crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-07 15:46:52

2013) F. Sherwood Rowland

Gist

The atmosphere around our earth contains small amounts of ozone; molecules made from three oxygen atoms. Ozone has played a major role in absorbing ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which would otherwise negatively impact life on earth. In 1974, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina demonstrated that CFC gases, freons, have a damaging effect on ozone in the atmosphere. Freons had many uses, including propellants in spray cans and refrigerants in refrigerators. By limiting the use of freons, the depletion of the ozone layer has been slowed.

Summary

F. Sherwood Rowland (born June 28, 1927, Delaware, Ohio, U.S.—died March 10, 2012, Corona del Mar, California) was an American chemist who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with chemists Mario Molina and Paul Crutzen for research on the depletion of the Earth’s ozone layer. Working with Molina, Rowland discovered that man-made chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) propellants accelerate the decomposition of the ozonosphere, which protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation. Their findings eventually brought about international changes in the chemical industry.

Rowland was educated in his hometown at Ohio Wesleyan University (B.A., 1948) and at the University of Chicago (M.S., 1951; Ph.D., 1952). He held academic posts at Princeton University (1952–56) and at the University of Kansas (1956–64) before becoming a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, in 1964. At Irvine in the early 1970s he began working with Molina. Rowland was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978.

Rowland and Molina theorized that CFC gases combine with solar radiation and decompose in the stratosphere, releasing atoms of chlorine and chlorine monoxide that are individually able to destroy large numbers of ozone molecules. Their research, first published in Nature magazine in 1974, initiated a federal investigation of the problem. The National Academy of Sciences concurred with their findings in 1976, and in 1978 CFC-based aerosols were banned in the United States. Further validation of their work came in the mid-1980s with the discovery of the so-called hole in the ozone shield over Antarctica. In 1987 an international protocol to ban the production of ozone-depleting gases was negotiated by the United Nations in Montreal.

Details

Frank Sherwood Rowland (June 28, 1927 – March 10, 2012) was an American Nobel laureate and a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. His research was on atmospheric chemistry and chemical kinetics. His best-known work was the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons contribute to ozone depletion.

Education and early life

Born in Delaware, Ohio, Rowland received a majority of his education in public schools and, due to accelerated promotion was able to graduate high school several weeks before his 16th birthday. In the summers during his high school career, Frank was entrusted to run the local weather service station. This was Rowland's first exposure to systematic experimentation and data collection. After entering Ohio Wesleyan University, Rowland was about to graduate shortly before his 18th birthday. Instead, he was enlisted to the Navy to train radar operators. Rowland was discharged after 14 months as a non commissioned officer. After entering the University of Chicago, Rowland was assigned Willard F. Libby as a mentor and began to study radiochemistry. Rowland's thesis was about the chemical state of cyclotron-produced radioactive bromine atoms. Rowland received his B.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1948. He then earned his M.S. in 1951 and his Ph.D. in 1952, both from the University of Chicago.

Career and research

Rowland held academic posts at Princeton University (1952–56) and at the University of Kansas (1956–64) before becoming a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, in 1964. At Irvine in the early 1970s he began working with Mario J. Molina. Rowland was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978 and served as a president of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1993. His best-known work was the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons contribute to ozone depletion. Rowland theorized that man made organic compound gases will decompose as a result of solar radiation in the stratosphere, releasing atoms of chlorine which react with oxygen (ozone) to form chlorine monoxide, and that they are individually able to destroy large numbers of ozone molecules. It was obvious that Rowland had a good idea of what was occurring at higher altitudes when he stated "...I knew that such a molecule could not remain inert in the atmosphere forever, if only because solar photochemistry at high altitudes would break it down". Rowland's research, first published in Nature magazine in 1974, initiated a scientific investigation of the problem. In 1978, a first ban on CFC-based aerosols in spray cans was issued in the United States. The actual production did however not stop and was soon on the old levels. It took till the 1980s to allow for a global regulation policy.

Rowland performed many measurements of the atmosphere. One experiment included collecting air samples at various cities and locations around the globe to determine CCl3F North-South mixing. By measuring the concentrations at different latitudes, Rowland was able to see that CCl3F was mixing between hemispheres quite rapidly. The same measurement was repeated 8 years later, and the results showed a steady increase in CCl3F concentrations. Rowland's work also showed how the density of the ozone layer varied by season increasing in November and decreasing until April where it levels out for the summer only to increase in November. Data gained throughout successive years showed that although the pattern was consistent, the overall ozone levels were dropping. Rowland and his colleagues interacted both with the public and the political side and suggested various solutions, which allowed to step wise reduce the CFC impact. CFC emissions were regulated first within Canada, the United States, Sweden and Norway. In the 1980s, the Vienna Agreement and the Montreal Protocol allowed for global regulation.

Personal life

Frank Rowland was the father of art historian Ingrid Rowland and Jeff Rowland. He had two granddaughters. After suffering from a short bout of ill health, Rowland died on March 10, 2012, of complications from Parkinson's disease. Upon hearing the news, renowned chemist and good friend Mario J. Molina stated: "Sherry was a prime influence throughout my career and had inspired me and many others to walk in the shadow of his greatness".

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-08 15:52:26

2014) Edward B. Lewis

Gist

Among more advanced organisms, life begins when a fertilized egg divides and forms new cells which, in turn, also divide. Initially these cells appear identical, but in time, they begin to change. Some cells go to make up the heart, others nerve paths, and still others strands of hair, for example. Genes regulate this process. Edward Lewis studied fruit flies and in the 1970s he discovered, among other things, that the positions of the flies' bodily organs matched the corresponding genes' positions on the chromosome.

Summary

Edward B. Lewis (born May 20, 1918, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died July 21, 2004, Pasadena, California) was an American developmental geneticist who, along with geneticists Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus, was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering the functions that control early embryonic development.

Lewis’s interest in genetics was kindled in high school. He studied biostatistics at the University of Minnesota (B.A., 1939) and genetics at the California Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1942), where he taught from 1946 to 1988. Working independently of Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus, Lewis based his research on studies of the fruit fly, or vinegar fly (Drosophila melanogaster), a species popular for genetic experiments. By crossbreeding thousands of flies, he was able to establish that genes are generally arranged on the chromosome in the same order as their corresponding body segments—e.g., the first set of genes controls the head and thorax; the middle set, the abdomen; and the final set, posterior parts. This orderliness is known as the colinearity principle. Lewis also found that genetic regulatory functions may overlap. For example, a fly with an extra set of wings has a defective gene not in the abdominal region but in the thoracic region, which normally functions as a regulator of such mutations.

Lewis’s work on the fruit fly helped to explain mechanisms of general biological development, such as the causes of congenital deformities, in humans and other higher organisms. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1968 and received the National Medal of Science in 1990.

Details

Edward Butts Lewis (May 20, 1918 – July 21, 2004) was an American geneticist, a corecipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He helped to found the field of evolutionary developmental biology.

Early life

Lewis was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the second son of Laura Mary Lewis (née Histed) and Edward Butts Lewis, a watchmaker-jeweler. His full name was supposed to be Edward Butts Lewis Jr., but his birth certificate was incorrectly filled out with "B." as his middle name.

Lewis graduated from E. L. Meyers High School.

Education and career

He received a BA in Biostatistics from the University of Minnesota in 1939, where he worked on Drosophila melanogaster in the lab of C.P. Oliver. In 1942 Lewis received a PhD from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working under the guidance of Alfred Sturtevant. In 1939, Edward B. Lewis arrived at Caltech and finished his PhD within three years. Lewis enrolled in the U.S. Army Air Corps training program in meteorology in 1942 and later received his master's degree in the area a year later. As he left for military service in 1943, he was told by the university president Robert A. Millikan that he had a position as an instructor at Caltech when he returned. He served working mostly as a weather forecaster in Hawaii and Okinawa for four years. Lewis returned in 1946 and took his position at Caltech where his duties included helping in the laboratory for an introductory genetics course. He was promoted in 1956 to a professor and became the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology in 1966.

Personal life

In 1946, Edward B. Lewis met Pamela Harrah (1925–2018). She was an accomplished artist, but also shared Lewis' interests in animal life. She had gone to Stanford and studied genetics and later discovered the mutant Polycomb, that now is important in the understanding of gene regulation. They married and had three sons named Glenn, Hugh, and Keith. Pam developed an infection that caused her to have a visual and physical, partial unilateral paralysis, which limited her mobility.

Lewis maintained a constant exercise routine in his day, as he started his mornings with breakfast and exercise, until he suffered from cancer. Lewis would normally have lunch with his faculty members at the Anthenaeum, then take a nap and return to the laboratory in the evening. The most constant part of his daily routine was that he would do most of his work at night. He also enjoyed playing the flute and would allow himself to have time to play the flute at night. In addition, Lewis appreciated other aspects of life even though they interrupted his typical schedule. Some other things he did with his time include: jogging, swimming, playing on the beach, playing chamber music with friends, going to see movies, and attending opera performances. Edward B. Lewis was a humble man who did not always receive attention for his works. Over time, his work with Drosophila became more appreciated and he began to attract more attention.

Career and research

His Nobel Prize–winning studies with Drosophila, (including the discovery of the Drosophila Bithorax complex of homeotic genes, and elucidation of its function), founded the field of evolutionary developmental biology and laid the groundwork for our current understanding of the universal, evolutionarily conserved strategies controlling animal development. He is credited with development of the complementation test. His key publications in the fields of genetics, developmental biology, radiation and cancer are presented in the book Genes, Development and Cancer, which was released in 2004.

During the 1950s, Lewis studied the effects of radiation from X-rays, nuclear fallout and other sources as possible causes of cancer. He reviewed medical records from survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as radiologists and patients exposed to X-rays. Lewis concluded that "health risks from radiation had been underestimated". Lewis published articles in Science and other journals and made a presentation to a Congressional committee on atomic energy in 1957.

At the scientific level of the debate, the crucial question was whether the "threshold theory" was valid or whether, as Lewis insisted, the effects of radioactivity were "linear with no threshold", where every exposure to radiation had a long-term cumulative effect.

The issue of linearity versus threshold re-entered the debate on nuclear fallout in 1962, when Ernest Sternglass, a Pittsburgh physicist, argued that the linearity thesis was confirmed by the research of Alice Stewart.

On November 20, 2001, Lewis was interviewed by Elliot Meyerowitz in the Kerckhoff Library at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. This interview was released on DVD in 2004 as "Conversations in Genetics: Volume 1, No. 3 – Edward B. Lewis; An Oral History of Our Intellectual Heritage in Genetics" 67 min; Producer Rochelle Easton Esposito; The Genetics Society of America.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-09 15:34:50

2015) Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

Gist:

Life

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard was born in Heyrothsberge, Germany, as one of five children in a large family. Her father was an architect and both her parents were interested in art and music. Aged just 12, Christiane decided to pursue a career in biology. She studied biology at Goethe University in Frankfurt, but later moved to Tübingen, where she studied biochemistry before undertaking graduate studies at the Max Planck Institute. She went on to work at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg before returning to the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen in 1984.

Work

Among more advanced organisms, life begins when a fertilized egg divides and forms new cells which, in turn, also divide. Initially these cells appear identical, but in time, they begin to change. Some cells go to make up the heart, others nerve paths, and still others strands of hair, for example. Genes regulate this process. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus studied the development of fruit flies and, around 1980, succeeded in identifying and classifying the 15 genes that direct the cells to form a new fly.

Summary

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (born October 20, 1942, Magdeburg, Germany) is a German developmental geneticist who was jointly awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with geneticists Eric F. Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis for their research concerning the mechanisms of early embryonic development. Nüsslein-Volhard, working in tandem with Wieschaus, expanded upon the pioneering work of Lewis, who used the fruit fly, or vinegar fly (Drosophila melanogaster), as an experimental subject. Her work has relevance to the development of all multicellular organisms, including humans.

At Eberhard-Karl University of Tübingen, Nüsslein-Volhard received a diploma in biochemistry in 1968 and a doctorate in genetics in 1973. After holding fellowships in Basel and Freiburg, she joined Wieschaus as a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg in 1978. In 1981 she returned to Tübingen, where she served as director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology from 1985 to 2015.

At Heidelberg, Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus spent more than a year crossbreeding 40,000 fruit fly families and systematically examining their genetic makeup at a dual microscope. Their trial-and-error methods resulted in the discovery that of the fly’s 20,000 genes, about 5,000 are deemed important to early development and about 140 are essential. They assigned responsibility for the fruit fly’s embryonic development to three genetic categories: gap genes, which lay out the head-to-tail body plan; pair-rule genes, which determine body segmentation; and segment-polarity genes, which establish repeating structures within each segment.

In the early 1990s Nüsslein-Volhard began studying genes that control development in the zebra fish Danio rerio. These organisms are ideal models for investigations into developmental biology because they have clear embryos, have a rapid rate of reproduction, and are closely related to other vertebrates. Nüsslein-Volhard studied the migration of cells from their sites of origin to their sites of destination within zebra fish embryos. Her investigations in zebra fish have helped elucidate genes and other cellular substances involved in human development and in the regulation of normal human physiology.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Nüsslein-Volhard received the Leibniz Prize (1986) and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1991). She also published several books, including Zebrafish: A Practical Approach (2002; written with Ralf Dahm) and Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development (2006).

Details

Christiane (Janni) Nüsslein-Volhard (born 20 October 1942) is a German developmental biologist and a 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate. She is the only woman from Germany to have received a Nobel Prize in the sciences.

Nüsslein-Volhard earned her PhD in 1974 from the University of Tübingen, where she studied protein-DNA interaction. She won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1991 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995, together with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis, for their research on the genetic control of embryonic development.

Early life and education

Nüsslein-Volhard was born in Magdeburg on 20 October 1942, the second of five children to Rolf Volhard, an architect, and Brigitte Haas Volhard, a nursery school teacher. She has four siblings: three sisters and one brother. She grew up and went to school in south Frankfurt, where she was exposed to art and music and thus was "trained in looking at things and recognizing things". Her great-grandfather was the chemist Jacob Volhard, and her grandfather was the known internist Franz Volhard. She is also the aunt of the Nobel laureate in chemistry Benjamin List.

After the Abitur in 1962, she briefly considered pursuing medicine, but dropped the idea after doing a month’s nursing course in a hospital. Instead, she opted to study biology at Goethe University Frankfurt. In 1964 Nüsslein-Volhard left Frankfurt for the University of Tübingen, to start a new course in biochemistry. She originally wanted to do behavioral biology, "but then somehow I ended up in biochemistry (...) and molecular genetics because at the time this was the most modern aspect, and I was ambitious — I wanted to go where the leaders were. The old-fashioned botanists and zoologists were such dull people— there was nothing interesting there."

She received a diploma in biochemistry in 1969 and earned a PhD in 1974 for research into protein–DNA interactions and the binding of RNA polymerase in Escherichia coli.

Career

In 1975, Nüsslein-Volhard became a postdoctoral researcher in Walter Gehring´s laboratory at the Biozentrum, University of Basel. She was a specialist in the developmental biology of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) supported by a long-term fellowship from the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). In 1977, she continued in the laboratory of Klaus Sander at University of Freiburg, who was an expert in embryonic patterning. In 1978, she set up her own lab in the newly founded European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg with Eric Wieschaus, whom she had met in Basel. Over the next three years they examined about 20,000 mutated fly families, collected about 600 mutants with an altered body pattern and found that out of the approximately 5,000 essential genes only 120 were essential for early development. In October 1980, they published the mere 15 genes controlling the segmented pattern of the Drosophila larva.

In 1981, Nüsslein-Volhard moved to the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society in Tübingen. From 1984 until her retirement in 2014, she was the director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen and also led its genetics department. After 1984, she launched work on the developmental biology of vertebrates, using the zebrafish (Danio rerio) as her research model.

In 2001, she became a member of the Nationaler Ethikrat (National Ethics Council of Germany) for the ethical assessment of new developments in the life sciences and their influence on the individual and society. Her primer for the lay-reader, Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development, was published in April 2006.

In 2004, she started the Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Foundation (Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Stiftung) which aids promising young female German scientists with children. The foundation's main focus is to facilitate childcare as a supplement to existing stipends and day care.

Research

During the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, little was known about the genetic and molecular mechanisms by which multicellular organisms develop from single cells to morphologically complex forms during embryogenesis. Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus identified genes involved in embryonic development by a series of genetic screens, generating random mutations in fruit flies using ethyl methanesulfonate. Some of these mutations affected genes involved in the development of the embryo. They took advantage of the segmented form of Drosophila larvae to address the logic of the genes controlling development. They looked at the pattern of segments and denticles in each mutant under the microscope, and were therefore able to work out that particular genes were involved in different processes during development based on their differing mutant phenotypes (such as fewer segments, gaps in the normal segment pattern, and alterations in the patterns of denticles on the segments). Many of these genes were given descriptive names based on the appearance of the mutant larvae, such as hedgehog, gurken (German: "cucumbers"), and Krüppel ( "cripple"). Later, researchers Pavel Tomancal, Amy Beaton, et. Al, identified exactly which gene had been affected by each mutation, thereby identifying a set of genes crucial for Drosophila embryogenesis.

