crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-26 15:31:58

2063) Raymond Davis Jr.

Gist:

Work

In certain nuclear reactions (such as when protons combine to form helium nuclei) elusive particles called neutrinos are created. Raymond Davies wanted to detect neutrinos in radiation from space to confirm the theory that this kind of nuclear reaction is the source of the sun’s energy. Beginning in the 1960s, he placed a large tank containing a chlorine-rich liquid inside a mine. In rare cases, a neutrino interacted with a chlorine atom to form an argon atom. By counting these argon atoms, neutrinos from space could be detected.

Summary

Raymond Davis, Jr. (born October 14, 1914, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died May 31, 2006, Blue Point, New York) was an American physicist who, with Koshiba Masatoshi, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2002 for detecting neutrinos. Riccardo Giacconi also won a share of the award for his work on X-rays.

Davis received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1942. After military service during World War II, he joined Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, in 1948. He remained there until his retirement in 1984. In 1985 Davis took a post as a research professor with the University of Pennsylvania.

Davis’s prizewinning work focused on neutrinos, subatomic particles that had long baffled scientists. Since the 1920s it had been suspected that the Sun shines because of nuclear fusion reactions that transform hydrogen into helium and release energy. Later, theoretical calculations indicated that countless neutrinos must be released in those reactions and, consequently, that Earth must be exposed to a constant flood of solar neutrinos. Because neutrinos interact weakly with matter, however, only one in every trillion is stopped on its way to Earth. Neutrinos thus developed a reputation for being undetectable.

Some of Davis’s contemporaries had speculated that one type of nuclear reaction might produce neutrinos with enough energy to make them detectable. If such a neutrino collided with a chlorine atom, it should form a radioactive argon nucleus. In the 1960s, in a gold mine in South Dakota, Davis built an underground neutrino detector, a huge tank filled with more than 600 tons of the cleaning fluid tetrachloroethylene. He calculated that high-energy neutrinos passing through the tank should form 20 argon atoms a month on average, and he developed a way to count those exceedingly rare atoms. Monitoring the tank for more than 25 years, he was able to confirm that the Sun produces neutrinos, but he consistently found fewer neutrinos than predicted. This deficit became known as the solar neutrino problem. Davis’s results were later confirmed by Koshiba, who also found evidence that neutrinos change from one type to another in flight. Because Davis’s detector was sensitive to only one type, those that had switched identity eluded detection.

Details

Raymond Davis Jr. (October 14, 1914 – May 31, 2006) was an American chemist and physicist. He is best known as the leader of the Homestake experiment in the 1960s-1980s, which was the first experiment to detect neutrinos emitted from the Sun; for this he shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Early life and education

Davis was born in Washington, D.C., where his father was a photographer for the National Bureau of Standards. He spent several years as a choirboy to please his mother, although he could not carry a tune. He enjoyed attending the concerts at the Watergate before air traffic was loud enough to drown out the music. His brother Warren, 14 months younger than he, was his constant companion in boyhood. He received his B.S. from the University of Maryland in 1938 in chemistry, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. He also received a master's degree from that school and a Ph.D. from Yale University in physical chemistry in 1942.[2]

Career

Davis spent most of the war years at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah observing the results of chemical weapons tests and exploring the Great Salt Lake basin for evidence of its predecessor, Lake Bonneville.

After his discharge from the army in 1945, Davis went to work at Monsanto's Mound Laboratory, in Miamisburg, Ohio, doing applied radiochemistry of interest to the United States Atomic Energy Commission. In 1948, he joined Brookhaven National Laboratory, which was attempting to find peaceful uses for nuclear power.

