this substance epidermal growth factor (EGF), and he went on to purify it and completely analyze its chemistry. He and his coworkers found that EGF influences a great range of developmental events in the body. He also discovered the mechanisms by which EGF is taken into and acts upon individual cells.

Cohen conducted his research at Washington University until 1959, upon which he moved to Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, becoming professor of biochemistry there in 1967; he retired as professor emeritus in 2000. Cohen received an Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1986) and was inducted into the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Hall of Honor (2007).

Details

Stanley Cohen (November 17, 1922 – February 5, 2020) was an American biochemist who, along with Rita Levi-Montalcini, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986 for the isolation of nerve growth factor and the discovery of epidermal growth factor. He died in February 2020 at the age of 97.

Early life and education

Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 17, 1922. He was the son of Fannie (née Feitel) and Louis Cohen, a tailor. His parents were Jewish immigrants. Cohen received his bachelor's degree in 1943 from Brooklyn College, where he had double-majored in chemistry and biology. After working as a bacteriologist at a milk processing plant to earn money, he received his Master of Arts in zoology from Oberlin College in 1945. He earned a doctorate from the department of biochemistry about the metabolism of earthworms at the University of Michigan in 1948.

Career

His first academic employment was at the University of Colorado studying the metabolism of premature babies. In 1952 he moved to Washington University in St. Louis, working first in the department of radiology, learning isotope methodology, and then in the department of zoology. Working with Rita Levi-Montalcini, he isolated nerve growth factor. He later isolated a protein that could accelerate incisor eruption and eyelid opening in newborn mice, which was renamed epidermal growth factor. He continued research on cellular growth factors after joining the faculty of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1959.

In 1999, Cohen retired from Vanderbilt University.

Awards and legacy

Cohen received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Rita Levi-Montalcini in 1983, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986 for the isolation of nerve growth factor and the discovery of epidermal growth factor and the National Medal of Science in 1986. His research on cellular growth factors has proven fundamental to understanding the development of cancer and designing anti-cancer drugs.

His Scopus h-index value was 82 as of March 2022.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-05-27 17:09:04

1460) Rita Levi-Montalcini

Summary

Rita Levi-Montalcini (born April 22, 1909, Turin, Italy—died December 30, 2012, Rome) was an Italian American neurologist who, with biochemist Stanley Cohen, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1986 for her discovery of a bodily substance that stimulates and influences the growth of nerve cells.

Levi-Montalcini studied medicine at the University of Turin and did research there on the effects that peripheral tissues have on nerve cell growth. Although she was forced into hiding in Florence during the German occupation of Italy (1943–45) because of her Jewish ancestry, she was able to resume her research at Turin after the war. In 1947 she accepted a post at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, with the zoologist Viktor Hamburger, who was studying the growth of nerve tissue in chick embryos. She eventually held dual citizenship in Italy and the United States.

In 1948 it was discovered in Hamburger’s laboratory that a variety of mouse tumour spurred nerve growth when implanted into chick embryos. Levi-Montalcini and Hamburger traced the effect to a substance in the tumour that they named nerve-growth factor (NGF). Levi-Montalcini further showed that the tumour caused similar cell growth in a nerve-tissue culture kept alive in the laboratory, and Stanley Cohen, who by then had joined her at Washington University, was able to isolate the NGF from the tumour. NGF was the first of many cell-growth factors to be found in the bodies of animals. It plays an important role in the growth of nerve cells and fibres in the peripheral nervous system.

Levi-Montalcini established the Institute of Cell Biology in Rome in 1962 and thereafter divided her time between the institute and Washington University. In 1987 she was awarded the National Medal of Science, and an autobiographical work, In Praise of Imperfection, was published in 1988. In 2001 Italian Prime Minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi appointed Levi-Montalcini senator for life for her outstanding contributions to science.

Details

Rita Levi-Montalcini (22 April 1909 – 30 December 2012) was an Italian neurobiologist. She was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with colleague Stanley Cohen for the discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF).

From 2001 until her death, she also served in the Italian Senate as a Senator for Life. This honor was given due to her significant scientific contributions. On 22 April 2009, she became the first Nobel laureate to reach the age of 100, and the event was feted with a party at Rome's City Hall.

Early life and education

Levi-Montalcini was born on 22 April 1909 in Turin, to Italian Jewish parents with roots dating back to the Roman Empire. She and her twin sister Paola were the youngest of four children. Her parents were Adele Montalcini, a painter, and Adamo Levi, an electrical engineer and mathematician, whose families had moved from Asti and Casale Monferrato, respectively, to Turin at the turn of the twentieth century.