The subsequent study of these mutants and their interactions led to important new insights into early Drosophila development, especially the mechanisms that underlie the step-wise development of body segments. These experiments are not only distinguished by their sheer scale (with the methods available at the time, they involved an enormous workload), but more importantly by their significance for organisms other than fruit flies.

Her findings led to important realizations about evolution – for example, that protostomes and deuterostomes are likely to have had a relatively well-developed common ancestor with a much more complex body plan than had been conventionally thought.

Additionally, they greatly increased our understanding of the regulation of transcription, as well as cell fate during development.

Nüsslein-Volhard is associated with the discovery of Toll, which led to the identification of toll-like receptors.

As of 2023, Nüsslein-Volhard has an h-index of 104 according to Scopus.

Personal life

Nüsslein-Volhard married in the mid-1960s while studying at the Goethe University Frankfurt, but divorced soon afterward and did not have any children. She lives in Bebenhausen, Germany. She has said that she loves to sing, play the flute and do chamber music. She published a cookbook in 2006.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-10 16:15:57

2016) Eric F. Wieschaus

Gist

Wieschaus (born June 8, 1947, South Bend, Ind., U.S.) is an American developmental biologist who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, with geneticists Edward B. Lewis and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (qq. v.), for discovering the genetic controls of early embryonic development.

Among more advanced organisms, life begins when a fertilized egg divides and forms new cells which, in turn, also divide. Initially these cells appear identical, but in time, they begin to change. Some cells go to make up the heart, others nerve paths, and still others strands of hair, for example. Genes regulate this process. Eric Wieschaus and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard studied the development of fruit flies and, around 1980, succeeded in identifying and classifying the 15 genes that direct the cells to form a new fly.

Summary

Eric F. Wieschaus (born June 8, 1947, South Bend, Ind., U.S.) is an American developmental biologist who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, with geneticists Edward B. Lewis and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (qq.v.), for discovering the genetic controls of early embryonic development. Working together with Nüsslein-Volhard, Wieschaus expanded upon the innovative work of Lewis, who likewise based his studies on the fruit fly, or vinegar fly (Drosophila melanogaster), a popular species for genetic experiments.

Wieschaus graduated from the University of Notre Dame (B.S., 1969) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1974) and pursued postdoctoral work at the University of Zürich in Switzerland. He began working with Nüsslein-Volhard at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (1978–81) in Heidelberg, W.Ger. In 1981 he joined the faculty of Princeton University as assistant professor, later becoming associate professor (1983) and full professor (1987).

With Nüsslein-Volhard at Heidelberg, Wieschaus examined mutations in 40,000 fruit fly families, discovering that about 5,000 of the fly’s 20,000 genes are important to embryonic development and about 140 are essential. Their research, published in the English scientific journal Nature in 1980, generated the widely accepted model that three sets of genes control subdivision in the developing embryo: gap genes, a blueprint for general body development; pair-rule genes, which subdivide these general regions into body segments; and segment-polarity genes, which affect specific structures within these segments. Their work helped scientists to better understand congenital mutations in other animals, including humans.

Details

Eric Francis Wieschaus (born June 8, 1947 in South Bend, Indiana) is an American evolutionary developmental biologist and 1995 Nobel Prize-winner.

Early life

Born in South Bend, Indiana, he attended John Carroll Catholic High School in Birmingham, Alabama before attending the University of Notre Dame for his undergraduate studies (B.S., biology), and Yale University (Ph.D., biology) for his graduate work.

Scientific career

In 1978, he moved to his first independent job, at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany and moved from Heidelberg to Princeton University in the United States in 1981.

Much of his research has focused on embryogenesis in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, specifically in the patterning that occurs in the early Drosophila embryo. Most of the gene products used by the embryo at these stages are already present in the unfertilized egg and were produced by maternal transcription during oogenesis. A small number of gene products, however, are supplied by transcription in the embryo itself. He has focused on these "zygotically" active genes because he believes the temporal and spatial pattern of their transcription may provide the triggers controlling the normal sequence of embryonic development. Saturation of all the possible mutations on each chromosome by random events to test embryonic lethality was done by Eric Wieschaus. This body of science eventually was termed the Heidelberg screen.

In 1995, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edward B. Lewis and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard as co-recipients, for their work revealing the genetic control of embryonic development.

As of 2018, Wieschaus is the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology at Princeton. He was formerly Adjunct Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey – Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

Personal life

He has three daughters and is married to molecular biologist Gertrud Schüpbach, who is also a professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, working on Drosophila oogenesis.

Wieschaus is an atheist and is one of the 77 Nobel Laureates who signed the 2007 petition to repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-11 15:42:41

2017) Douglas Osheroff

Gist:

Life

Douglas Osheroff was born in Aberdeen, Washington, into a family with Eastern European roots and many medical professionals. He became interested in science early and engaged in dangerous experiments in his free time. He studied at Caltech, an inspiring environment where Richard Feynman lectured, and continued his education at Cornell, where he studied low temperature physics and met his wife, Phyllis Liu. After a subsequent 15 years at Bell Labs, he moved to Stanford to pursue his talent as a teacher.

Work

When certain substances are cooled to extremely low temperatures, they become superfluid, flowing without any friction. This applies to helium-4, the most common form of helium, but for a long time the superfluidity of helium-3 was in dispute. The different types of helium are described by different quantum mechanical rules and equations under which helium-4 has a whole-number spin while helium-3 has a half-number spin. In 1972 Douglas Osheroff, David Lee and Robert Richardson verified that helium-3 also becomes superfluid at extremely low temperatures.

Summary

Douglas Osheroff (born August 1, 1945, Aberdeen, Washington, U.S.) is an American physicist who, along with David Lee and Robert Richardson, was the corecipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery of superfluidity in the isotope helium-3.

Osheroff received a bachelor’s degree (1967) from the California Institute of Technology and a doctorate (1973) from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He was a graduate student working with Lee and Richardson in the low-temperature laboratory at Cornell when the team made its discovery in 1972. The team was investigating the properties of helium-3 under temperatures of just a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero (−273° C). Osheroff noticed minute jumps in the internal pressure of the sample of helium-3 under investigation, and he drew the team’s attention to these small deviations. The researchers eventually concluded that the helium-3 had undergone a phase transition to a superfluid state, in which a liquid’s atoms lose their randomness and move about in a coordinated manner. Such a substance lacks all internal friction, flows without resistance, and behaves according to quantum mechanical laws rather than to those of classical fluid mechanics. The discovery of superfluidity in helium-3 enabled scientists to study directly in macroscopic—or visible—systems the quantum mechanical effects that had previously been studied only indirectly in molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.

Osheroff conducted research at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1972 to 1982 and headed solid-state and low-temperature research there from 1982 to 1987. He later taught at Stanford University.

Details

Douglas Dean Osheroff (born August 1, 1945) is an American physicist known for his work in experimental condensed matter physics, in particular for his co-discovery of superfluidity in Helium-3. For his contributions he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics along with David Lee and Robert C. Richardson. Osheroff is currently the J. G. Jackson and C. J. Wood Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Stanford University.

Life and work

Osheroff was born in Aberdeen, Washington. His father, William Osheroff, was the son of Jewish immigrants who left Russia. His mother, Bessie Anne (Ondov), a nurse, was the daughter of Slovak immigrants (her own father was a Lutheran minister). from the Felvidék, Upper Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary. Osheroff was confirmed in the Lutheran Church but he was given the chance to choose and decided not to attend any longer. He has stated "In some sense it seemed that lying in church is the worst place to lie. I guess at some emotional level I accept the idea of God, but I don't know how God would manifest itself."

Osheroff earned his bachelor's degree in 1967 from Caltech, where he attended lectures by Richard Feynman and did undergraduate research for Gerry Neugebauer.

Osheroff joined the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics at Cornell University as a graduate student, doing research in low-temperature physics. Together with David Lee, the head of the laboratory, and Robert C. Richardson, Osheroff used a Pomeranchuk cell to investigate the behaviour of 3He at temperatures within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero. They discovered unexpected effects in their measurements, which they eventually explained as phase transitions to a superfluid phase of 3He. Lee, Richardson and Osheroff were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996 for this discovery.

Osheroff received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1973. He then worked at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey for 15 years, continuing to research low-temperature phenomena in 3He. In 1987 he moved to the Departments of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University, where he also served as department chair from 1993 to 1996. His research is focused on phenomena that occur at extremely low temperatures.

Osheroff was selected to serve on the Space Shuttle Columbia investigation panel, serving much the same role as Richard Feynman did on the Space Shuttle Challenger panel.

He currently serves on the board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American government.

Osheroff is left-handed, and he often blames his slight quirks and eccentricities on it. He is also an avid photographer and introduces students at Stanford to medium-format film photography in a freshman seminar titled "Technical Aspects of Photography." In addition, he has taught the Stanford introductory physics course on electricity and magnetism on multiple occasions, most recently in Spring 2008, as well as undergraduate labs on low temperature physics.

Among his physics outreach activities, Osheroff participated in the science festivals for middle and high school students, is an official guest of honor at the International Young Physicists' Tournament 2013.

He married a biochemist, Phyllis Liu-Osheroff, in 1970.

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

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-12 15:12:27

2018) Robert Coleman Richardson

Gist:

Work

When certain substances are cooled to extremely low temperatures, they become superfluid, flowing without any friction. This applies to helium-4, the most common form of helium, but for a long time the superfluidity of helium-3 was in dispute. The different types of helium are described by different quantum mechanical rules and equations under which helium-4 has a whole-number spin while helium-3 has a half-number spin. In 1972 Robert Richardson, David Lee, and Douglas Osheroff verified that helium-3 also becomes superfluid at extremely low temperatures.

Summary

Robert C. Richardson (born June 26, 1937, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died February 19, 2013, Ithaca, New York) was an American physicist who was the corecipient, along with Douglas Osheroff and David Lee, of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery of superfluidity in the isotope helium-3 (3He).

Richardson received a Ph.D. in physics from Duke University (Durham, North Carolina) in 1966 and joined the faculty of Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) in 1967. He served as director of the laboratory of atomic and solid-state physics there from 1990 to 1996.

At the time of their discovery in 1972, Richardson and Lee were senior researchers in the low-temperature laboratory at Cornell and were investigating the properties of the isotope helium-3. They had cooled a sample of helium-3 to within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero (−273° C) and were monitoring its internal pressure. Osheroff, a graduate student on the research team, noticed small jumps in the internal pressure that the researchers eventually explained as a phase transition to superfluidity. When a liquid becomes superfluid, its atoms lose their randomness and can flow in a coordinated manner. Helium-3 in this state lacks the internal friction that exists in normal liquids and thus flows without resistance. Because superfluid helium-3 is governed by the quantum laws of microphysics, it has allowed scientists to study directly in macroscopic—or visible—systems the quantum mechanical effects that previously could be studied only indirectly in such invisible particles as molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.

Details

Robert Coleman Richardson (June 26, 1937 – February 19, 2013) was an American experimental physicist whose area of research included sub-millikelvin temperature studies of helium-3. Richardson, along with David Lee, as senior researchers, and then graduate student Douglas Osheroff, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1972 discovery of the property of superfluidity in helium-3 atoms in the Cornell University Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics.

Richardson was born in Washington D.C. He went to high school at Washington-Lee in Arlington, Virginia. He later described Washington-Lee's biology and physics courses as "very old-fashioned" for the time. "The idea of 'advanced placement' had not yet been invented," he wrote in his Nobel Prize autobiography. He took his first calculus course when he was a sophomore in college.

Richardson attended Virginia Tech and received a B.S. in 1958 and a M.S. in 1960. He received his PhD from Duke University in 1965.

Background

At the time of his death, he was the Floyd Newman Professor of Physics at Cornell University, although he no longer operated a laboratory. From 1998 to 2007 he served as Cornell's vice provost for research, and from 2007 to 2009 was senior science adviser to the president and provost. His past experimental work focused on using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance to study the quantum properties of liquids and solids at extremely low temperatures.

Richardson was an Eagle Scout, and mentioned the Scouting activities of his youth in the biography he submitted to the Nobel Foundation at the time of his award.

Richardson claimed that he did not believe in an anthropomorphic God, but it is unclear what specific beliefs he held.

Personal life

Richardson was born to Robert Franklin Richardson, a telephone engineer. He married Betty Marilyn McCarthy, a fellow physicals PhD student from Duke, on 29 Sep 1962 at the Immaculate Conception Catholic church in Durham, North Carolina.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-13 15:38:01

2019) David Lee (physicist)

Summary

David Lee (born January 20, 1931, Rye, New York, U.S.) is an American physicist who, with Robert C. Richardson and Douglas D. Osheroff, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1996 for their joint discovery of superfluidity in the isotope helium-3.

Lee received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1952 and a Ph.D. in physics from Yale University in 1959. He joined the faculty of Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) in 1959, becoming a full professor in 1968 and professor emeritus in 2007. Two years later he began teaching at Texas A&M University.

Lee and Richardson built a special cooling apparatus for their research in the low-temperature laboratory at Cornell. They discovered superfluidity in helium-3 by accident in 1972. They had cooled that compound to within a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero (−273 °C) when Osheroff, a graduate student working with them, noticed odd changes in the sample’s internal pressure. The team eventually determined that these deviations marked helium-3’s phase transition to superfluidity. Because the atoms in superfluid helium-3 move in a coordinated manner, that substance lacks all internal friction and flows without resistance. Helium-3 in this state behaves according to quantum mechanical laws. The discovery of superfluidity in helium-3 enabled scientists to study directly in macroscopic (visible) systems the strange quantum mechanical effects that previously could only be studied indirectly in molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.

Details

David Morris Lee (born January 20, 1931) is an American physicist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert C. Richardson and Douglas Osheroff "for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3." Lee is professor emeritus of physics at Cornell University and distinguished professor of physics at Texas A&M University.

Personal life

Lee was born and raised in Rye, New York.[4] His parents, Annette (Franks), a teacher, and Marvin Lee, an electrical engineer, were children of Jewish immigrants from England and Lithuania. He graduated from Harvard University in 1952 and then joined the U.S. Army for 22 months. After being discharged from the army, he obtained a master's degree from the University of Connecticut. In 1955 Lee entered the Ph.D. program at Yale University where he worked under Henry A. Fairbank in the low-temperature physics group, doing experimental research on liquid 3He.

After graduating from Yale in 1959, Lee took a job at Cornell University, where he was responsible for setting up the new Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics. Shortly after arriving at Cornell he met his future wife, Dana, then a PhD student in another department; the couple went on to have two sons.

Lee moved his laboratory from Cornell to Texas A&M University on November 16, 2009.

Work

The work that led to Lee's Nobel Prize was performed in the early 1970s. Lee, together with Robert C. Richardson and graduate student, Doug Osheroff used a Pomeranchuk cell to investigate the behaviour of 3He at temperatures within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero. They discovered unexpected effects in their measurements, which they eventually explained as phase transitions to a superfluid phase of 3He. Lee, Richardson and Osheroff were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996 for this discovery.

Lee's research also covered a number of other topics in low-temperature physics, particularly relating to liquid, solid and superfluid helium (4He, 3He and mixtures of the two). Particular discoveries include the antiferromagnetic ordering in solid helium-3, nuclear spin waves in spin polarized atomic hydrogen gas with Jack H. Freed, and the tri-critical point on the phase separation curve of liquid 4He-3He, in collaboration with his Cornell colleague John Reppy. His former research group at Cornell currently studies impurity-helium solids.

As well as the Nobel Prize, other prizes won by Lee include the 1976 Sir Francis Simon Memorial Prize of the British Institute of Physics and the 1981 Oliver Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society along with Doug Osheroff and Robert Richardson for their superfluid 3He work. In 1997, Lee received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Lee is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lee is currently teaching physics at Texas A&M University and continuing his (formerly Cornell-based) research program there as well.

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

Additional Information

American scientist David M. Lee was a leading low-temperature physicist. His most significant addition to his field was the discovery of superfluid helium-3 in 1971. In 1996 he and two colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for this discovery.

David Morris Lee was born on January 20, 1931, in Rye, New York. He graduated from Rye High School in 1948 and earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in Massachusetts in 1952. Between 1952 and 1954, he served in the U.S. Army.

Within his first year out of the army, Lee completed a master’s degree in physics from the University of Connecticut. In 1959, while completing a Ph.D. in physics at Yale University in Connecticut, he was recruited into the new low-temperature physics laboratory at Cornell University in New York.

At that time, scientists at Cornell University were racing with scientists at the University of California at San Diego to discover the temperature at which helium-3 becomes a nuclear magnet. In the fall of 1971 Lee and his two partners in the lab, Douglas D. Osheroff and Robert C. Richardson, thought they had discovered the point at which this phase transition of solid helium-3 occurred, and they published an article in Nature describing their findings. On closer observation by Osheroff, however, they realized that they had instead stumbled upon something entirely different: at extremely low temperatures, helium-3 becomes a superfluid.