Davis reports that he was asked "to find something interesting to work on," and dedicated his career to the study of neutrinos, particles which had been predicted to explain the process of beta decay, but whose separate existence had not been confirmed. Davis investigated the detection of neutrinos by beta decay, the process by which a neutrino brings enough energy to a nucleus to make certain stable isotopes into radioactive ones. Since the rate for this process is very low, the number of radioactive atoms created in neutrino experiments is very small, and Davis began investigating the rates of processes other than beta decay that would mimic the signal of neutrinos. Using barrels and tanks of carbon tetrachloride as detectors, Davis characterized the rate of the production of argon-37 as a function of altitude and as a function of depth underground. He deployed a detector containing chlorine atoms at the Brookhaven Reactor in 1954 and later one of the reactors at Savannah River. These experiments failed to detect a surplus of radioactive argon when the reactors were operating over when the reactors were shut down, and this was taken as the first experimental evidence that neutrinos causing the chlorine reaction, and antineutrinos produced in reactors, were distinct. Detecting neutrinos proved considerably more difficult than not detecting antineutrinos. Davis was the lead scientist behind the Homestake Experiment, the large-scale radiochemical neutrino detector which first detected evidence of neutrinos from the sun.

Davis shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 with Japanese physicist Masatoshi Koshiba and Italian Riccardo Giacconi for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, Davis was recognized for his work on the detection of cosmic neutrinos, looking at the solar neutrino problem in the Homestake Experiment. He was 88 years old when awarded the prize.

Personal life

Davis met his wife Anna Torrey at Brookhaven and together they built a 21-foot wooden sailboat, the Halcyon. They had five children and lived in the same house in Blue Point, New York for over 50 years. On May 31, 2006, he died in Blue Point, New York, from complications of Alzheimer's disease.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-27 16:16:06

2064) Masatoshi Koshiba

Gist:

Life

Masatoshi Koshiba was born in Toyohashi, Aichi Prefecture in Japan. After first studying at Tokyo University he later earned his PhD from the University of Rochester in New York in 1955. After several years spent working at the University of Chicago, Koshiba returned to Tokyo, where he continues to work and where he conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research. Masatoshi Koshiba married Kyoko Kato in 1959.

Work

Certain nuclear reactions, including those where hydrogen atoms combine with helium, form elusive particles called neutrinos. By proving the existence of neutrinos in cosmic radiation, Raymond Davis showed that the sun's energy originates from such nuclear reactions. From 1980, Masatoshi Koshiba provided further proof of this through measurements taken inside an enormous water tank within a mine. In rare cases, neutrinos react with atomic nuclei in water, creating an electron and thus a flash of light that can be detected.

Summary

Koshiba Masatoshi (born September 19, 1926, Toyohashi, Japan—died November 12, 2020, Tokyo) was a Japanese physicist who, with Raymond Davis, Jr., won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2002 for their detection of neutrinos. Riccardo Giacconi also won a share of the award for his work on the cosmic sources of X rays.

Koshiba earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in New York in 1955. He then joined the University of Tokyo, where he became professor in 1960 and emeritus professor in 1987. From 1987 to 1997 Koshiba taught at Tokai University.

Koshiba’s award-winning work centred on neutrinos, subatomic particles that had long perplexed scientists. Since the 1920s it had been suspected that the Sun shines because of nuclear fusion reactions that transform hydrogen into helium and release energy. Later, theoretical calculations indicated that countless neutrinos must be released in these reactions and, consequently, that Earth must be exposed to a constant flood of solar neutrinos. Because neutrinos interact weakly with matter, however, only one in a trillion is stopped on its way to Earth. Neutrinos thus developed a reputation as being undetectable.

In the 1980s Koshiba, drawing on the work done by Davis, constructed an underground neutrino detector in a zinc mine in Japan. Called Kamiokande II, it was an enormous water tank surrounded by electronic detectors to sense flashes of light produced when neutrinos interacted with atomic nuclei in water molecules. Koshiba was able to confirm Davis’s results—that the Sun produces neutrinos and that fewer neutrinos were found than had been expected (a deficit that became known as the solar neutrino problem). In 1987 Kamiokande also detected neutrinos from a supernova explosion outside the Milky Way. After building a larger, more sensitive detector named Super-Kamiokande, which became operational in 1996, Koshiba found strong evidence for what scientists had already suspected—that neutrinos, of which three types are known, change from one type into another in flight.

Details

Masatoshi Koshiba (Koshiba Masatoshi, 19 September 1926 – 12 November 2020) was a Japanese physicist and one of the founders of neutrino astronomy. His work with the neutrino detectors Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande was instrumental in detecting solar neutrinos, providing experimental evidence for the solar neutrino problem.