In her teenage years, she considered becoming a writer and admired Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf, but after seeing a close family friend die of stomach cancer she decided to attend the University of Turin Medical School. Her father discouraged his daughters from attending college, as he feared it would disrupt their potential lives as wives and mothers, but eventually he supported Levi-Montalcini's aspirations to become a doctor. While she was at the University of Turin, the neurohistologist Giuseppe Levi sparked her interest in the developing nervous system. After graduating summa cum laude M.D. in 1936, Montalcini remained at the university as Levi's assistant, but her academic career was cut short by Benito Mussolini's 1938 Manifesto of Race and the subsequent introduction of laws barring Jews from academic and professional careers.

Career and research

Levi-Montalcini lost her assistant position in the anatomy department after the 1938 Italian racial laws barring Jews from university positions were passed. During World War II she set up a laboratory in her bedroom in Turin and studied the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos, discovering that nerve cells die when they lack targets, and laying the groundwork for much of her later research. She described this experience decades later in the science documentary film Death by Design/The Life and Times of Life and Times (1997). The film also features her fraternal twin sister Paola, who became a respected artist best known for her aluminum sculptures designed to bring light to the rooms due to the reflective white surface.

When the Germans invaded Italy in September 1943, her family fled south to Florence, where they survived the Holocaust, under false identities, protected by some non-Jewish friends. During the Nazi occupation, Levi-Montalcini was in contact with the partisans of the Action Party. After the liberation of Florence in August 1944, she volunteered her medical expertise for the Allied health service, providing critical care to those injured during the war. This period highlighted her resilience and commitment to medical science despite the tumultuous circumstances. Upon returning to Turin in 1945, she resumed her research activities. In September 1946, she accepted a one-semester research fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis, which extended into a long-term position due to her groundbreaking work. Her collaboration with Viktor Hamburger was instrumental in furthering her research on nerve growth factor, and she held a significant academic role at the university for over three decades, shaping the future of neurobiology through her mentorship and research.

In September 1946, Levi-Montalcini was granted a one-semester research fellowship in the laboratory of Professor Viktor Hamburger at Washington University in St. Louis; he was interested in two of the articles Levi-Montalcini had published in foreign scientific journals. After she duplicated the results of her home laboratory experiments, Hamburger offered her a research associate position, which she held for 30 years. It was there that, in 1952, she did her most important work: isolating nerve growth factor (NGF) from observations of certain cancerous tissues that cause extremely rapid growth of nerve cells. The critical experiment was done with Hertha Meyer at the Carlos Chagas Filho Biophysics Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1952. Their publication in 1954 became the first definitive indication of the protein.

By transferring pieces of tumours to chick embryos, Montalcini established a mass of cells that was full of nerve fibres. The discovery of nerves growing everywhere like a halo around the tumour cells was surprising. When describing it, Montalcini said it is: "like rivulets of water flowing steadily over a bed of stones." The nerve growth produced by the tumour was unlike anything she had seen before – the nerves took over areas that would become other tissues and even entered veins in the embryo. But nerves did not grow into the arteries, which would flow from the embryo back to the tumour. This suggested to Montalcini that the tumour itself was releasing a substance that was stimulating the growth of nerves. Her research led to the seminal publication "In vitro experiments on the effects of mouse sarcomas 180 and 37 on the spinal and sympathetic ganglia of the chick embryo" in 1954, which was a foundational work in identifying and understanding nerve growth factor (NGF). This discovery paved the way for future research in neurobiology and had profound implications for understanding neurodegenerative diseases.

She was made a full professor in 1958. In 1962, she established a second laboratory in Rome and divided her time between there and St. Louis. In 1963, she became the first woman to receive the Max Weinstein Award (given by the United Cerebral Palsy Association) due to her significant contributions to neurological research.

From 1961 to 1969, she directed the Research Center of Neurobiology of the CNR (Rome), and from 1969 to 1978, the Laboratory of Cellular Biology. After she retired in 1977, she was appointed as director of the Institute of Cell Biology of the Italian National Council of Research in Rome. She later retired from that position in 1979, however continued to be involved as a guest professor.

Levi-Montalcini founded the European Brain Research Institute in 2002, and then served as its president. Her role in this institute was at the centre of some criticism from some parts of the scientific community in 2010.