Superfluids are very special forms of liquids that have no inner friction, or viscosity. At the time of Lee, Osheroff, and Richardson’s discovery, it was known that helium-4 was a superfluid at low temperatures, but no one had yet been able to make a superfluid out of helium-3. It was at only 0.002 degree above absolute zero that superfluidity in helium-3 was obtained.

The scientists corrected their earlier Nature article and conducted more experiments that showed them that superfluid helium-3 was a very unusual substance. It had magnetic properties and a different structure than had been expected. Perhaps most importantly, superfluid helium-3 seemed to exhibit quantum properties, which allowed the researchers to observe subatomic effects on a macroscopic scale. In addition, they theorized that the superfluid might hold the key to hypothetical objects called cosmic strings, which were thought to have been responsible for the condensation of matter into galaxies during the creation of the universe. On a more practical level, superfluid helium-3 helped in the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a noninvasive procedure used to see into the body.

Lee, Osheroff, and Richardson won the Simon Memorial Prize of the British Physical Society in 1976 and the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize of the American Physical Society in 1981 for their discovery of superfluid helium-3. Lee also won two separate Guggenheim fellowships. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1991.

Lee became a full professor at Cornell in 1968 and professor emeritus in 2007. Two years later he began teaching at Texas A&M University.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-14 16:00:59

2020) Robert Curl

Gist:

Work

Carbon is an element that can assume a number of different forms. In nature, for example, graphite and diamonds appear. In 1985 Robert Curl, Richard Smalley and Harold Kroto irradiated a surface of graphite with laser pulses so that carbon gas was formed. When the carbon gas condensed, previously unknown structures with 60 and 70 carbon atoms were formed. The most common structure had 60 carbon atoms arranged in a sphere with five and six edges. The structures were called fullerenes in honor of architect Buckminster Fuller, who worked with this geometric shape.

Summary

Robert Curl (born August 23, 1933, Alice, Texas, U.S.—died July 3, 2022, Houston, Texas) was an American chemist who, with Richard E. Smalley and Harold W. Kroto, discovered buckminsterfullerene, a spherical form of carbon comprising 60 atoms, in 1985. The discovery opened a new branch of chemistry, and all three men were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work.

In 1954 Curl earned a B.A. at the Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, and three years later he completed his doctoral studies in chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the faculty at Rice in 1958 and retired as professor emeritus in 2008.

In September 1985 Curl met with Kroto, of the University of Sussex, England, and Smalley, a colleague at Rice. In 11 days of research, they discovered buckminsterfullerene, so named for the molecule’s resemblance to the geodesic domes designed by American architect R. Buckminster Fuller. They announced their findings to the public in the November 14, 1985, issue of the journal Nature.

Buckminsterfullerene —whimsically abbreviated to “buckyball”— proved to be the first of several similar forms of carbon collectively dubbed fullerenes. Since the discovery of fullerenes, research on these compounds has accelerated. Although Kroto, Curl, and Smalley discovered this fundamental new form of carbon as a synthetic product in the course of attempting to simulate the chemistry in the atmosphere of giant stars, fullerenes were later found to occur naturally in tiny amounts on Earth and in meteorites. In the 1990s a method was announced for producing buckyballs in large quantities, and practical applications appeared likely. In 1991 Science magazine named buckminsterfullerene their "molecule of the year."

Curl’s later research focused on quartz tuning forks and the development of trace-gas sensors. This research was aimed at creating sensors that could be used to generate arrays of quartz tuning forks. These arrays could then be used for the photoacoustic detection of gases. He also worked on developing improved technology that employed high-powered lasers and fluorescent dyes to sequence DNA.

Details

Robert Floyd Curl Jr. (August 23, 1933 – July 3, 2022) was an American chemist who was Pitzer–Schlumberger Professor of Natural Sciences and professor of chemistry at Rice University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for the discovery of the nanomaterial buckminsterfullerene, and hence the fullerene class of materials, along with Richard Smalley (also of Rice University) and Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex.

Early life and education

Born in Alice, Texas, United States, Curl was the son of a Methodist minister. Due to his father's missionary work, his family moved several times within southern and southwestern Texas, and the elder Curl was involved in starting the San Antonio Medical Center's Methodist Hospital. Curl attributes his interest in chemistry to a chemistry set he received as a nine-year-old, recalling that he ruined the finish on his mother's porcelain stove when nitric acid boiled over onto it. He is a graduate of Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio, Texas. His high school offered only one year of chemistry instruction, but in his senior year his chemistry teacher gave him special projects to work on.

Curl received a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry from Rice Institute (now Rice University) in 1954. He was attracted to the reputation of both the school's academics and football team, and the fact that at the time it charged no tuition. He earned his doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957. At Berkeley, he worked in the laboratory of Kenneth Pitzer, then dean of the college of chemistry, with whom he would become a lifelong collaborator. Curl's graduate research involved performing infrared spectroscopy to determine the bond angle of disiloxane.

Scientific career

Curl was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University with E. B. Wilson, where he used microwave spectroscopy to study the bond rotation barriers of molecules. After that, he joined the faculty of Rice University in 1958. He inherited the equipment and graduate students of George Bird, a professor who was leaving for a job at Polaroid. Curl's early research involved the microwave spectroscopy of chlorine dioxide. His research program included both experiment and theory, mainly focused on detection and analysis of free radicals using microwave spectroscopy and tunable lasers. He used these observations to develop the theory of their fine structure and hyperfine structure, as well as information about their structure and the kinetics of their reactions.

Nobel Prize

Curl's research at Rice involved the fields of infrared and microwave spectroscopy. Curl's research inspired Richard Smalley to come to Rice in 1976 with the intention of collaborating with Curl. In 1985, Curl was contacted by Harold Kroto, who wanted to use a laser beam apparatus built by Smalley to simulate and study the formation of carbon chains in red giant stars. Smalley and Curl had previously used this apparatus to study semiconductors such as silicon and germanium. They were initially reluctant to interrupt their experiments on these semiconductor materials to use their apparatus for Kroto's experiments on carbon, but eventually gave in.

They indeed found the long carbon chains they were looking for, but also found an unexpected product that had 60 carbon atoms. Over the course of 11 days, the team studied and determined its structure and named it buckminsterfullerene after noting its similarity to the geodesic domes for which the architect Buckminster Fuller was known. This discovery was based solely on the single prominent peak on the mass spectrograph, implying a chemically inert substance that was geometrically closed with no dangling bonds. Curl was responsible for determining the optimal conditions of the carbon vapor in the apparatus, and examining the spectrograph. Curl noted that James R. Heath and Sean C. O'Brien deserve equal recognition in the work to Smalley and Kroto. The existence of this type of molecule had earlier been theorized by others, but Curl and his colleagues were at the time unaware of this. Later experiments confirmed their proposed structure, and the team moved on to synthesize endohedral fullerenes that had a metal atom inside the hollow carbon shell. The fullerenes, a class of molecules of which buckminsterfullerene was the first member discovered, are now considered to have potential applications in nanomaterials and molecular scale electronics. Robert Curl's 1985 paper entitled "C60: Buckminsterfullerine", published with colleagues H. Kroto, J. R. Heath, S. C. O’Brien, and R. E. Smalley, was honored by a Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award from the Division of History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, presented to Rice University in 2015. The discovery of fullerenes was recognized in 2010 by the designation of a National Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society at the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

After winning the Nobel Prize in 1996, Curl took a quieter path than Smalley, who became an outspoken advocate of nanotechnology, and Kroto, who used his fame to further his interest in science education, saying, "After winning a Nobel, you can either become a scientific pontificator, or you can have some idea for a new science project and you can use your newfound notoriety to get the resources to do it. Or you can say, 'Well, I enjoy what I was doing, and I want to keep doing that.'" True to that humility, when asked by the President of Rice what he would like, following the Nobel announcement, he asked that a bike rack be installed closer to his office and laboratory.

Later research

Curl's later research interests involved physical chemistry, developing DNA genotyping and sequencing instrumentation, and creating photoacoustic sensors for trace gases using quantum cascade lasers. He is known in the residential college life at Rice University for being the first master of Lovett College.

Curl retired in 2008 at the age of 74, becoming a University Professor Emeritus, Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor of Natural Sciences Emeritus, and Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Rice University.

Personal life

Curl married Jonel Whipple in 1955, with whom he had two children. He cycled to his office and lab and every week played bridge with the Rice Bridge Brigade. Curl died in Houston on July 3, 2022, at the age of 88.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-15 15:29:34

2021) Harry Kroto

Gist:

Work

Carbon is an element that can assume a number of different forms. In nature, for example, graphite and diamonds appear. In 1985 Harold Kroto, Robert Curl, and Richard Smalley irradiated a surface of graphite with laser pulses so that carbon gas was formed. When the carbon gas condensed, previously unknown structures with 60 and 70 carbon atoms were formed. The most common structure had 60 carbon atoms arranged in a sphere with five and six edges. The structures were called fullerenes in honor of architect Buckminster Fuller, who worked with this geometric shape.

Summary

Sir Harold W. Kroto (born October 7, 1939, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England—died April 30, 2016) was an English chemist who, with Richard E. Smalley and Robert F. Curl, Jr., was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their joint discovery of the carbon compounds called fullerenes.

Kroto received a Ph.D. from the University of Sheffield in 1964. He joined the faculty of the University of Sussex in 1967 and became a professor of chemistry there in 1985. In the course of his research, Kroto used microwave spectroscopy to discover long chainlike carbon molecules in the atmospheres of stars and gas clouds. Wishing to study the vaporization of carbon in order to find out how these carbon chains formed, he went to Rice University (Houston, Texas), where Smalley had designed an instrument, the laser-supersonic cluster beam apparatus, that could vaporize almost any known material and then be used to study the resulting clusters of atoms or molecules.

In a series of experiments carried out in September 1985, the two men, along with Smalley’s associate at Rice, Robert Curl, generated clusters of carbon atoms by vaporizing graphite in an atmosphere of helium. Some of the spectra they obtained from the vaporization corresponded to previously unknown forms of carbon containing even numbers of carbon atoms ranging from 40 to more than 100. Most of the new carbon molecules had a structure of C60. The researchers recognized that this molecule’s atoms are bonded together in a highly symmetrical hollow structure that resembles a sphere or ball. C60 is a polygon with 60 vertices and 32 faces, 12 of which are pentagons and 20 of which are hexagons—the same geometry as that of a soccer ball.

In the 1985 paper describing their work, the discoverers chose the whimsical name buckminsterfullerene for C60, after the American architect R. Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic dome designs have a structure similar to that molecule. The discovery of the unique structure of fullerenes, or buckyballs, as this class of carbon compounds came to be known, opened up an entirely new branch of chemistry.

Details

Sir Harold Walter Kroto (born Harold Walter Krotoschiner; 7 October 1939 – 30 April 2016) was an English chemist. He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery of fullerenes. He was the recipient of many other honors and awards.

Kroto ended his career as the Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University, which he joined in 2004. Prior to this, he spent approximately 40 years at the University of Sussex.

Kroto promoted science education and was a critic of religious faith.

Early years

Kroto was born in Wisbech, Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, England, to Edith and Heinz Krotoschiner, his name being of Silesian origin. His father's family came from Bojanowo, Poland, and his mother's from Berlin. Both of his parents were born in Berlin and fled to Great Britain in the 1930s as refugees from Nazi Germany; his father was Jewish. Harry was raised in Bolton while the British authorities interned his father on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien during World War II. Kroto attended Bolton School, where he was a contemporary of the actor Ian McKellen. In 1955, Harold's father shortened the family name to Kroto.

As a child, he became fascinated by a Meccano set. Kroto credited Meccano, as well as his aiding his father in the latter's balloon factory after World War II – amongst other things – with developing skills useful in scientific research. He developed an interest in chemistry, physics, and mathematics in secondary school, and because his sixth form chemistry teacher (Harry Heaney – who subsequently became a university professor) felt that the University of Sheffield had the best chemistry department in the United Kingdom, he went to Sheffield.

Although raised Jewish, Kroto stated that religion never made any sense to him. He was a humanist who claimed to have three religions: Amnesty Internationalism, atheism, and humour. He was a distinguished supporter of the British Humanist Association. In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.

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

Education and academic career:

Education

Kroto was educated at Bolton School and went to the University of Sheffield in 1958, where he obtained a first-class honours BSc degree in Chemistry (1961) and a PhD in Molecular Spectroscopy (1964). During his time at Sheffield he also was the art editor of Arrows – the university student magazine, played tennis for the university team (reaching the UAU finals twice) and was President of the Student Athletics Council (1963–64). Among other things such as making the first phosphaalkenes (compounds with carbon phosphorus double bonds), his doctoral studies included unpublished research on carbon suboxide, O=C=C=C=O, and this led to a general interest in molecules containing chains of carbon atoms with numerous multiple bonds. He started his work with an interest in organic chemistry, but when he learned about spectroscopy it inclined him towards quantum chemistry; he later developed an interest in astrochemistry.

After obtaining his PhD, Kroto spent two-years as a postdoctoral fellow in the molecular spectroscopy group of Gerhard Herzberg at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, and the subsequent year (1966–1967) at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey carrying out Raman studies of liquid phase interactions and worked on quantum chemistry.

Research at the University of Sussex

In 1967, Kroto began teaching and research at the University of Sussex in England. During his time at Sussex from 1967 to 1985, he carried out research mainly focused on the spectroscopic studies of new and novel unstable and semi-stable species. This work resulted in the birth of the various fields of new chemistry involving carbon multiply bonded to second and third row elements e.g. S, Se and P. A particularly important breakthrough (with Sussex colleague John Nixon) was the creation of several new phosphorus species detected by microwave spectroscopy. This work resulted in the birth of the field(s) of phosphaalkene and phosphaalkyne chemistry. These species contain carbon double and triple bonded to phosphorus (C=P and C≡P) such as cyanophosphaethyne.

In 1975, he became a full professor of Chemistry. This coincided with laboratory microwave measurements with Sussex colleague David Walton on long linear carbon chain molecules, leading to radio astronomy observations with Canadian astronomers surprisingly revealing that these unusual carbonaceous species exist in relatively large abundances in interstellar space as well as the outer atmospheres of certain stars – the carbon-rich red giants.

Discovery of buckminsterfullerene

In 1985, on the basis of the Sussex studies and the stellar discoveries, laboratory experiments (with co-workers James R. Heath, Sean C. O'Brien, Yuan Liu, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University) which simulated the chemical reactions in the atmospheres of the red giant stars demonstrated that stable C60 molecules could form spontaneously from a condensing carbon vapour. The co-investigators directed lasers at graphite and examined the results. The C60 molecule is a molecule with the same symmetry pattern as a football, consisting of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons of carbon atoms. Kroto named the molecule buckminsterfullerene, after Buckminster Fuller who had conceived of the geodesic domes, as the dome concept had provided a clue to the likely structure of the new species.

In 1985, the C60 discovery caused Kroto to shift the focus of his research from spectroscopy in order to probe the consequences of the C60 structural concept (and prove it correct) and to exploit the implications for chemistry and material science.

This research is significant for the discovery of a new allotrope of carbon known as a fullerene. Other allotropes of carbon include graphite, diamond and graphene. Kroto's 1985 paper entitled "C60: Buckminsterfullerene", published with colleagues J. R. Heath, S. C. O'Brien, R. F. Curl, and R. E. Smalley, was honored by a Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award from the Division of History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, presented to Rice University in 2015. The discovery of fullerenes was recognized in 2010 by the designation of a National Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society at the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Research at Florida State University

In 2004, Kroto left the University of Sussex to take up a new position as Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University. At FSU he carried out fundamental research on: Carbon vapour with Professor Alan Marshall; Open framework condensed phase systems with strategically important electrical and magnetic behaviour with Professors Naresh Dalal (FSU) and Tony Cheetham (Cambridge); and the mechanism of formation and properties of nano-structured systems. In addition, he participated in research initiatives at FSU that probed the astrochemistry of fullerenes, metallofullerenes, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in stellar/circumstellar space, as well as their relevance to stardust.

Educational outreach and public service

In 1995, he jointly set up the Vega Science Trust, a UK educational charity that created high quality science films including lectures and interviews with Nobel Laureates, discussion programmes, careers and teaching resources for TV and Internet Broadcast. Vega produced over 280 programmes, that streamed for free from the Vega website which acted as a TV science channel. The trust closed in 2012.

In 2009, Kroto spearheaded the development of a second science education initiative, Geoset. Short for the Global Educational Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology, GEOSET is an ever-growing online cache of recorded teaching modules that are freely downloadable to educators and the public. The program aims to increase knowledge of the sciences by creating a global repository of educational videos and presentations from leading universities and institutions.

In 2003, prior to the Blair/Bush invasion of Iraq on the pretext that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Kroto initiated and organised the publication of a letter to be signed by a dozen UK Nobel Laureates and published in The Times. It was composed by his friend the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate the late Sir Joseph Rotblat and published in The Times on 15 February 2003.

He wrote a set of articles, mostly opinion pieces, from 2002 to 2003 for the Times Higher Education Supplement, a weekly UK publication.

From 2002 to 2004, Kroto served as president of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2004, he was appointed to the Francis Eppes Professorship in the chemistry department at Florida State University, carrying out research in nanoscience and nanotechnology.