Koshiba won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002, jointly with Raymond Davis Jr., "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos".

He was a senior counselor at the International Center for Elementary Particle Physics (ICEPP) and professor at the University of Tokyo.

Early life

Koshiba was born in Toyohashi in central Japan on September 19, 1926, to Toshio and Hayako Koshiba. His father was a military officer. His mother died when he was three, leading to his father marrying his wife's elder sister. He grew up in Yokosuka, and completed his high school in Tokyo. It is mentioned that his initial interest was in studying German literature, but, ended up studying physics, spurred by a teacher's denigrating comments.

He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1951 and received a PhD in physics from the University of Rochester, New York, in 1955.

Career and research

Koshiba started his career as a research associate at the Department of Physics, University of Chicago from July 1955 to February 1958, and was an associate professor at Institute of Nuclear Study, University of Tokyo from March 1958 to October 1963. While on leave from November 1959 to August 1962 he served as the acting director, Laboratory of High Energy Physics and Cosmic Radiation, Department of Physics, University of Chicago.

At the University of Tokyo he became associate professor in March 1963 and then professor in March 1970 in the Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, and emeritus professor there in 1987. From 1987 to 1997, Koshiba taught at Tokai University.

In 2002, he jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics for "pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos". (The other shares of that year's Prize were awarded to Raymond Davis Jr. and Riccardo Giacconi of the U.S.A.).

Koshiba's initial research was in cosmic rays. In 1969, he shifted into electron-positron collider physics, and was involved with the JADE detector in Germany, which helped confirm the Standard Model. Along with Masayuki Nakahata and Atsuto Suzuki, Koshiba designed the Kamiokande experiment to detect proton decay, a prediction of grand unified theories. No proton decay was detected, but Koshiba realized the detector could be made to detect neutrinos, and adapted the project accordingly, following the pioneering U.S. work of Davis.

In the early 1970s, Koshiba collaborated with Gersh Budker (1918-1977), the particle-accelerator electron cooling pioneer in the Soviet Union. This collaboration was cut short for unknown reasons but Budker died of heart attack a few years later.

Through this experiment, he (and Davis in the U.S.) were able to confirm the prediction that neutrinos are generated during the nuclear fusion reaction in the sun. However, these experiments detected fewer neutrinos than had been expected. This deficit was called the solar neutrino problem. The deficit would be eventually explained by "neutrino oscillations", whose existence was confirmed by an enlarged version of Kamiokande, known as Super-Kamiokande, run under the direction of Koshiba's student Takaaki Kajita.

In 1987, the Kamiokande experimental detector detected neutrinos from the supernova explosion (designated SN 1987A) outside the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud. His research was pioneering in the establishment of neutrino astronomy as a field of study.

In 1996, with the promising results from Kamiokande, the team operationalized a larger and more sensitive detector called Super-Kamiokande. With this detector, scientists were able to demonstrate strong evidence to prove that neutrinos changed from one type to another of three types during flight. This demonstration resolved the solar neutrino problem with the reasoning being that the early detectors could detect one type of neutrino rather than all three types.

Koshiba was a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and also a foreign fellow of Bangladesh Academy of Sciences. He was a founding member of the Edogawa NICHE Prize Steering committee.

Personal life

Koshiba married Kyoto Kato, an art museum curator, when he returned to Japan in the late 1950s. The couple had a son and a daughter.

He died on November 12, 2020, at the Edogawa Hospital in Tokyo at the age of 94.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-28 15:18:06

2065) John B. Fenn

Gist:

Work

When electrically charged molecules—ions—are accelerated by an electrical field, their speed depends on the ion’s charge and weight. By measuring the time it takes for the ions to pass a certain distance, the incidence of different molecules in a test can be determined. It was impossible, however, to use this technique on large molecules, such as proteins, before large ions could be produced in gaseous form. In 1988 John Fenn showed that when a test sample is sprayed with an electrical field, small charged drops are formed, and when the water evaporates, ions in gaseous form remain.

Summary

John B. Fenn (born June 15, 1917, New York City, New York, U.S.—died December 10, 2010, Richmond, Virginia) was an American scientist who, with Tanaka Koichi and Kurt Wüthrich, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2002 for developing techniques to identify and analyze proteins and other large biological molecules.