Controversies were raised about the cooperation of Levi-Montalcini with the Italian pharmaceutical concern Fidia. While working for Fidia, she improved her understanding of gangliosides. Beginning in 1975, she supported the drug Cronassial (a particular mixture of gangliosides) produced by Fidia from bovine brain tissue. Independent studies showed that the drug actually could be successful in the treatment of intended diseases (peripheral neuropathies). Years later, some patients under treatment with Cronassial reported a severe neurological syndrome (Guillain–Barré syndrome). As per the normal cautionary routine, Germany banned Cronassial in 1983, followed by other countries. Italy prohibited the drug only in 1993; at the same time, an investigation revealed that Fidia paid the Italian Ministry of Health for a quick approval of Cronassial and later paid for pushing the use of the drug in the treatment of diseases where it had not been tested. Levi-Montalcini's relationship with the company was revealed during the investigation, and she was criticized publicly.

In the 1990s, she was one of the first scientists to point out the importance of the mast cell in human pathology. In the same period (1993), she identified the endogenous compound palmitoylethanolamide as an important modulator of this cell. Understanding this mechanism initiated a new era of research into this compound which has resulted in more discoveries regarding its mechanisms and benefits, a far better understanding of the endocannabinoid system and new liposomal palmitoylethanolamide product formulations designed specifically for improved absorption and bioavailability.

Levi-Montalcini earned a Nobel Prize along with Stanley Cohen in 1986 in the physiology or medicine category. The two earned their Nobel Prizes for their research into the nerve growth factor (NGF), the protein that causes cell growth due to stimulated nerve tissue.

Political career

On 1 August 2001, she was appointed as Senator for Life by the President of Italy, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.

On 28–29 April 2006, Levi-Montalcini, aged 97, attended the opening assembly of the newly elected Senate, at which the President of the Senate was elected. She declared her preference for the centre-left candidate Franco Marini. Due to her support of the government of Romano Prodi, she was often criticized by some right-wing senators, who accused her of saving the government when the government's exiguous majority in the Senate was at risk. Her old age was mocked by far-right politician Francesco Storace.

Personal life

Levi-Montalcini's father, Adamo Levi, was an electrical engineer and mathematician, and her mother, Adele Montalcini, was a painter. The family's Jewish roots extend back to the Roman Empire; due to the family's strict and traditional background, Adamo was not supportive of women attending college as it would intrude in their ability to tend to the children and house.

Levi-Montalcini had an older brother Gino, who died after a heart attack in 1974. He was one of the best-known contemporary Italian architects and a professor at the University of Turin. She had two sisters: Anna, five years older than Rita, and Paola, her twin sister, a popular artist who died on 29 September 2000, age 91.

In 2003, she filed a libel suit for defamation against Beppe Grillo.

Levi-Montalcini never married and had no children. In a 2006 interview, she said, "I never had any hesitation or regrets in this sense... My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work and interests. I have never felt lonely." She remained active in scientific research and public life well into her later years, even attending the opening assembly of the newly elected Senate at the age of 97. She died in her home in Rome on 30 December 2012 at the age of 103. In honor of her legacy, numerous institutions, scholarships, and awards have been named after her. For instance, the Rita Levi-Montalcini Foundation was established to support education and research for young women in Africa and Italy, ensuring her impact on science and society continues to inspire future generations. Additionally, various commemorative events and memorials, including a Google Doodle on her 106th birthday, celebrate her life and contributions to neurobiology.

Upon her death, the Mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, stated it was a great loss "for all of humanity." He praised her as someone who represented "civic conscience, culture and the spirit of research of our time." Italian astrophysicist Margherita Hack told Sky TG24 TV in a tribute to her fellow scientist, "She is really someone to be admired." Italy's premier, Mario Monti, paid tribute to Levi-Montalcini's "charismatic and tenacious" character and for her lifelong endeavour to "defend the battles in which she believed." Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi praised Levi-Montalcini's civil and moral efforts, saying she was an "inspiring" example for Italy and the world.

According to the former President of the Grand Orient of Italy, she was invited and participated in many cultural events organized by the main Italian Masonic organization.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-01 18:38:19

1461) Georg Bednorz

Summary

J. Georg Bednorz (born May 16, 1950, West Germany) is a German physicist who, along with Karl Alex Müller (q.v.), was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint discovery of superconductivity in certain substances at temperatures higher than had previously been thought attainable.

Bednorz graduated from the University of Münster in 1976 and earned his doctorate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zürich in 1982. That same year he joined the IBM Zürich Research Laboratory, where he was recruited by Müller into the latter’s studies of superconductivity.

In 1983 the two men began systematically testing newly developed ceramic materials known as oxides in the hope that such substances could act as superconductors. In their efforts Bednorz was the experimenter in charge of the actual making and testing of the oxides. In 1986 the two men succeeded in achieving superconductivity in a barium-lanthanum-copper oxide at a temperature of 35 kelvins (-238° C [-396° F]), 12 K higher than the highest temperature at which superconductivity had previously been achieved in any substance.