He spoke at Auburn University on 29 April 2010, and at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University with Robert Curl on 13 October 2010.

In October 2010 Kroto participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students had the opportunity to engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize–winning scientist.

He spoke at Mahatma Gandhi University, at Kottayam, in Kerala, India in January 2011, where he was an 'Erudite' special invited lecturer of the Government of Kerala, from 5 to 11 January 2011.

Kroto spoke at CSICon 2011, a convention "dedicated to scientific inquiry and critical thinking" organized by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in association with Skeptical Inquirer magazine and the Center for Inquiry. He also delivered the IPhO 2012 lecture at the International Physics Olympiad held in Estonia.

In 2014, Kroto spoke at the Starmus Festival in the Canary Islands, delivering a lecture about his life in science, chemistry, and design.

Personal life

In 1963, Kroto married Margaret Henrietta Hunter, also a student of the University of Sheffield at the time. The couple had two sons. Throughout his life, Kroto was a lover of film, theatre, art, and music and published his own artwork.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-16 15:54:53

2022) Richard Smalley

Gist:

Work

Carbon is an element that can assume a number of different forms. In nature, for example, graphite and diamonds appear. In 1985 Richard Smalley, Robert Curl, and Harold Kroto irradiated a surface of graphite with laser pulses so that carbon gas was formed. When the carbon gas condensed, previously unknown structures with 60 and 70 carbon atoms were formed. The most common structure had 60 carbon atoms arranged in a sphere with five and six edges. The structures were called fullerenes in honor of architect Buckminster Fuller, who worked with this geometric shape.

Summary

Richard E. Smalley (born June 6, 1943, Akron, Ohio, U.S.—died October 28, 2005, Houston, Texas) was an American chemist and physicist, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Robert F. Curl, Jr., and Sir Harold W. Kroto for their joint discovery of carbon-60 (C60, or buckminsterfullerene) and the fullerenes.

Smalley received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1973. After postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago, he began his teaching career at Rice University (Houston, Texas) in 1976. He was named Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry there in 1982 and became a professor of physics in 1990.

It was at Rice University that Smalley and his colleagues discovered fullerenes, the third known form of pure carbon (diamond and graphite are the other two known forms). Smalley had designed a laser supersonic cluster beam apparatus that could vaporize any material into a plasma of atoms and then be used to study the resulting clusters (aggregates of tens to many tens of atoms). On a visit to Smalley’s lab, Kroto realized that the technique might be used to simulate the chemical conditions in the atmosphere of carbon stars and so provide compelling evidence for his conjecture that the carbon chains originated in stars.

In a now-famous 11-day series of experiments conducted in September 1985 at Rice University by Kroto, Smalley, and Curl and their student coworkers James Heath, Yuan Liu, and Sean O’Brien, Smalley’s apparatus was used to simulate the chemistry in the atmosphere of giant stars by turning the vaporization laser onto graphite. The study not only confirmed that carbon chains could be produced but also showed, serendipitously, that a hitherto unknown carbon species containing 60 atoms formed spontaneously in relatively high abundance. The atoms of fullerenes are arranged in a closed shell. C60, the smallest stable fullerene molecule, consists of 60 carbon atoms that fit together to form a cage, with the bonds resembling the pattern of seams on a soccer ball. The molecule was given the name buckminsterfullerene, or buckyball, because its shape is similar to the geodesic domes designed by the American architect and theorist R. Buckminster Fuller.

A leading supporter of nanotechnology, Smalley played a key role in the establishment in 2000 of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, a federal research and development program.

Details

Richard Errett Smalley (June 6, 1943 – October 28, 2005) was an American chemist who was the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry, Physics, and Astronomy at Rice University. In 1996, along with Robert Curl, also a professor of chemistry at Rice, and Harold Kroto, a professor at the University of Sussex, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of a new form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene, also known as buckyballs. He was an advocate of nanotechnology and its applications.

Early life and education

Smalley, the youngest of 4 siblings, was born in Akron, Ohio on June 6, 1943, to Frank Dudley Smalley, Jr., and Esther Virginia Rhoads. He grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. Richard Smalley credits his father, mother and aunt as formative influences in industry, science and chemistry. His father, Frank Dudley Smalley, Jr. worked with mechanical and electrical equipment and eventually became CEO of a trade journal for farm implements called Implement and Tractor. His mother, Esther Rhoads Smalley, completed her B.A. Degree while Richard was a teenager. She was particularly inspired by mathematician Norman N. Royall Jr., who taught Foundations of Physical Science, and communicated her love of science to her son through long conversations and joint activities. Smalley's maternal aunt, pioneering female chemist Sara Jane Rhoads, interested Smalley in the field of chemistry, letting him work in her organic chemistry laboratory, and suggesting that he attend Hope College, which had a strong chemistry program.

Smalley attended Hope College for two years before transferring to the University of Michigan where he received his Bachelor of Science in 1965, performing undergraduate research in the laboratory of Raoul Kopelman. Between his studies, he also worked in industry, where he developed his unique managerial style. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1973 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "The lower electronic states of 1,3,5 (sym)-triazine", under the supervision of Elliot R. Bernstein. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago from 1973 to 1976, with Donald Levy and Lennard Wharton where he was a pioneer in the development of supersonic beam laser spectroscopy.

Career

In 1976, Smalley joined Rice University. In 1982, he was appointed to the Gene and Norman Hackerman Chair in Chemistry at Rice. He helped to found the Rice Quantum Institute in 1979, serving as chairman from 1986 to 1996. In 1990, he became also a professor in the department of physics. In 1990, he helped to found the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology. In 1996, he was appointed its director.

He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1990, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.

Fullerenes

Smalley's research in physical chemistry investigated the formation of inorganic and semiconductor clusters using pulsed molecular beams and time-of-flight mass spectrometry. As a consequence of this expertise, Robert Curl introduced him to Harry Kroto in order to investigate a question about the constituents of astronomical dust. These are carbon-rich grains expelled by old stars such as R Coronae Borealis. The result of this collaboration was the discovery of C60 (known as Buckyballs) and the fullerenes as the third allotropic form of carbon.

Smalley recognized that the structure of C60 was like that of a soccer ball after cutting and tapping hexagons together in a three-dimensional manner, utilizing 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons. He was also responsible for the name of C60, naming it after Buckminster Fuller, an American architect who was known for his use of geodesic domes in his designs.

The research that earned Kroto, Smalley and Curl the Nobel Prize mostly comprised three articles. First was the discovery of C60 in the November 14, 1985, issue of Nature, "C60: Buckminsterfullerene". The second article detailed the discovery of the endohedral fullerenes in "Lanthanum Complexes of Spheroidal Carbon Shells" in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (1985). The third announced the discovery of the fullerenes in "Reactivity of Large Carbon Clusters: Spheroidal Carbon Shells and Their Possible Relevance to the Formation and Morphology of Soot" in the Journal of Physical Chemistry (1986).

Although only three people can be cited for a Nobel Prize, graduate students James R. Heath, Yuan Liu, and Sean C. O'Brien participated in the work. Smalley mentioned Heath and O'Brien in his Nobel Lecture. Heath went on to become a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and O'Brien joined Texas Instruments and is now at MEMtronics. Yuan Liu is a Senior Staff Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

This research is significant for the discovery of a new allotrope of carbon known as a fullerene. Other allotropes of carbon include graphite, diamond and graphene. Harry Kroto's 1985 paper entitled "C60: Buckminsterfullerine", published with colleagues J. R. Heath, S. C. O'Brien, R. F. Curl, and R. E. Smalley, was honored by a Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award from the Division of History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, presented to Rice University in 2015. The discovery of fullerenes was recognized in 2010 by the designation of a National Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society at the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Nanotechnology

Following nearly a decade's worth of research into the formation of alternate fullerene compounds (e.g. C28, C70), as well as the synthesis of endohedral metallofullerenes (M@C60), reports of the identification of carbon nanotube structures led Smalley to begin investigating their iron-catalyzed synthesis.

As a consequence of this research, Smalley was able to persuade the administration of Rice University, under then-president Malcolm Gillis, to create Rice's Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) focusing on any aspect of molecular nanotechnology. It was renamed The Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology after Smalley's death in 2005, and has since merged with the Rice Quantum Institute, becoming the Smalley-Curl Institute (SCI) in 2015.

Smalley's latest research was focused on carbon nanotubes, specifically focusing on the chemical synthesis side of nanotube research. He is well known for his group's invention of the high-pressure carbon monoxide (HiPco) method of producing large batches of high-quality nanotubes. Smalley spun off his work into a company, Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc. and associated nanotechnologies.

Smalley and his lab worked solely in this area of study and nothing else for approximately 10 years, up until the end of his life. His research lab carried the slogan "If it ain't tubes, we don't do it" proudly.

Dispute on molecular assemblers

He was an outspoken skeptic of the idea of molecular assemblers, as advocated by K. Eric Drexler. His main scientific objections, which he termed the "fat fingers problem" and the "sticky fingers problem", argued against the feasibility of molecular assemblers being able to precisely select and place individual atoms. He also believed that Drexler's speculations about apocalyptic dangers of molecular assemblers threatened the public support for development of nanotechnology. He debated Drexler in an exchange of letters which were published in Chemical & Engineering News as a point-counterpoint feature.

Personal life

Smalley was married four times, to Judith Grace Sampieri (1968–1978), Mary L. Chapieski (1980–1994), JoNell M. Chauvin (1997–1998) and Deborah Sheffield (2005), and had two sons, Chad Richard Smalley (born June 8, 1969) and Preston Reed Smalley (born August 8, 1997).

In 1999, Smalley was diagnosed with cancer. Smalley died of leukemia,[36] variously reported as non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, on October 28, 2005, at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, at the age of 62.

Upon Smalley's death, the US Senate passed a resolution to honor Smalley, crediting him as the "Father of Nanotechnology."

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-17 16:01:54

2023) Peter Doherty (immunologist)

Gist:

Work

When the body's cells are attacked by viruses, the immune system begins killing the infected cells. By studying mice, Peter Doherty and Rolf Zinkernagel proved in 1973 how the immune system recognises virus-ridden cells. A kind of white blood cell, the T-cell, kills the virus-ridden cells, but only if it recognises both the foreign substances, viruses, and certain substances from the body's own cells. The discovery has provided an important basis for producing vaccines and medicines against infectious diseases, and also for treating and understanding inflammatory diseases and cancer.

Summary

Peter C. Doherty (born October 15, 1940, Australia) is an Australian immunologist and pathologist who, with Rolf Zinkernagel of Switzerland, received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1996 for their discovery of how the body’s immune system distinguishes virus-infected cells from normal cells.

Doherty earned bachelor’s (1962) and master’s (1966) degrees in veterinary medicine from the University of Queensland but switched to pathology while earning his doctorate (1970) from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. While conducting research (1972–75) at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Doherty began collaborating with Zinkernagel in studying what role the white blood cells known as T lymphocytes (T cells) play in mice infected with a particular type of virus able to cause meningitis. They theorized that it was the strength of the immune response itself that caused the fatal destruction of brain cells in mice infected with this virus. To test this theory, they mixed virus-infected mouse cells with T lymphocytes from other infected mice. The T lymphocytes did destroy the virus-infected cells, but only if the infected cells and the lymphocytes came from a genetically identical strain of mice; the T lymphocytes would ignore virus-infected cells that had been taken from another strain of mice. Further research showed that T cells must recognize two separate signals on an infected cell before they will destroy it. One signal is a fragment of the invading virus that the cell displays on its surface; the other is a self-identifying tag from the cell’s major histocompatibility complex (MHC) antigens, which identify a cell as belonging to one’s own body. This concept of the simultaneous recognition of both self and foreign molecules formed the basis for a new understanding of the general mechanisms used by the immune system at the cellular level.

After teaching at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1975–82), Doherty headed the department of pathology at the Curtin School in Canberra (1982–88) and served as chairman (1988–2001) of the department of immunology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He later joined the faculty at the University of Melbourne, and in 2014 the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, a joint venture between the university and the Royal Melbourne Hospital, opened.

Doherty was the author of several books, including Sentinel Chickens: What Birds Tell Us About Our Health and the World (2012) and The Knowledge Wars (2015). The Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize: A Life in Science (2005) is part memoir.

Details

Peter Charles Doherty (born 15 October 1940) is an Australian immunologist and Nobel laureate. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1995, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Rolf M. Zinkernagel in 1996 and was named Australian of the Year in 1997. In the Australia Day Honours of 1997, he was named a Companion of the Order of Australia for his work with Zinkernagel. He is also a National Trust Australian Living Treasure. In 2009 as part of the Q150 celebrations, Doherty's immune system research was announced as one of the Q150 Icons of Queensland for its role as an iconic "innovation and invention".

Early life and education

Peter Charles Doherty was born in the Brisbane, suburb of Sherwood on 15 October 1940, to Eric Charles Doherty and Linda Doherty (née Byford). He grew up in Oxley, and attended Indooroopilly State High School (which now has a lecture theatre named after him).

After receiving his bachelor's degree in veterinary science in 1962 from the University of Queensland, he was a rural veterinary officer for the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Stock before taking up laboratory-based work at the Department's Animal Research Institute. There he met microbiology graduate Penelope Stephens and they were married in 1965. Doherty received his master's degree in veterinary science in 1966 from the University of Queensland.

He obtained his PhD in pathology in 1970 from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, then returned to Australia to continue his research at the John Curtin School of Medical Research within the Australian National University in Canberra.

Research and career

Doherty's research focused on the immune system and his Nobel Prize-winning work described how the body's immune cells protect against viruses. He and Rolf Zinkernagel, the co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, discovered how T cells recognise their target antigens in combination with major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins.

Viruses infect host cells and reproduce inside them. Killer T-cells destroy those infected cells so that the viruses cannot reproduce. Zinkernagel and Doherty discovered that, in order for killer T cells to recognise infected cells, they had to recognise two molecules on the surface of the cell – not only the virus antigen, but also a molecule of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This recognition was done by a T-cell receptor on the surface of the T cell. The MHC was previously identified as being responsible for the rejection of incompatible tissues during transplantation. Zinkernagel and Doherty discovered that the MHC was responsible for the body fighting meningitis viruses too.

Awards and honours

Doherty was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1987. In 1997, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. He is the patron of the eponymous Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute), a joint venture between the University of Melbourne and Melbourne Health. It houses a group of infection and immunology experts, including Director Professor Sharon Lewin, who are charged with leading the battle against infectious diseases in humans. This became operational in 2014. He became an Honorary Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2015. In the same year he was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences (FAHMS). In April 2017 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Victoria (FRSV).

John Monash Science School, Moreton Bay Boys College, and Murrumba State Secondary College each have a house named after him.

Personal life

As of 2021, Peter Doherty and his wife Penny live in Melbourne. They have two sons, Michael, a neurologist working in the United States, and James, a Melbourne-based barrister, and six grandchildren. He gained a renewed level of fame in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic when he accidentally tweeted the phrase 'Dan Murphy opening hours' instead of performing a web search for it.

Doherty currently spends three months of the year conducting research at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, where he is a faculty member at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center through the College of Medicine. For the other 9 months of the year, he works in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne, Victoria.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-18 15:43:19

2024) Rolf M. Zinkernagel

Gist:

Work

When the body's cells are attacked by viruses, the immune system begins killing the infected cells. By studying mice, Rolf Zinkernagel and Peter Doherty proved in 1973 how the immune system recognises virus-ridden cells. A kind of white blood cell, the T-cell, kills the virus-ridden cells, but only if it recognises both the foreign substances, viruses, and certain substances from the body's own cells. The discovery has provided an important basis for producing vaccines and medicines against infectious diseases, and also for treating and understanding inflammatory diseases and cancer.

Summary

Rolf Martin Zinkernagel was born in Riehen, Switzerland, on January 6, 1944. After earning his M.D. from the University of Basel in 1970, he received a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Lausanne. He began his training in immunology at Lausanne and learned first-hand the "frustrations of experimental lab work" while attempting to measure the radioactivity of cells infected by bacteria. In 1972, after taking a World Health Organization course on immunology taught by visiting professor Robert V. Blanden (AAI '77) at Lausanne, Zinkernagel applied for a second postdoctoral fellowship at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, where he planned to study cell-mediated immunity to Listeria and Salmonella under Blanden. When Zinkernagel arrived in Canberra in January 1973, however, the only laboratory with available space was that occupied by another postdoctoral fellow—Peter Doherty. Shortly thereafter, Zinkernagel and Doherty began collaborating on the study of the immune response to LCMV, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize.

Although Zinkernagel had not originally intended to pursue another degree when he moved to Australia, shortly after he began collaborating with Doherty, he entered the graduate immunology program at Australian National University, earning his Ph.D. in 1975. Recruited by Frank Dixon (AAI '50, president 1971–72), Zinkernagel accepted a position as an associate member of the Scripps Clinical Research Institute in La Jolla, California, in 1976. He also began teaching in the Department of Pathology at the University of California, San Diego. Shortly after being promoted to the rank of full member at Scripps in 1979, he returned to Switzerland to join the faculty of the Department of Pathology at the University of Zurich as associate professor. Promoted to full professor in 1988, Zinkernagel was appointed founding co-director of the university's Institute of Experimental Biology in 1992. He retired from both positions in 2008.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Peter C. Doherty (AAI '76) “for their discoveries concerning the specificity of the cell mediated immune defense.”

Details

Rolf Martin Zinkernagel (born 6 January 1944) is a professor of experimental immunology at the University of Zurich. Along with Peter C. Doherty, he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of how the immune system recognizes virus-infected cells.

Education

Zinkernagel received his MD degree from the University of Basel in 1970 and his PhD from the Australian National University in 1975.

Career and research

Zinkernagel is a member of the Cancer Research Institute Scientific Advisory Council, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and The Academy of Cancer Immunology. Zinkernagel was elected as a Corresponding Fellow to the Australian Academy of Science also in 1996.

Awards and honours

Together with the Australian Peter C. Doherty he received the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of how the immune system recognizes virus-infected cells. With this he became the 24th Swiss Nobel laureate. In 1999 he was awarded an honorary Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), Australia's highest civilian honour, for his scientific work with Doherty.

Viruses infect host cells and reproduce inside them. Killer T-cells destroy those infected cells so that the viruses cannot reproduce. Zinkernagel and Doherty discovered that for killer T-cells to recognize infected cells, they had to recognize two molecules on the surface of the cell—not only the virus antigen, but also a molecule of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This recognition was done by a T-cell receptor on the surface of the T-cell. The MHC was previously identified as being responsible for the rejection of incompatible tissues during transplantation. Zinkernagel and Doherty discovered that the MHC was responsible for the body fighting meningitis viruses too.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, he also won the Cloëtta Prize in 1981, the Cancer Research Institute William B. Coley Award in 1987, the Otto-Naegeli-Preis in 1988 and the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award in 1995. In 1994 he became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Zinkernagel was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMeRS) in 1998.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-19 15:52:17

2025) Steven Chu

Gist:

Life

Stephen Chu was born in St. Louis, Missouri, into an academic family of Chinese heritage. He excelled at school and as a child liked to build models before becoming interested in chemistry experiments. He studied physics at the University of Rochester and continued his studies at UC Berkeley. There he began with theoretical physics until he realised that experimental physics was his calling. After Berkeley he did his Nobel Prize-awarded work at Bell Labs. Chu served as United States Secretary of Energy from 2009 to 2013. He is married to physicist Jean Fetter, and has two sons, Geoffrey and Michael, from a previous marriage.

Work

At room temperature atoms and molecules in the air move about at breakneck speed. In order for them to be studied, they need to be slowed down or chilled. During the 1980s Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William Phillips developed different methods for this. When atoms come in contact with light particles with fixed energies, photons, their movement is affected as if they had been bumped. With the aid of laser light from different directions and adjustment of the photon’s energy for Doppler effects, the atoms can be cooled to extremely low temperatures and captured in a trap.

Summary

Steven Chu (born February 28, 1948, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.) is an American physicist who, with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics for their independent pioneering research in cooling and trapping atoms using laser light. He later served as secretary of energy (2009–13) in the administration of U.S. Pres. Barack Obama. Chu is an author of the Encyclopædia Britannica article on spectroscopy.

Chu graduated from the University of Rochester, New York, in 1970 with a B.S. in physics and an A.B. in mathematics. He received a doctorate in physics in 1976 from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a postdoctoral fellow from 1976 to 1978. He joined the staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, in 1978 and became the head of the quantum electronics research department at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey, in 1983.

In 1985 Chu and his coworkers at Bell Labs used an array of intersecting laser beams to create an effect they called “optical molasses,” in which the speed of target atoms was reduced from about 4,000 km per hour to about 1 km per hour, as if the atoms were moving through thick molasses. The temperature of the slowed atoms approached absolute zero (−273.15 °C, or −459.67 °F). Chu and his colleagues also developed an atomic trap using lasers and magnetic coils that enabled them to capture and study the chilled atoms. Phillips and Cohen-Tannoudji expanded on Chu’s work, devising ways to use lasers to trap atoms at temperatures even closer to absolute zero. These techniques make it possible for scientists to improve the accuracy of atomic clocks used in space navigation, to construct atomic interferometers that can precisely measure gravitational forces, and to design atomic lasers that can be used to manipulate electronic circuits at an extremely fine scale.

In 1987 Chu joined the faculty of Stanford University, where he continued his work on laser trapping of atoms and branched into biophysics and biology. He served twice as chair of the physics department and helped to establish research institutes such as the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and Bio-X, the latter being a program for interdisciplinary research into biology and medicine.

In 2004 Chu returned to Berkeley as director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, an institution with a long history of research in atomic and nuclear physics that is now part of the system of national laboratories supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. There he encouraged research into renewable energy, particularly the use of solar energy to create biofuels and generate electricity.

In December 2008 Chu was selected by President-elect Barack Obama to serve as secretary of energy, partly on the basis of his administrative experience and scientific credentials and partly because of his commitment to using science to develop alternative energies and combat climate change. Chu was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in a unanimous voice vote on January 20, 2009. Under Chu’s leadership, the energy department took a central role in implementing funding for renewable energies as part of the president’s large economic stimulus bill passed in February 2009, attempting to redirect the country’s energy consumption away from traditional fossil fuels. Chu stepped down as secretary of energy in April 2013. He subsequently rejoined the faculty at Stanford.

Details

Steven Chu (born February 28, 1948) is an American physicist and former government official. He is a Nobel laureate and was the 12th U.S. secretary of energy. He is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research at the University of California, Berkeley, and his research at Bell Laboratories and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.

Chu served as U.S. Secretary of Energy under the administration of President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. At the time of his appointment as Energy Secretary, Chu was a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where his research was concerned primarily with the study of biological systems at the single molecule level. Chu resigned as energy secretary on April 22, 2013. He returned to Stanford as Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular & Cellular Physiology.

Chu is a vocal advocate for more research into renewable energy and nuclear power, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combating climate change. He has conceived of a global "glucose economy", a form of a low-carbon economy, in which glucose from tropical plants is shipped around like oil is today. On February 22, 2019, Chu began a one-year term as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Early life and education

Chu was born on February 28, 1948, in St. Louis, Missouri, with Chinese ancestry from Liuhe, Taicang, China. He attended Garden City High School in Garden City, New York. He received both a B.A. in mathematics and a B.S. in physics in 1970 from the University of Rochester and earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, under Eugene D. Commins, in 1976, during which he was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Chu comes from a family of highly educated white collar professionals and scholars. His father, Ju-Chin Chu, earned a doctorate in chemical engineering from MIT and taught at Washington University in St. Louis and Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and his mother studied economics at MIT. His maternal grandfather, Shu-tian Li, was a hydraulic engineer who earned a Ph.D. from Cornell University, and was a professor and president of Tianjin University. His mother's uncle, Li Shu-hua, a biophysicist, attended University of Paris before returning to China.

Chu's older brother, Gilbert Chu, is a professor of biochemistry and medicine at Stanford University. His younger brother, Morgan Chu, is a patent lawyer who is the former co-managing partner at the law firm Irell & Manella. According to Chu, his two brothers and four cousins have four Ph.D.s, three M.D.s, and a J.D. among themselves.

Career and research

After obtaining his doctorate, he remained at Berkeley as a postdoctoral researcher for two years before joining Bell Labs, where he and his several co-workers carried out his Nobel Prize-winning laser cooling work. He left Bell Labs and became a professor of physics at Stanford University in 1987, serving as the chair of its physics department from 1990 to 1993 and from 1999 to 2001. At Stanford, Chu and three others initiated the Bio-X program, which focuses on interdisciplinary research in biology and medicine, and played a key role in securing the funding for the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. In August 2004, Chu was appointed as the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratory, and joined UC Berkeley's department of physics and department of molecular and cell biology. Under Chu's leadership, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was a center of research into biofuels and solar energy. He spearheaded the laboratory's Helios project, an initiative to develop methods of harnessing solar power as a source of renewable energy for transportation.

Chu's early research focused on atomic physics by developing laser cooling techniques and the magneto-optical trapping of atoms using lasers. He and his co-workers at Bell Labs developed a way to cool atoms by employing six laser beams opposed in pairs and arranged in three directions at right angles to each other. Trapping atoms with this method allows scientists to study individual atoms with great accuracy. Additionally, the technique can be used to construct an atomic clock with great precision.

At Stanford, Chu's research interests expanded into biological physics and polymer physics at the single-molecule level. He studied enzyme activity and protein and RNA folding using techniques like fluorescence resonance energy transfer, atomic force microscopy, and optical tweezers. His polymer physics research used individual DNA molecules to study polymer dynamics and their phase transitions. He continued researching atomic physics as well and developed new methods of laser cooling and trapping. As of 2022, he is the President of the Scientific Committee of ESPCI Paris.

Honors and awards

Steven Chu was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for the "development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light", together with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.

He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Academia Sinica of Taiwan, and is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Korean Academy of Science and Engineering. In 1994, The Optical Society recognized Chu with the William F. Meggers Award. The Society later elected him an Honorary Member. He was also awarded the Humboldt Prize by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1995. In 1998, Chu received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Chu received an honorary doctorate from Boston University when he was the keynote speaker at the 2007 commencement exercises. He is a senior fellow of the Design Futures Council. Diablo Magazine awarded him an Eco Award in its April 2009 issue, shortly after he was nominated for Energy Secretary.

Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard University awarded him honorary doctorates during their 2010 and 2009 commencement exercises, respectively. He was awarded an honorary degree from Yale University during its 2010 commencement. He was also awarded an honorary degree from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, the same institution at which his father taught for several years, during its 2011 commencement. Penn State University awarded him an honorary doctorate during their 2012 commencement exercises. In 2014, Chu was awarded an honorary doctorate from Williams College, during which he gave a talk moderated by Williams College Professor Protik Majumder. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth College during its 2015 commencement. Chu was also awarded an honorary doctorate from Amherst College in 2017, where he later gave a lecture titled "Climate Change and Needed Technical Solutions for a Sustainable Future" in March 2018.

Chu was elected an international fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering UK in 2011, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2014. His nomination reads:

Steven Chu's development of methods to laser cool and trap atoms was recognized by the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. He also pioneered the development of atom interferometry for precision measurement, and he introduced methods to visualize and manipulate single bio-molecules simultaneously with optical tweezers. Throughout his career, he has sought new solutions to the energy and climate challenges. From January 2009 to April 2013, he was the 12th U.S. Secretary of Energy under President Barack Obama, and initiated the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy, the Energy Innovation Hubs, and the Clean Energy Ministerial meetings.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-20 15:40:43

2026) Claude Cohen-Tannoudji

Gist:

Work

At room temperature atoms and molecules in the air move about at breakneck speed. In order for them to be studied, they need to be slowed down or chilled. During the 1980s Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Steven Chu, and William Phillips developed different methods for this. When atoms come in contact with light particles with fixed energies, photons, their movement is affected as if they had been bumped. With the aid of laser light from different directions and adjustment of the photon’s energy for Doppler effects, the atoms can be cooled to extremely low temperatures and captured in a trap.

Summary

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (born April 1, 1933, Constantine, Algeria) is a French physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 with Steven Chu and William D. Phillips. They received the award for their development of techniques that use laser light to cool atoms to extremely low temperatures. At such temperatures the atoms move slowly enough to be examined in detail.

Cohen-Tannoudji was educated at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Paris, receiving his doctorate in 1962. After graduating, he continued to work as a research scientist in the department of physics at ENS while also teaching at the University of Paris VI from 1964 to 1973 and at the Collège de France from 1973 to 2004.

Cohen-Tannoudji and his colleagues at ENS expanded on the work of Chu and Phillips, successfully explaining a seeming discrepancy in theory and devising new mechanisms for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. In 1995 they cooled helium atoms to within eighteen-millionths of a degree above absolute zero (−273.15° C, or −459.67° F), with a corresponding speed of about two centimetres per second. Their work, and that of Chu and Phillips, furthered scientists’ understanding of how light and matter interact. Among other practical applications, the techniques they developed can be used to construct atomic clocks and other instruments capable of an extremely high degree of precision.

Details

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (born 1 April 1933) is a French physicist. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Chu and William Daniel Phillips for research in methods of laser cooling and trapping atoms. Currently he is still an active researcher, working at the École normale supérieure (Paris).

Early life

Cohen-Tannoudji was born in Constantine, French Algeria, to Algerian Sephardic Jewish parents Abraham Cohen-Tannoudji and Sarah Sebbah. When describing his origins Cohen-Tannoudji said: "My family, originally from Tangier, settled in Tunisia and then in Algeria in the 16th century after having fled Spain during the Inquisition. In fact, our name, Cohen-Tannoudji, means simply the Cohen family from Tangiers. The Algerian Jews obtained the French citizenship in 1870 after Algeria became a French colony in 1830."

After finishing secondary school in Algiers in 1953, Cohen-Tannoudji left for Paris to attend the École Normale Supérieure. His professors included Henri Cartan, Laurent Schwartz, and Alfred Kastler.

In 1958 he married Jacqueline Veyrat, a high school teacher, with whom he has three children. His studies were interrupted when he was conscripted into the army, in which he served for 28 months (longer than usual because of the Algerian War). In 1960 he resumed working toward his doctorate, which he obtained from the École Normale Supérieure under the supervision of Alfred Kastler and Jean Brossel at the end of 1962.

Career

After his dissertation, he started teaching quantum mechanics at the University of Paris. From 1964-67, he was an associate professor at the university and from 1967-1973 he was a full professor. His lecture notes were the basis of the popular textbook, Mécanique quantique, which he wrote with two of his colleagues. He also continued his research work on atom-photon interactions, and his research team developed the model of the dressed atom.

In 1973, he became a professor at the Collège de France. In the early 1980s, he started to lecture on radiative forces on atoms in laser light fields. He also formed a laboratory there with Alain Aspect, Christophe Salomon, and Jean Dalibard to study laser cooling and trapping. He even took a statistical approach to laser cooling with the use of stable distributions.

In 1976, he took sabbatical leave from the Collège de France, and lectured at Harvard University and MIT. At Harvard, he was a Loeb Lecturer for two weeks, and at MIT, he was a visiting professor.

His work eventually led to the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997 "for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light", shared with Steven Chu and William Daniel Phillips. Cohen-Tannoudji was the first physics Nobel prize winner born in an Arab country.

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

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-21 17:04:54

2027) William Daniel Phillips

Gist:

Work

At room temperature atoms and molecules in the air move about at breakneck speed. In order for them to be studied, they need to be slowed down or chilled. During the 1980s William Phillips, Steven Chu, and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji developed different methods for this. When atoms come in contact with light particles with fixed energies, photons, their movement is affected as if they had been bumped. With the aid of laser light from different directions and adjustment of the photon’s energy for Doppler effects, the atoms can be cooled to extremely low temperatures and captured in a trap.

Summary

William D. Phillips (born Nov. 5, 1948, Wilkes-Barre, Pa., U.S.) is an American physicist whose experiments using laser light to cool and trap atoms earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997. He shared the award with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, who also developed methods of laser cooling and atom trapping.

Phillips received his doctorate in physics (1976) and completed his postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1978 he joined the staff of the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Gaithersburg, Md., and it was there that he conducted his award-winning research. Building on Chu’s work, Phillips developed new and improved methods for measuring the temperature of laser-cooled atoms. In 1988 he discovered that the atoms reached a temperature six times lower than the predicted theoretical limit. Cohen-Tannoudji refined the theory to explain the new results, and he and Phillips further investigated methods of trapping atoms cooled to even lower temperatures.

One result of the development of laser-cooling techniques was the first observation, in 1995, of the Bose-Einstein condensate, a new state of matter originally predicted 70 years earlier by Albert Einstein and the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. In this state atoms are so chilled and so slow that they, in effect, merge and behave as one single quantum entity that is much larger than any individual atom.

Details

William Daniel Phillips (born November 5, 1948) is an American physicist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1997, with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji.

Biography

Phillips was born to William Cornelius Phillips of Juniata, Pennsylvania, and Mary Catherine Savino of Ripacandida, Italy. He is of Italian descent on his mother's side and of Welsh descent on his father's side. His parents moved to Camp Hill (near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) in 1959, where he attended high school and graduated valedictorian of his class in 1966. He graduated from Juniata College in 1970 summa cum laude. After that he received his physics doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1978 he joined National Bureau of Standards (currently NIST).

In 1996, he received the Albert A. Michelson Medal from The Franklin Institute.

Phillips' doctoral thesis concerned the magnetic moment of the proton in H2O. He later did some work with Bose–Einstein condensates. In 1997 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Steven Chu for his contributions to laser cooling, a technique to slow the movement of gaseous atoms in order to better study them, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and especially for his invention of the Zeeman slower.

Phillips is also a professor of physics, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at University of Maryland, College Park.

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

He was one of the 35 Nobel laureates who signed a letter urging President Obama to provide a stable $15 billion per year support for clean energy research, technology and demonstration.

He is one of three well-known scientists and Methodist laity who have involved themselves in the religion and science dialogue. The other two scientists and fellow Methodists are chemist Charles Coulson and 1981 Nobel laureate Arthur Leonard Schawlow.