Details

Johannes Georg Bednorz (born 16 May 1950) is a German physicist who, together with K. Alex Müller, discovered high-temperature superconductivity in ceramics, for which they shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Life and work

Bednorz was born in Neuenkirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany to elementary-school teacher Anton and piano teacher Elisabeth Bednorz, as the youngest of four children. His parents were both from Silesia in Central Europe, but were forced to move westwards in turbulences of World War II.

As a child, his parents tried to get him interested in classical music, but he was more practically inclined, preferring to work on motorcycles and cars. (Although as a teenager he did eventually learn to play the violin and trumpet.) In high school he developed an interest in the natural sciences, focusing on chemistry, which he could learn in a hands-on manner through experiments.

In 1968, Bednorz enrolled at the University of Münster to study chemistry. However, he soon felt lost in the large body of students, and opt to switch to the much less popular subject of crystallography, a subfield of mineralogy at the interface of chemistry and physics. In 1972, his teachers Wolfgang Hoffmann and Horst Böhm arranged for him to spend the summer at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory as a visiting student. The experience here would shape his further career: not only did he meet his later collaborator K. Alex Müller, the head of the physics department, but he also experienced the atmosphere of creativity and freedom cultivated at the IBM lab, which he credits as a strong influence on his way of conducting science.

After another visit in 1973, he came to Zurich in 1974 for six months to do the experimental part of his diploma work. Here he grew crystals of SrTiO3, a ceramic material belonging to the family of perovskites. Müller, himself interested in perovskites, urged him to continue his research, and after obtaining his master's degree from Münster in 1977 Bednorz started a PhD at the ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) under supervision of Heini Gränicher and Alex Müller. In 1978, his future wife, Mechthild Wennemer, whom he had met in Münster, followed him to Zürich to start her own PhD.

In 1982, after obtaining his PhD, he joined the IBM lab. There, he joined Müller's ongoing research on superconductivity. In 1983, Bednorz and Müller began a systematic study of the electrical properties of ceramics formed from transition metal oxides, and in 1986 they succeeded in inducing superconductivity in a lanthanum barium copper oxide (LaBaCuO, also known as LBCO). The oxide's critical temperature (Tc) was 35 K, a full 12 K higher than the previous record. This discovery stimulated a great deal of additional research in high-temperature superconductivity on cuprate materials with structures similar to LBCO, soon leading to the discovery of compounds such as BSCCO (Tc 107K) and YBCO (Tc 92K).

In 1987, Bednorz and Müller were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials". In the same year Bednorz was appointed an IBM Fellow.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-06-04 22:43:59

1462) K. Alex Müller

Gist

When certain metals are cooled to extremely low temperatures, they become superconductors, conducting electrical current entirely without resistance. However, very low temperatures, just a few degrees above absolute zero, are required for this phenomenon to occur. In 1986 Alex Müller and Georg Bednorz discovered that a material composed of copper oxide with lantanum and barium additives became superconducting at a significantly higher temperature than previously tested materials. This sparked extensive research into similar materials.

Summary

K. Alex Müller (born April 20, 1927, Basel, Switzerland—died January 9, 2023, Zürich, Switzerland) was a Swiss physicist who, along with J. Georg Bednorz, was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint discovery of superconductivity in certain substances at higher temperatures than had previously been thought attainable.

Müller received his doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1958, and beginning in 1963 he performed research in solid-state physics at the IBM Zürich Research Laboratory, heading the physics department there for several years and becoming an IBM fellow in 1982.

A specialist in the ceramic compounds known as oxides, Müller in the early 1980s began searching for substances that would become superconductive (i.e., conduct electricity with no resistance) at higher temperatures than had theretofore been obtained. The highest transition temperature (the temperature below which a material loses all electrical resistance) attainable at that time was about 23 K (−250° C [−418° F]). In 1983 Müller recruited Bednorz to help him systematically test various oxides, materials that a few recent studies had indicated might be suitable for superconductivity. In 1986 the two men succeeded in achieving superconductivity in a recently developed barium-lanthanum-copper oxide at a temperature of 35 K (−238° C [−396° F]), 12 K higher than had previously been achieved. Their discovery immediately prompted a wave of renewed superconductivity experiments by other scientists worldwide, this time using oxides, and within a year transition temperatures approaching 100 K (−173° C [−280° F]) had been achieved.

The intense research generated by Müller’s and Bednorz’s discovery raised the prospect that superconductivity could be achieved at temperatures high enough for the generation and transmission of electric power, a feat that would have important economic implications.

Details

Karl Alexander Müller (20 April 1927 – 9 January 2023) was a Swiss physicist and Nobel laureate. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 with Georg Bednorz for their work in superconductivity in ceramic materials.

Biography

Müller was born in Basel, Switzerland, on 20 April 1927, to Irma (née Feigenbaum) and Paul Müller. His mother is Jewish. His family immediately moved to Salzburg, Austria, where his father was studying music. Alex and his mother then moved to Dornach, near Basel, to the home of his grandparents. Then they moved to Lugano, in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, where he learned to speak Italian fluently. His mother died when he was 11.

In the spring of 1956 Müller married Ingeborg Marie Louise Winkler. They had a son, Eric, in the summer of 1957, and a daughter, Sylvia, in 1960.

Education

After his mother's death, Müller was sent to school at the Evangelical College in Schiers, in the eastern part of Switzerland. Here he studied from 1938 to 1945, obtaining his baccalaureate (Matura).

Müller then enrolled in the Physics and Mathematics Department of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich). He took courses by Wolfgang Pauli, who made a deep impression on him. After receiving his Diplom, he worked for one year, then returned to ETH Zürich for a PhD, submitting his thesis at the end of 1957.

Career

Müller joined the Battelle Memorial Institute in Geneva, soon becoming the manager of a magnetic resonance group. During this time he became a lecturer at the University of Zürich. In 1963 he accepted an offer as a research staff member at the IBM Zürich Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon, where he remained until his retirement. In parallel, he maintained his affiliation with University of Zurich where he was appointed professor in 1970. From 1972 to 1985 Müller was manager of the ZRL physics department. In 1982 he became an IBM Fellow. He received an honorary doctorate from Technical University of Munich and University of Geneva. In 1987 (before winning the Nobel Prize) he got an honorary degree (laurea honoris causa) in Physics from the University of Pavia.

Research

For his undergraduate diploma work, Müller studied under G. Busch. He worked on the Hall Effect in gray tin, a semimetal.

Between his undergraduate degree and beginning his graduate studies, he worked for one year in the Department of Industrial Research at ETH on the Eidophor large-scale display system.

At IBM his research for almost 15 years centered on SrTiO3 (strontium titanate) and related perovskite compounds. He studied their photochromic properties when doped with various transition-metal ions; their chemical binding, ferroelectric and soft-mode properties; and the critical and multicritical phenomena of their structural phase transitions. Important highlights of this research have been published in a book written together with Tom Kool from the University of Amsterdam.

Death

Müller died on 9 January 2023, at the age of 95 in Zürich.

Nobel Prize–winning work

In the early 1980s, Müller began searching for substances that would become superconductive at higher temperatures. The highest critical temperature (Tc) attainable at that time was about 23 K. In 1983 Müller recruited Georg Bednorz to IBM, to help systematically test various oxides. A few recent studies had indicated these materials might superconduct, but experts who knew about Müller's idea thought it was “crazy”. In 1986 the two researchers succeeded in achieving superconductivity in lanthanum barium copper oxide (LBCO) at a temperature of 35 K. Over the previous 75 years the critical temperature had risen from 11 K in 1911 to 23 K in 1973 where it had remained for 13 years. Thus 35 K was incredibly high by the prevailing standards of superconductivity research. This discovery stimulated a great deal of additional research in high-temperature superconductivity, leading to the discovery of compounds such as BSCCO (Tc = 107 K) and YBCO (T'c = 92 K).

They reported their discovery in the June 1986 issue of Zeitschrift für Physik B. Before the end of the year, Shoji Tanaka at the University of Tokyo and then Paul Chu at the University of Houston had each independently confirmed their result. A couple of months later Chu achieved superconductivity at 93 K in YBCO, triggering a stampede of scientific interest exemplified by the 1987 "Woodstock of physics", at which Müller was a featured presenter.

In 1987 Müller and Bednorz were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics—the shortest time between the discovery and the prize award for any scientific Nobel.

Math Is Fun Forum

#1476 2024-04-20 22:28:28

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#1477 2024-04-21 20:40:17

Re: crème de la crème

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#1481 2024-04-26 20:24:16

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#1484 2024-04-29 16:31:51

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#1486 2024-05-01 16:35:42

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#1488 2024-05-13 21:15:23

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#1491 2024-05-18 22:03:43

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#1493 2024-05-22 17:42:46

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#1497 2024-05-26 16:11:28

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#1498 2024-05-27 17:09:04

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#1499 2024-06-01 18:38:19

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