In October 2010, Phillips participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's lunch with a laureate program where middle and high school students got to engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch. Phillips is also a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.

Personal life

Phillips married Jane Van Wynen shortly before he went to MIT. Neither had been regular churchgoers early in their marriage. However, in 1979, they joined the Fairhaven United Methodist Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland because they appreciated its diversity. He is a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion. He and his wife have two daughters; Caitlin Phillips (born 1979) who founded Rebound Designs, and Christine Phillips (b 1981) who works in Science Communication.

During a seminar at the University of Maryland Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry titled Coherent Atoms in Optical Lattices Phillips stated, "Rubidium is God's gift to Bose–Einstein condensates."

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-22 15:45:59

2028) Paul D. Boyer

Gist:

Work

All life requires energy. In both plants and animals, energy is stored and transported by a special molecule, adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Photosynthesis and respiration generate a flow of hydrogen ions, which are used to build up ATP molecules with the help of ATP synthase, an enzyme that facilitates the process without being incorporated in the final product. In 1974 Paul Boyer presented a theory explaining how ATP synthase works. The theory was substantiated in 1994 when John Walker used X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of ATP synthase.

Summary

Paul D. Boyer (born July 31, 1918, Provo, Utah, U.S.—died June 2, 2018, Los Angeles, California) was an American biochemist who, with John E. Walker, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1997 for their explanation of the enzymatic process involved in the production of the energy-storage molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which fuels the metabolic processes of the cells of all living things. (Danish chemist Jens C. Skou also shared the award for separate research on the molecule.)

After receiving his doctorate in biochemistry in 1943 from the University of Wisconsin, Boyer held a number of teaching positions before joining the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles in 1963. There he served as professor (1963–89) and director of the Molecular Biology Institute (1965–83) before being named professor emeritus in 1990.

In the early 1950s Boyer began to research how cells form ATP, a process that occurs in animal cells in a structure called a mitochondrion. In 1961 the British chemist Peter D. Mitchell showed that the energy required to make ATP is supplied as hydrogen ions flow across the mitochondrial membrane down their concentration gradient in an energy-producing direction. (For this work Mitchell won the 1978 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.) Boyer’s later research revealed more specifically what is involved in ATP synthesis. His work focused on the enzyme ATP synthase, and he demonstrated how the enzyme harnesses the energy produced by the hydrogen flow to form ATP out of adenosine diphosphate (ADP) and inorganic phosphate. Boyer postulated an unusual mechanism to explain the way in which ATP synthase functions. Known as his “binding change mechanism,” it was partially confirmed by Walker’s research.

Details

Paul Delos Boyer (July 31, 1918 – June 2, 2018) was an American biochemist, analytical chemist, and a professor of chemistry at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research on the "enzymatic mechanism underlying the biosynthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)" (ATP synthase) with John E. Walker, making Boyer the first Utah-born Nobel laureate; the remainder of the Prize in that year was awarded to Danish chemist Jens Christian Skou for his discovery of the Na+/K+-ATPase.

Birth and education

Boyer was born in Provo, Utah, and grew up in a nonpracticing Mormon family of Dutch, German, French, and English descent. He attended Provo High School, where he was active in student government and the debating team. He was also his high schools valedictorian and played intramural basketball in high school and college. He received a B.S. in chemistry from Brigham Young University in 1939 and obtained a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Scholarship for graduate studies. Five days before leaving for Wisconsin, Paul married Lyda Whicker in 1939, and they remained married for nearly eighty years until his death in 2018, making him the longest-married Nobel laureate. The Boyers had three children.

Though the Boyers connected with the Mormon community in Wisconsin, they considered themselves "on the wayward fringe" and doubted the doctrinal claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). After experimenting with Unitarianism, Boyer eventually became an atheist. In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.

Academic career

After Boyer received his Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1943, he spent years at Stanford University on a war-related research project dedicated to stabilization of serum albumin for transfusions. He began his independent research career at the University of Minnesota and introduced kinetic, isotopic, and chemical methods for investigating enzyme mechanisms. In 1955, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and worked with Professor Hugo Theorell on the mechanism of alcohol dehydrogenase. In 1956, he accepted a Hill Foundation Professorship and moved to the medical campus of the University of Minnesota. In 1959–1960, he served as Chairman of the Biochemistry Section of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and in 1969–1970 as President of the American Society of Biological Chemists.

Since 1963, he had been a professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at University of California, Los Angeles. In 1965, he became the founding director of the Molecular Biology Institute and spearheaded the construction of the building and the organization of an interdepartmental Ph.D. program. This institutional service did not diminish the creativity and originality of his research program, which led to three postulates for the binding mechanism for ATP synthesis—that energy input was not used primarily to form ATP but to promote the binding of phosphate and mostly the release of tightly bound ATP; that three identical catalytic sites went through compulsory, sequential binding changes; and that the binding changes of the catalytic subunits, circularly arranged on the periphery of the enzyme, were driven by the rotation of a smaller internal subunit.

Paul Boyer was editor or associate editor of the Annual Review of Biochemistry from 1963 to 1989. He was editor of the classic series, "The Enzymes". When he worked on the series "The Enzymes", he was helped by his wife Lyda as she was a professional editor at UCLA. In 1981, he was faculty research lecturer at UCLA. In that same year, he was awarded the prestigious Tolman Medal by the Southern California Section of the American Chemical Society.

Death

Boyer died of respiratory failure on June 2, 2018, at the age of 99, less than two months shy of his 100th birthday at his Los Angeles home.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-23 17:17:08

2029) John E. Walker

Gist:

Work

All life requires energy. In both plants and animals, energy is stored and transported by a special molecule, adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Photosynthesis and respiration generate a flow of hydrogen ions, which are used to build up ATP molecules with the help of ATP synthase, an enzyme that facilitates the process without being incorporated in the final product. In 1974 Paul Boyer presented a theory explaining how ATP synthase works. The theory was substantiated in 1994 when John Walker used X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of ATP synthase.

Summary

John Walker (born January 7, 1941, Halifax, Yorkshire, England) is a British chemist who was corecipient, with Paul D. Boyer, of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1997 for their explanation of the enzymatic process that creates adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Walker and Boyer’s findings offer insight into the way life-forms produce energy. (Danish chemist Jens C. Skou also shared the award for separate research on the molecule.)

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, in 1964, Walker studied in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford and received a doctorate in 1969. From 1969 to 1971 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin in the United States, and from 1971 to 1974 he was a fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. His award-winning work was conducted at the University of Cambridge in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which he joined in 1974 at the urging of biochemist Frederick Sanger.

Walker began his work at Cambridge by studying the proteins encoded by DNA that are found in certain bacteriophages and in mitochondria, the energy-producing organelles of animal cells. In the late 1970s he began studying ATP synthase, an enzyme found on the inner membrane of the mitochondrion that aids in the synthesis of ATP, the carrier of chemical energy. Focusing on the chemical and structural composition of the enzyme, he determined the sequence of amino acids that make up the synthase’s protein units. By 1994, working with X-ray crystallographers, Walker clarified the three-dimensional structure of the enzyme, which consists of one protein group (the F0 portion) embedded in the inner membrane and connected by a sort of protein stalk or shaft to another protein group (the F1 portion) located in the matrix of the organelle. The passage of hydrogen ions through the membrane causes the F0 portion and the stalk to rotate, and this rotation changes the configuration of the proteins in the F1 portion. Walker’s results supported Boyer’s “binding change mechanism,” which proposed that the enzyme functions by changing the position of its protein groups in such a way as to change their chemical affinity for ATP and its precursor molecules.

In 1998 Walker became director of the MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit, also at Cambridge. Largely on the strength of his own work, this unit in 2009 became the Mitochondrial Biology Unit, focusing on the mechanisms of energy conversion in the mitochondrion and on the role of that organelle in human health and disease. Walker directed one group that studied ATP synthase and another that studied the composition and function of all the proteins found in the mitochondrion. In 2013 he stepped down as director of the Mitochondrial Biology Unit.

Walker received many honours in addition to the Nobel for his work. In 1999 he was knighted. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1995 and was awarded the Society’s highest honour, the Copley Medal, in 2012.

Details

Sir John Ernest Walker (born 7 January 1941) is a British chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1997. As of 2015 Walker is Emeritus Director and Professor at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit in Cambridge, and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

Early life and education

Walker was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, the son of Thomas Ernest Walker, a stonemason, and Elsie Lawton, an amateur musician. He was brought up with his two younger sisters (Judith and Jen) in a rural environment and went to Rastrick Grammar School. At school, he was a keen sportsman and specialized in physical sciences and mathematics during his final three years there. He received a 3rd class Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry from St Catherine's College, Oxford. Walker began his study of peptide antibiotics with Edward Abraham at Oxford in 1965 and received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1969. During this period, he became interested in developments in molecular biology.

Career and research

From 1969 to 1971, Walker worked at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and from 1971 to 1974 in France. He met Fred Sanger in 1974 at a workshop at the University of Cambridge. This resulted in an invitation to work at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology of the Medical Research Council, which became a long-term appointment. Among the other staff was Francis Crick, who was well known for his discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. At first, he analyzed the sequences of proteins and then uncovered details of the modified genetic code in mitochondria. In 1978, he decided to apply protein chemical methods to membrane proteins. In this way, Walker characterized the subunit composition of proteins in the mitochondrial membrane and the DNA sequence of the mitochondrial genome.

His landmark crystallographic studies of the F1-ATPase, the catalytic region of the ATP synthase (done in collaboration with crystallographer Andrew Leslie), from bovine heart mitochondria revealed the three catalytic sites in three different conformations imposed by the position of the asymmetric central stalk. This structure supported the binding change mechanism and rotary catalysis for the ATP synthase (and related enzymes), one of the catalytic mechanisms proposed by Paul Boyer. This work, published in 1994, led to Walker's share of the 1997 Nobel prize for chemistry. Since this structure, Walker and his colleagues have produced most of the crystal structures in the PDB of mitochondrial ATP synthase, including transition state structures and protein with bound inhibitors and antibiotics. Scientists trained in Walker's group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge or MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit have gone on to determine crystal bacterial complex I and cryo-EM maps of mitochondrial complex I and vacuolar type ATPases.

Teaching and mentoring

Many students and postdoctoral research fellows who studied with John Walker have gone on to independent research careers, including Leonid Sazanov, Postdoctoral Fellow (ISTA) and Daniela Stock, Postdoctoral Fellow (Sydney).

Awards and honours

Walker was elected an EMBO Member in 1984. He shared his Nobel Prize with the American chemist Paul D. Boyer for their elucidation of the enzymatic mechanism underlying the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate. They also shared the prize with Danish chemist Jens C. Skou for research unrelated to theirs (Discovery of the Na+/K+-ATPase). Sir John was knighted in 1999 for services to molecular biology. He is a member of the Advisory Council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1995. Walker is also a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences and an Honorary Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford. He became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. In 2012 he was awarded the Copley Medal.

Personal life

Walker married Christina Westcott in 1963, and has two daughters.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-24 17:06:01

2030) Jens Christian Skou

Gist:

Work

Many of the cell’s functions, such as those concerned with nerve impulses, muscular contractions and digestion, require that the concentration of potassium ions inside the cell is higher than outside it, whereas the concentration of sodium ions must be lower inside than outside. It takes a great deal of energy to bring this about. The energy is stored in a special substance, adenosine triphosphate (ATP). In 1957 Jens Christian Skou discovered an enzyme, Na+/K+-ATPase, that serves as a sort of biological pump to transport ions.

Summary

Jens C. Skou (born October 8, 1918, Lemvig, Denmark—died May 28, 2018, Aarhus) was a Danish biophysicist who (with Paul D. Boyer and John E. Walker) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1997 for his discovery of the enzyme called sodium-potassium-activated adenosine triphosphatase (Na+-K+ ATPase), which is found in the plasma membrane of animal cells and acts as a pump that exchanges sodium (Na+) for potassium (K+).

Skou studied medicine at the University of Copenhagen and in 1954 earned a doctorate degree at Aarhus University, where he later taught. His research on ion-carrying enzymes was based on the work of Sir Alan Hodgkin and Richard Keynes, who followed the movements of sodium and potassium in a nerve cell following stimulation. The English scientists discovered that upon activation of the neuron, sodium ions flood the cell. The sodium concentration level is restored when ions are transported back across the membrane. This process requires energy, since transport occurs against a concentration gradient (from an area of low concentration to high concentration) and so was believed to require energy in the form of the energy-carrying molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

In the late 1950s Skou proposed that an enzyme is responsible for the transport of molecules through a cell’s membrane. His work with the membranes of nerve cells from crabs led to the discovery of Na+-K+ ATPase. Bound to a cell membrane, Na+-K+ ATPase is activated by external potassium and internal sodium. The enzyme pumps sodium out of the cell and potassium into it, thereby maintaining a high intracellular concentration of potassium and a low concentration of sodium relative to the surrounding external environment. Skou’s work led to the discovery of similar ATPase-based enzymes, including the ion pump that controls muscle contraction.

Details

Jens Christian Skou (8 October 1918 – 28 May 2018) was a Danish biochemist and Nobel laureate.

Early life

Skou was born in Lemvig, Denmark to a wealthy family. His father Magnus Martinus Skou was a timber and coal merchant. His mother Ane-Margrethe Skou took over the company after the death of his father. At the age of 15, Skou entered a boarding school in Haslev, Zealand. He graduated in medicine from the University of Copenhagen in 1944 and received his doctorate in 1954. He began working at the Aarhus University in 1947 and was appointed professor of biophysics in 1977. He retired from the Aarhus University in 1988, but kept offices at the Department of Physiology (today part of the Department of Biomedicine).

Career

In 1997 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (together with Paul D. Boyer and John E. Walker) for his discovery of Na+,K+-ATPase, making him, at the time of his death, the latest Danish Nobel laureate and the first at Aarhus University.

Skou had taken a few years away from his clinical training in the early 1950s to study the action of local anaesthetics. He had discovered that a substance’s anaesthetic action was related to its ability to dissolve in a layer of the lipid part of the plasma membrane, the anaesthetic molecules affected the opening of sodium channels which he assumed to be protein. This, he argued, would affect the movement of sodium ions and make nerve cells inexcitable, thus causing anaesthesia.

Skou thought that other types of membrane protein might also be affected by local anaesthetics dissolving in the lipid part of the membrane. He therefore had the idea of looking at an enzyme which was embedded in the membrane and finding out if its properties were affected by local anaesthetics. He looked at ATPase in crab nerves.

The enzyme was there, but its activity was very variable and he needed a highly active enzyme for his studies. Eventually he managed to discover that ATPase was most active when exposed to the right combination of sodium, potassium and magnesium ions. Only then did he realise that this enzyme might have something to do with the active movement of sodium and potassium across the plasma membrane. This idea had been postulated many years before, however, the mechanism was quite unknown.

Skou published his findings. However, in his paper he was wary of identifying the enzyme with the active ion movement, so he left out the term “sodium-potassium pump” from the title of his paper. Indeed, he seems to have realised the importance of his discovery only gradually, and he continued his studies on local anaesthetics.

In 1958 Skou went to a conference in Vienna to describe his work on cholinesterase. There he met Robert Post (born 1920), who had been studying the pumping of sodium and potassium in red blood cells. Post had recently discovered that three sodium ions were pumped out of the cell for every two potassium ions pumped in, and in his research he had made use of a substance called ouabain (or g-strophanthin) which had recently been shown to inhibit the pump).

Post had not read Skou’s paper, but he was excited when Skou told him about his work with ATPase. Post asked whether the enzyme was inhibited by ouabain. At this stage Skou was unaware that ouabain inhibited the pump, but he immediately telephoned his lab and arranged for the experiment to be done. Ouabain did indeed inhibit the enzyme, thus establishing a link between the enzyme and the sodium-potassium pump.

Following the Nobel Prize, Skou gave several interviews recounting the story of his discoveries, and at age 94 was reported to still keep up with publications in his field. He died on 28 May 2018 in Aarhus, Denmark at the age of 99, less than five months shy of his 100th birthday.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-25 16:38:23

2031) Stanley B. Prusiner

Gist:

Life

Stanley Prusiner was born in Des Moines, Iowa, USA and grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his father worked as an architect. Prusiner studied chemistry and then medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he received his MD in 1968. After military service at the US Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, he moved to the University of California San Francisco in 1972 and has been working there since then. Stanley Prusiner is married and has two children.

Work

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and related illnesses affecting people and animals involve the degeneration of brain cells. In 1982 Stanley Prusiner was able to isolate a suspected infectious agent, a protein that Prusiner called a prion. He identified the gene behind the prion protein, but determined that it is also present in healthy people and animals. Prusiner showed that the prion molecules are folded in a different way than the normal proteins and that the folding of the prion can be transferred to normal proteins. This is the basis for the illness.

Summary

Stanley B. Prusiner (born May 28, 1942, Des Moines, Iowa, U.S.) is an American biochemist and neurologist whose discovery in 1982 of disease-causing proteins called prions won him the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Prusiner grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (A.B., 1964; M.D., 1968). After spending four years in biochemical research, he became (1972) a resident in neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. He joined the faculty there in 1974 and became a professor of neurology and biochemistry. While a neurology resident, he was in charge of a patient who died of a rare fatal degenerative disorder of the brain called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Prusiner became intrigued by this little-known class of neurodegenerative disorders—the spongiform encephalopathies—that caused progressive dementia and death in humans and animals. In 1974 he set up a laboratory to study scrapie, a related disorder of sheep, and in 1982 he claimed to have isolated the scrapie-causing agent. He claimed that this pathogenic agent, which he named “prion,” was unlike any other known pathogen, such as a virus or bacterium, because it consisted only of protein and lacked the genetic material contained within all life-forms that is necessary for replication.

When first published, the prion theory met with much criticism, but it became widely accepted by the mid-1990s. In 1996, when a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease emerged in Great Britain, Prusiner’s research was the focus of national attention. Fears abounded that the new variant of the disease might be linked to “mad cow” disease, a brain disorder that first appeared in British cattle a decade earlier. Some evidence suggested that the mad cow prion may have jumped species, infecting humans who consumed beef contaminated with the infectious agent. Because mad cow disease was believed to have been caused when the agent that causes scrapie in sheep was transmitted to cattle in feed, there was precedent for species-jumping events to occur. Prusiner’s research also could have significant implications for such disorders as Alzheimer disease and Parkinson disease, which seemed to share certain characteristics with the diseases caused by prions.

Prusiner received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1994) and the Louisa Gross Horowitz Prize (1997) for his discoveries pertaining to neurodegenerative disease. After he was appointed director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, he founded InPro Biotechnology, Inc. (2001). The company was designed to further develop and commercialize discoveries and technologies conceived in his laboratory at the university. Among the technologies promoted by InPro was a test to detect bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle and sheep, chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Prusiner also wrote several books during his career, including Slow Transmissible Diseases of the Nervous System (1979; cowritten by William Hadlow) and Prion Biology and Diseases (2004).

Details

Stanley Ben Prusiner (born May 28, 1942) is an American neurologist and biochemist. He is the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Prusiner discovered prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens primarily or solely composed of protein, a scientific theory considered by many as a heretical idea when first proposed. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1994 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for research on prion diseases developed by him and his team of experts (D. E. Garfin, D. P. Stites, W. J. Hadlow, C. M. Eklund) beginning in the early 1970s.

Early life, career and research

He was born in Des Moines, Iowa, into a Jewish[8] family to Miriam (Spigel) and Lawrence Prusiner, an architect. He spent his childhood in Des Moines and Cincinnati, Ohio, where he attended Walnut Hills High School, where he was known as "the little genius" for his groundbreaking work on a repellent for Boxelder bugs. Prusiner received a Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and later received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Prusiner then completed an internship in medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Later Prusiner moved to the National Institutes of Health, where he studied glutaminases in E. coli in the laboratory of Earl Stadtman.

After three years at NIH, Prusiner returned to UCSF to complete a residency in neurology. Upon completion of the residency in 1974, Prusiner joined the faculty of the UCSF neurology department. Since that time, Prusiner has held various faculty and visiting faculty positions at both UCSF and UC Berkeley.

Since 1999, Prusiner has been director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases research laboratory at UCSF, working on prion diseases, Alzheimer's disease and tauopathies.

Prion: A heretical idea

In his 1998 PNAS review article on Prions, Prusiner wrote: "The idea that scrapie prions were composed of an amyloidogenic protein was truly heretical when it was introduced" (by Tikvah Alper). Encephalopathy was a mysterious disease that attacks the brain, and leaves the brains of its victims full of holes. Scientists did not know what pathogen or disease-causing organism that produced such pattern. Prusiner and his co-workers suggested "One scientific theory, viewed as heretical in that it seems to challenge the role of nucleic acids as the exclusive carriers of genetic information." This theory suggested that this pathogen might be a "deadly variety of a normal protein that has the ability to amplify itself in the brain. The hypothetical protein is called a prion (pronounced PREE-on)."

Awards and honors

Stanley Prusiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for his work in proposing an explanation for the cause of bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow disease") and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. In this work, he coined the term prion, which comes from the words "proteinaceous" and "infectious," in 1982 to refer to a previously undescribed form of infection due to protein misfolding.

Prusiner was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1992 and to its governing council in 2007. He is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993), a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1997, and the American Philosophical Society (1998), the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (2003), and the Institute of Medicine.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-26 15:28:03

2032) Robert B. Laughlin

Gist:

Work:

The Hall effect refers to the fact that 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. In interfaces in certain materials a quantum Hall effect occurs. After Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui discovered that changes in the magnetic field result in changes in Hall conductance that vary in steps that represent fractions of a constant, Robert Laughlin explained the phenomenon in 1983 with the formation of quasiparticles and a kind of quantum fluid.

Summary

Robert B. Laughlin (born November 1, 1950, Visalia, California, U.S.) is an American physicist who, with Daniel C. Tsui and Horst Störmer, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1998 for the discovery that electrons in an extremely powerful magnetic field can form a quantum fluid in which “portions” of electrons can be identified. This effect is known as the fractional quantum Hall effect.

Laughlin graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972 and earned a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979. He conducted research at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey (1979–81) and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California (1981–82), before becoming an associate professor of physics at Stanford University (Stanford, California) in 1985. He became a full professor at Stanford in 1989.

Laughlin received his share of the Nobel Prize for explaining the puzzling experimental results obtained by Tsui and Störmer in 1982 in the course of their research at Bell Laboratories. The two men had been experimenting with the Hall effect—the voltage that develops between the edges of a thin current-carrying ribbon placed flat between the poles of a strong magnet. The Hall effect had been known since 1879, but in 1980 the German physicist Klaus von Klitzing, while observing the effect at very low temperatures and under extremely strong magnetic fields, discovered that as the strength of the applied magnetic field is increased, the corresponding change in the voltage of the deflected current (the Hall resistance) occurs in a series of steps or jumps that are proportional to integer numbers, thereby displaying quantum properties. Tsui and Störmer extended Klitzing’s work by observing the Hall effect at temperatures near absolute zero and under even more powerful magnetic fields. Under these conditions, the voltage of the deflected current changed in fractional increments of the steps observed by Klitzing, suggesting that the charge carriers in the current carry exact fractions of an electron’s charge.

Laughlin provided the theoretical explanation for these puzzling results in 1983. He posited that the extremely low temperature and the tremendous magnetic field induce the electrons in an electric current to condense and form a “quantum fluid” that is related to those which occur in superconducting materials and in liquid helium. The fluid is formed when electrons combine with the “flux quanta” of the magnetic field to form new quasi-particles, each of which carries only one-third of an electron’s charge. This phenomenon is an unusual extension of quantum physics that may shed additional light on the nature and structure of matter.

Details

Robert Betts Laughlin (born November 1, 1950) is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. Along with Horst L. Störmer of Columbia University and Daniel C. Tsui of Princeton University, he was awarded a share of the 1998 Nobel Prize in physics for their explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect.

In 1983, Laughlin was first to provide a many body wave function, now known as the Laughlin wavefunction, for the fractional quantum hall effect, which was able to correctly explain the fractionalized charge observed in experiments. This state has since been interpreted as the integer quantum Hall effect of the composite fermion.

His 2017 paper, "Pumped thermal grid storage with heat exchange" inspired Project Malta at Google X and subsequently Malta inc.

Biography

Laughlin was born in Visalia, California. He earned a B.A. in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972, and his Ph.D. in physics in 1979 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Between 2004 and 2006, he served as the president of KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea.

Publications

Laughlin published a book entitled A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down in 2005. The book argues for emergence as a replacement for reductionism, in addition to general commentary on hot-topic issues.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-27 15:47:14

2033) Horst Ludwig Störmer

Gist:

Work

The Hall effect refers to the fact that 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. In interfaces in certain materials a quantum Hall effect occurs. Klaus von Klitzing discovered that 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. Subsequently, Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui discovered in 1982 that there also are steps that represent fractions of the constant.

Summary

Horst L. Störmer (born April 6, 1949, Frankfurt am Main, West Germany [now Germany]) is a German-born American physicist who, with Daniel C. Tsui and Robert B. Laughlin, was coawarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect.

Störmer grew up in West Germany (now Germany). He graduated from Goethe University Frankfurt in 1970 and earned a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Stuttgart in 1977. Moving to the United States, he joined the research staff of Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, New Jersey) in 1978. There he and his coworker Tsui made their discovery in 1982. Störmer was head of the Physical Research Laboratory at Bell Labs from 1992 to 1998, when he became a professor at Columbia University in New York City; he retired as professor emeritus in 2011.

The research of Störmer and Tsui was based on the Hall effect, which denotes the voltage that develops between the edges of a thin current-carrying ribbon placed flat between the poles of a strong magnet. This effect had long been familiar to science, but in 1980 the German physicist Klaus von Klitzing discovered that at extremely low temperatures, though the strength of an applied magnetic field is increased smoothly and continuously, the corresponding change in the voltage of the deflected current (the Hall resistance) occurs in discrete jumps or steps, thereby exhibiting quantum properties. Störmer and Tsui extended Klitzing’s work, observing the Hall effect in semiconductors at temperatures close to absolute zero and under extremely powerful magnetic fields. In 1982 they observed that under these conditions, the Hall effect varies not only stepwise but in fractional increments, implying that the charge carriers in the current carry exact fractions of an electron’s charge. In 1983 the American physicist Laughlin explained this puzzling phenomenon by proposing that the electrons in the powerful magnetic fields generated by Störmer and Tsui form a quantum fluid made up of quasi-particles that have fractional electric charges.

Earlier in 1998, Stormer was awarded jointly with Laughlin and Tsui the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics for the discovery of the fractional quantum hall effect.

Details

Horst Ludwig Störmer (born April 6, 1949) is a German physicist, Nobel laureate and emeritus professor at Columbia University. He was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Daniel Tsui and Robert Laughlin "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations" (the fractional quantum Hall effect). He and Tsui were working at Bell Labs at the time of the experiment cited by the Nobel committee.

Biography

Störmer was born in Frankfurt am Main, and grew up in the nearby town of Sprendlingen. After graduating from the Goetheschule in Neu-Isenburg in 1967, he enrolled in architectural engineering at the TH Darmstadt, but later moved to the Goethe University Frankfurt to study physics, but since he had missed the registration period for physics, he began with a mathematics and later changed to physics, qualifying for his Diploma in the laboratory of Werner Martienssen. Here he was supervised by Eckhardt Hoenig, and worked alongside another future Nobel laureate, Gerd Binnig.

Störmer moved to France to carry out his PhD research in Grenoble, working in a high-magnetic field laboratory which was run jointly between the French CNRS and the German Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. Störmer's academic advisor was Hans-Joachim Queisser, and he was awarded a PhD by the University of Stuttgart in 1977 for his thesis on investigations of electron hole droplets subject to high magnetic fields. He also met his wife, Dominique Parchet, while working in Grenoble. They divorced each other a few years later.

After receiving his PhD, Störmer moved to the US to work at Bell Labs, where he carried out the research that led to his Nobel prize. After working at Bell Labs for 20 years, he became the I.I. Rabi professor of physics and applied physics at Columbia University in New York City. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2006. He retired as professor emeritus in 2011.

Störmer is a naturalized US citizen.

Research career

Perhaps as important as the work for which he won the Nobel prize is his invention of modulation doping, a method for making extremely high mobility two dimensional electron systems in semiconductors. This enabled the later observation of the fractional quantum Hall effect, which was discovered by Störmer and Tsui in October 1981 in an experiment carried out in the Francis Bitter High Magnetic Field Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Within a year of the experimental discovery, Robert Laughlin was able to explain its results. Störmer, Tsui and Laughlin were jointly awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-28 15:14:54

2034) Daniel C. Tsui

Gist:

Work

The Hall effect refers to the fact that 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. In interfaces in certain materials a quantum Hall effect occurs. Klaus von Klitzing discovered that 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. Subsequently, Daniel Tsui and Horst Störmer discovered in 1982 that there also are steps that represent fractions of the constant.

Summary

Daniel C. Tsui (born February 28, 1939, Honan province, China) is a Chinese-born American physicist who, with Horst L. Störmer and Robert B. Laughlin, received the 1998 Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery that the electrons in a powerful magnetic field at very low temperatures can form a quantum fluid whose particles have fractional electric charges. This effect is known as the fractional quantum Hall effect.

Tsui graduated from Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, in 1961, and he obtained a Ph.D in physics from the University of Chicago in 1967. He then joined the research staff at Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, New Jersey), where he and Störmer made their prizewinning discovery in 1982. (In 1983 Laughlin, also of Bell Laboratories, provided the theoretical interpretation of the data.) Tsui became a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University in 1982; he retired as professor emeritus in 2010.

Tsui and Störmer’s research at Bell Laboratories was based on the Hall effect, which is the development of a crosswise electric field in current-carrying ribbon whose surface lies perpendicular to a strong magnetic field. This transverse electric field results from the force that the magnetic field exerts on the moving particles of the electric current. In 1980, while studying the Hall effect in semiconductors at very low temperatures and in strong magnetic fields, the German physicist Klaus von Klitzing discovered that though the strength of the applied magnetic field was increased smoothly, the corresponding change in electrical resistance occurred in discrete steps or jumps, thereby displaying quantum properties. In 1982 Tsui and Störmer studied this quantum Hall effect at temperatures near absolute zero and under extremely powerful magnetic fields. They found the quantum changes in electrical potential to occur in fractional increments of the steps observed by Klitzing, a result that could not be explained by existing theoretical models. In 1983 Laughlin’s explanation of the phenomenon posited that in a powerful magnetic field, electrons condense and form a quantum fluid in which their fractional charges become observable.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Tsui was awarded the Buckley Prize for Condensed Matter Physics in 1984 and was jointly awarded, with Störmer and Laughlin, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics in 1988.

Details

Daniel Chee Tsui (pinyin: Cuī Qí, born February 28, 1939) is an American physicist. He is currently serving as the Professor of Electrical Engineering, emeritus, at Princeton University. Tsui's areas of research include electrical properties of thin films and microstructures of semiconductors and solid-state physics.

Tsui won the Nobel Prize in Physics of 1998 with Robert B. Laughlin and Horst L. Störmer "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations."

Biography

Tsui was born into a Chinese agricultural family with two illiterate parents in Fanzhuang (Henan) Baofeng, Henan, Republic of China, on February 28, 1939. Born in the midst of Second World War, Tsui described his early childhood memories as being "filled with the years of drought, flood and war which were constantly on the consciousness of the inhabitants of my over-populated village."

In 1951, Tsui left for Hong Kong to attend Pui Ching Middle School in Kowloon, beginning his formal education at the level of sixth grade in his second year in Hong Kong. Tsui recalled facing difficulties due to his lack of familiarity with Cantonese dialect used.

Upon graduating in 1957, Tsui was admitted to the National Taiwan University Medical School, but due to uncertainties over whether he would be able to return to his family in China, he remained in Hong Kong to enroll in Special Classes Centre, a special two-year government program intended to prepare high school graduates for entrance into the University of Hong Kong. While preparing for the entrance examination to the University of Hong Kong in spring of 1958, Tsui was awarded a full scholarship to attend Augustana College, his church pastor's Lutheran alma mater in the United States. Accepting the scholarship, Tsui arrived at Augustana College just after Labor Day of 1958.

After spending three years at Augustana College, Tsui graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1961 as the only student of Chinese descent in his college. Tsui continued his study in physics at the University of Chicago, from where he received his Ph.D. in physics in 1967 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "de Haas-van Alphen effect and electronic band structure of nickel", under the supervision of Royal Stark. He remarked that due to the influence of prominent Chinese theoretical physicists and Nobel laureates C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee, both of whom studied at the University of Chicago, he had always knew that he wanted to pursue graduate studies in physics at the institution.

While a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Tsui met Linda Varland, who was an undergraduate student there at the time, and the two married after the latter's graduation. Tsui is a naturalized U.S. citizen. Tsui and Varland have two daughters, Aileen and Judith. Judith graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with a B.A. in anthropology in 1991 and is now an associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

After receiving his Ph.D. and then remaining in Chicago for a year of postdoctoral research, Tsui joined the research staff at Bell Laboratories to perform research in solid state physics in 1968. At Bell Laboratories, instead of studying mainstream topics of interest in semiconductor physics such as optics and high energy band-structures or their applications in devices, Tsui devoted his attention to a new field called the physics of two-dimensional electrons.

Tsui and Störmer made the groundbreaking discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect in 1982, while Laughlin provided a theoretical interpretation for the discovery the following year. This discovery will eventually be the reason of their winning of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Shortly after the discovery, Tsui departed from Bell Laboratories and joined the faculty of the department of electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton University with the support of two Nobel laureates in February 1982. After 28 years at Princeton, Tsui transferred to emeritus status in 2010.

He was also an adjunct senior research scientist in the physics department of Columbia University, and a research professor at Boston University.

Tsui is one of the 20 American recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics to sign a letter addressed to President George W. Bush in May 2008, urging him to "reverse the damage done to basic science research in the Fiscal Year 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill" by requesting additional emergency funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. 2022, Tsui is among only three of Chinese Nobel laureates who voiced their support for Ukraine.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-29 15:17:27

2035) Walter Kohn

Gist:

Work

The structures of molecules and the way they react with one another depends on the movement of electrons and their distribution in space, which is determined by the laws of quantum mechanics. However, quantum mechanics requires very complicated calculations for complex systems such as molecules. In 1964 Walter Kohn laid the foundation for a theory that stated it was not necessary to account for every electron’s movement. Instead, one could look at the average density of electrons in the space. This presented new opportunities for calculations involving chemical structures and reactions.

Summary

Walter Kohn (born March 9, 1923, Vienna, Austria—died April 19, 2016, Santa Barbara, California, U.S.) was an Austrian-born American physicist who, with John A. Pople, received the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The award recognized their individual work on computations in quantum chemistry. Kohn’s share of the prize acknowledged his development of the density-functional theory, which made it possible to apply the complicated mathematics of quantum mechanics to the description and analysis of the chemical bonding between atoms.

Having emigrated from his native Austria, Kohn received a master’s degree from the University of Toronto (Ontario, Canada) in 1946. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 1948 and taught there in 1948–50. He became a professor of physics at the Carnegie-Mellon Institute (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) in 1950, and he held professorships at the University of California at San Diego (1960–79) and the University of California at Santa Barbara (1979–91), becoming emeritus in 1991.

Kohn’s work centred on the use of quantum mechanics to understand electron bonding between atoms to form molecules. Since its development in the 1920s, quantum mechanics had proven a powerful tool for understanding the interactions of atomic particles with each other and with radiation. Quantum mechanics predicts probabilities in matter (wave functions); however, the mathematical calculations necessary to describe the probability states for electrons in an atomic or molecular system were far too complex to be useful to scientists. In the 1960s, however, Kohn discovered that the total energy of an atomic or molecular system described by quantum mechanics could be calculated if the spatial distribution (density) of all electrons within that system were known. It was not necessary, then, to describe the probable motions for each individual electron within such a system but merely to know the average electron density located at each point within a system. As developed by other researchers, Kohn’s approach, the density-functional theory, greatly simplified the computations needed to understand the electron bonding between atoms within molecules. The method’s simplicity enables researchers to map the geometrical structure of even very large molecules and to predict complex enzymatic and other chemical reactions.

Details

Walter Kohn (March 9, 1923 – April 19, 2016) was an Austrian-American theoretical physicist and theoretical chemist. He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the understandings of the electronic properties of materials. In particular, Kohn played the leading role in the development of density functional theory, which made it possible to calculate quantum mechanical electronic structure by equations involving the electronic density (rather than the many-body wavefunction). This computational simplification led to more accurate calculations on complex systems as well as many new insights, and it has become an essential tool for materials science, condensed-phase physics, and the chemical physics of atoms and molecules.

Early years in Canada

Kohn arrived in England as part of the Kindertransport rescue operation immediately after the annexation of Austria by Hitler. He was from a Jewish family, and has written, "My feelings towards Austria, my native land, are – and will remain – very painful. They are dominated by my vivid recollections of 1 1/2 years as a Jewish boy under the Nazi regime, and by the subsequent murder of my parents, Salomon and Gittel Kohn, of other relatives and several teachers, during the Holocaust. ... I want to mention that I have a strong Jewish identity and – over the years – have been involved in several Jewish projects, such as the establishment of a strong program of Judaic Studies at the University of California in San Diego.". Kohn also has identified as Deist.

Because he was an Austrian national, he was transferred to Canada in July 1940 after the outbreak of World War II. As a 17-year-old, Kohn traveled as part of a British convoy moving through U-boat-infested waters to Quebec City in Canada; and from there, by train, to a camp in Trois-Rivières. He was at first held in detention in a camp near Sherbrooke, Quebec. This camp, as well as others, provided a small number of educational facilities that Kohn used to the fullest, and he finally succeeded in entering the University of Toronto. As a German national, the future Nobel Laureate in Chemistry was not allowed to enter the chemistry building, and so he opted for physics and mathematics.

Scientific career

Kohn received a war-time bachelor's degree in applied mathematics at the end of his one-year army service, having completed only 2 1/2 out of the 4-year undergraduate program, from the University of Toronto in 1945; he was awarded an M.A. degree in applied mathematics by Toronto in 1946. Kohn was awarded a Ph.D. degree in physics by Harvard University in 1948, where he worked under Julian Schwinger on the three-body scattering problem. At Harvard he also fell under the influence of J. H. Van Vleck and developed an interest in solid state physics.

He moved from Harvard to Carnegie Mellon University from 1950 to 1960, after a short stint in Copenhagen as a National Research Council of Canada post-doctoral fellow. At Carnegie Mellon he did much of his seminal work on multiple-scattering band-structure work, now known as the KKR method. His association with Bell Labs got him involved with semiconductor physics, and produced a long and fruitful collaboration with Luttinger (including, for example, development of the Luttinger-Kohn model of semiconductor band structure). In 1960 he moved to the newly founded University of California, San Diego, held a term as the physics department chair, and remained until 1979. It was during this period, he, along with his student Chanchal Kumar Majumdar developed the Kohn–Majumdar theorem related to Fermi gas and its bound and unbound states. He then accepted the founding director's position at the new Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. He took his position as a professor in the Physics Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1984; where he worked until the end of his life.

Kohn made significant contributions to semiconductor physics, which led to his award of the Oliver E. Buckley Prize by the American Physical Society. He was also awarded the Feenburg medal for his contributions to the many-body problem. His work on density functional theory was initiated during a visit to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, with Pierre Hohenberg, and was prompted by a consideration of alloy theory. The Hohenberg–Kohn theorem was further developed, in collaboration with Lu Jeu Sham, to produce the Kohn-Sham equations. The latter is the standard work horse of modern materials science, and even used in quantum theories of plasmas. In 2004, a study of all citations to the Physical Review journals from 1893 until 2003, found Kohn to be an author of five of the 100 papers with the "highest citation impact", including the first two.

In 1957, he relinquished his Canadian citizenship and became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

In 1963 Kohn became a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1969, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1994. In 2011, he became an honorary member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). He was also a Member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.

Death

Kohn died on April 19, 2016, at his home in Santa Barbara, California from jaw cancer, at the age of 93.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-30 15:38:35

2036) John Pople

Gist:

Work

The structures of molecules and the way they react with one another depends on the movement of electrons and their distribution in space, which is determined by the laws of quantum mechanics. However, quantum mechanics requires very complicated calculations for complex systems such as molecules. At the end of the 1960s, John Pople provided vital input on the use of computers for such calculations, including the Gaussian computer program he developed. Using various experimental data, the program can provide descriptions of molecules’ properties and the course of reactions.

Summary

Sir John A. Pople (born October 31, 1925, Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, England—died March 15, 2004, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) was a British mathematician and chemist who, with Walter Kohn, received the 1998 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for work on computational methodology in quantum chemistry. Pople’s share of the prize recognized his development of computer-based methods of studying the quantum mechanics of molecules.

Pople was educated at the University of Cambridge and received a Ph.D. in mathematics from that institution in 1951. He was a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1951 to 1958 and a lecturer in mathematics there from 1954 to 1958. He then headed the Basic Physics Division of the National Physical Laboratory (Middlesex, England) from 1958 to 1964. He was a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) from 1964 to 1993, and he also taught at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) from 1986 to 1993.

Pople’s research centred on applying the complicated mathematics of quantum mechanics to study the chemical bonding between atoms within molecules. The use of quantum mechanics was problematic in this regard, because the necessary mathematical calculations for describing the probability states (wave functions) of individual electrons in molecular systems are so complex. However, the development in the 1960s of increasingly powerful computers that could perform such calculations opened up new opportunities in the field. In the late 1960s Pople designed a computer program, Gaussian, that could perform quantum-mechanical calculations to provide quick and accurate theoretical estimates of the properties of molecules and of their behaviour in chemical reactions. Gaussian eventually entered use in chemical laboratories throughout the world and became a basic tool in quantum-chemical studies. The computer models provided by this program have increased the understanding of such varied phenomena as interstellar matter and the effect of pollutants on the environment. These models also enable scientists to simulate the effectiveness of new drugs.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Pople received numerous awards, and in 2003 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

Details

Sir John Anthony Pople (31 October 1925 – 15 March 2004) was a British theoretical chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Walter Kohn in 1998 for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry.

Early life and education

Pople was born in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, and attended the Bristol Grammar School. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1943. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1946. Between 1945 and 1947 he worked at the Bristol Aeroplane Company. He then returned to the University of Cambridge and was awarded his PhD in mathematics in 1951 on lone pair electrons.

Career

After obtaining his PhD, he was a research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge and then from 1954 a lecturer in the mathematics faculty at Cambridge. In 1958, he moved to the National Physical Laboratory, near London as head of the new basics physics division. He moved to the United States of America in 1964, where he lived the rest of his life, though he retained British citizenship. Pople considered himself more of a mathematician than a chemist, but theoretical chemists consider him one of the most important of their number. In 1964 he moved to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he had experienced a sabbatical in 1961 to 1962. In 1993 he moved to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he was Trustees Professor of Chemistry until his death.

Research

Pople's major scientific contributions were in four different areas:

i) Statistical mechanics of water

Pople's early paper on the statistical mechanics of water, according to Michael J. Frisch, "remained the standard for many years". This was his thesis topic for his PhD at Cambridge supervised by John Lennard-Jones.

ii) Nuclear magnetic resonance

In the early days of nuclear magnetic resonance he studied the underlying theory, and in 1959 he co-authored the textbook High Resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance with W.G. Schneider and H.J. Bernstein.

iii) Semi-empirical theory

He made major contributions to the theory of approximate molecular orbital (MO) calculations, starting with one identical to the one developed by Rudolph Pariser and Robert G. Parr on pi electron systems, and now called the Pariser–Parr–Pople method. Subsequently, he developed the methods of Complete Neglect of Differential Overlap (CNDO) (in 1965) and Intermediate Neglect of Differential Overlap (INDO) for approximate MO calculations on three-dimensional molecules, and other developments in computational chemistry. In 1970 he and David Beveridge coauthored the book Approximate Molecular Orbital Theory describing these methods.

iv) Ab initio electronic structure theory

Pople pioneered the development of more sophisticated computational methods, called ab initio quantum chemistry methods, that use basis sets of either Slater type orbitals or Gaussian orbitals to model the wave function. While in the early days these calculations were extremely expensive to perform, the advent of high speed microprocessors has made them much more feasible today. He was instrumental in the development of one of the most widely used computational chemistry packages, the Gaussian suite of programs, including coauthorship of the first version, Gaussian 70. One of his most important original contributions is the concept of a model chemistry whereby a method is rigorously evaluated across a range of molecules. His research group developed the quantum chemistry composite methods such as Gaussian-1 (G1) and Gaussian-2 (G2). In 1991, Pople stopped working on Gaussian and several years later he developed (with others) the Q-Chem computational chemistry program. Prof. Pople's departure from Gaussian, along with the subsequent banning of many prominent scientists, including himself, from using the software gave rise to considerable controversy among the quantum chemistry community.

The Gaussian molecular orbital methods were described in the 1986 book Ab initio molecular orbital theory by Warren Hehre, Leo Radom, Paul v.R. Schleyer and Pople.

Awards and honours

Pople received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1961.[1] He was made a Knight Commander (KBE) of the Order of the British Empire in 2003. He was a founding member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.

An IT room and a scholarship are named after him at Bristol Grammar School, as is a supercomputer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

Personal life

Pople married Joy Bowers in 1952 and was married until her death from cancer in 2002. Pople died of liver cancer in Chicago in 2004. He was survived by his daughter Hilary, and sons Adrian, Mark and Andrew. In accordance with his wishes, Pople's Nobel Medal was given to Carnegie Mellon University by his family on 5 October 2009.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-08-31 15:56:35

2037) Robert F. Furchgott

Gist:

Life

Robert Furchgott was born in Charleston, South Carolina, where his family ran a department store. After studying chemistry at Chapel Hill in North Carolina, he received his doctorate at Northwestern University in Illinois. He then worked at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, at Washington University in St. Louis and, beginning in 1956, at State University of New York in Brooklyn. Furchgott and his wife Lenore had three daughters. After becoming a widower in 1983, he married Margaret Roth, who died in 2006.

Work

Since the 1970s researchers have understood that the role of the innermost layer of blood vessels, the endothelium, goes beyond protection. In 1980 Robert Furchgott showed that the ability of blood vessels to contract or expand disappeared if the endothelium was removed. He concluded that a substance that causes expansion was formed in this layer. In 1986 he and Louis Ignarro, independently of each other, demonstrated that this substance was nitric oxide (NO). The discovery has made possible new medications, such as those used to treat heart and cardiovascular diseases and impotence.

Summary

Robert F. Furchgott (born June 4, 1916, Charleston, S.C., U.S.—died May 19, 2009, Seattle, Wash.) was an American pharmacologist who, along with Louis J. Ignarro and Ferid Murad, was co-awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that nitric oxide (NO) acts as a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system. Their combined work uncovered an entirely new mechanism by which blood vessels in the body relax and widen.

Furchgott received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of North Carolina in 1937 and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Northwestern University in 1940. He joined SUNY-Brooklyn’s department of pharmacology in 1956, a position he held until 1989, when he retired as professor emeritus and became an adjunct professor at the University of Miami School of Medicine in Florida. Nearly all of Furchgott’s research involved the study of the mechanism of drug interaction with the receptors in blood vessels.

In the work for which he shared the Nobel Prize, Furchgott demonstrated that cells in the endothelium, or inner lining, of blood vessels produce an unknown signaling molecule. The molecule, which he named endothelium-derived relaxing factor (EDRF), signals smooth muscle cells in blood vessel walls to relax, dilating the vessels. Furchgott’s work would eventually be linked with research done by Murad in 1977, which showed that nitroglycerin and several related heart drugs induce the formation of nitric oxide, a colourless, odourless gas that acts to increase the diameter of blood vessels. Once Ignarro demonstrated that EDRF was nitric oxide, the stage was set for the discovery of the many applications of this important basic research. Furchgott and Ignarro first announced their findings at a scientific conference in 1986 and triggered an international boom in research on nitric oxide. Scientists later showed that nitric oxide is manufactured by many different kinds of cells in the body and has a role in regulating a variety of body functions. The research done by Murad, Furchgott, and Ignarro was key to the development of the highly successful anti-impotence drug sildenafil citrate (Viagra), which acts to increase nitric oxide’s effect in penile blood vessels. Researchers suggested that nitric oxide could be a key to improved treatments for heart disease, shock, and cancer.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Furchgott received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1996.

Details

Robert Francis Furchgott (June 4, 1916 – May 19, 2009) was a Nobel Prize-winning American biochemist who contributed to the discovery of nitric oxide as a transient cellular signal in mammalian systems.

Early life and education

Furchgott was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to Arthur Furchgott (December 1884 – January 1971), a department store owner, and Pena (Sorentrue) Furchgott. He graduated with from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1937 with a degree in chemistry and went on to earn a Ph.D in biochemistry at Northwestern University in 1940.

Career

Furchgott was faculty member and professor of pharmacology at Cornell University Medical College from 1940 to 1949, at Washington University School of Medicine from 1949 to 1956, at SUNY Brooklyn from 1956 to 1989, and at the University of Miami from 1989 through the end of his career.

In 1978, Furchgott discovered a substance in endothelial cells that relaxes blood vessels, calling it endothelium-derived relaxing factor (EDRF). By 1986, he had worked out EDRF's nature and mechanism of action, and determined that EDRF was in fact nitric oxide (NO), an important compound in many aspects of cardiovascular physiology. This research is important in explaining a wide variety of neuronal, cardiovascular, and general physiologic processes of central importance in human health and disease.

In addition to receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of nitric oxide as a new cellular signal in 1998 with Louis Ignarro and Ferid Murad, Furchgott's discovery that nitric oxide causes blood vessels to dilate provided a long-sought explanation for the therapeutic effects of nitroglycerin used to treat angina pectoris and was later instrumental in the development of the erectile dysfunction treatment drug Viagra.

In 1991, Furchgott received a Gairdner Foundation International Award for his groundbreaking discoveries.[citation needed] He also received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1996 and the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1999 with Ferid Murad.

Personal life

Furchgott was Jewish and lived most of his married and career life in Woodmere, New York on Long Island. He was married to Lenore Mandelbaum (February 1915 – April 1983) from 1941 until her death at age 68. They had three daughters: Jane, Terry, and Susan. His daughter, Susan, was an artist in the San Francisco counter-culture and co-founder of the Kerista Commune.

Furchgott spent his later years with Margaret Gallagher Roth, who died March 14, 2006. He served as a professor emeritus at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center. In 2008, he moved to Seattle's Ravenna neighborhood.

Death

Furchgott died on May 19, 2009, in Seattle. He is survived by his three daughters, four grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Math Is Fun Forum

#1551 2024-08-07 15:46:52

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