Fenn received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale University in 1940. He then spent more than a decade working for various companies before joining Princeton University in 1952. In 1967 he moved to Yale, where he became professor emeritus in 1987. Fenn took a post as research professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1994.

Fenn’s prizewinning research expanded the applications of mass spectrometry (MS), an analytic technique used in many fields of science since the early 20th century. MS can identify unknown compounds in minute samples of material, determine the amounts of known compounds, and help deduce molecular formulas of compounds. For decades scientists had employed MS on small and medium-sized molecules, but they also hoped to use it to identify large molecules such as proteins. After the genetic code was deciphered and gene sequences were explored, the study of proteins and how they interact inside cells took on great importance.

A requirement of MS is that samples be in the form of a gas of ions, or electrically charged molecules. Molecules such as proteins posed a problem because existing ionization techniques broke down their three-dimensional structure. Fenn developed a way to convert samples of large molecules into gaseous form without such degradation. In the late 1980s he originated electrospray ionization, a technique that involves injecting a solution of the sample into a strong electric field, which disperses it into a fine spray of charged droplets. As each droplet shrinks by evaporation, the electric field on its surface becomes intense enough to toss individual molecules from the droplet, forming free ions ready for analysis with MS. Fenn’s electrospray ionization has proved to be a highly versatile technique, and it has been used in the development of pharmaceuticals and the analyzation of foodstuffs for harmful substances.

Details

John Bennett Fenn (June 15, 1917 – December 10, 2010) was an American professor of analytical chemistry who was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002. Fenn shared half of the award with Koichi Tanaka for their work in mass spectrometry. The other half of the 2002 award went to Kurt Wüthrich. Fenn's contributions specifically related to the development of electrospray ionization, now a commonly used technique for large molecules and routine liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Early in his career, Fenn did research in the field of jet propulsion at Project SQUID, and focused on molecular beam studies. Fenn finished his career with more than 100 publications, including one book.

Fenn was born in New York City, and moved to Kentucky with his family during the Great Depression. Fenn did his undergraduate work at Berea College, and received his PhD from Yale. He worked in industry at Monsanto and at private research labs before moving to academic posts including Yale and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Fenn's research into electrospray ionization found him at the center of a legal dispute with Yale University. He lost the lawsuit, after it was determined that he misled the university about the potential usefulness of the technology. Yale was awarded $500,000 in legal fees and $545,000 in damages. The decision pleased the university, but provoked mixed responses from some people affiliated with the institution, who were disappointed with the treatment of a Nobel Prize winner with such a long history at the school.

Early life and education

Fenn was born in New York City, and grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey. In the years preceding the Great Depression, Fenn's father worked several different jobs, including briefly working as a draftsman at the Fokker Aircraft Company. During this time, Charles Lindbergh's plane The Spirit of St. Louis was briefly stored at one of the company's hangars. Fenn recalled sitting in the math as a ten-year-old, pretending to pilot the famous plane. When his family's fortunes took a turn for the worse with the advent of the Depression, they moved to Berea, Kentucky, because his aunt Helen Dingman, who was on the faculty of Berea College, agreed to help the family. Fenn completed his education at Berea College and Allied Schools, formally finishing his high school education at the age of 15, but he took extra classes for another year rather than start college at such a young age. He earned his bachelor's degree from Berea College in his new hometown, with the assistance of summer classes in organic chemistry at the University of Iowa, and physical chemistry at Purdue.

When Fenn was considering graduate school, he was advised to take additional mathematics courses by Henry Bent, then a chemistry professor at Harvard University. His undergraduate program in chemistry had required minimal math courses, and he had been excused from these due to high marks in his high school courses. Due to Bent's advice, Fenn added math classes to his schedule. Despite his future success, Fenn always felt that his lack of mathematical skills were a hindrance in his career. After submitting several applications, Fenn received offers for teaching assistantships from Yale and Northwestern, and accepted the position at Yale. Fenn did his graduate studies in physical chemistry under Gosta Akerlof. He obtained his PhD in chemistry from Yale in 1940 and his thesis was 45 pages long, with only three pages of prose.

Research career and academic posts

After completing graduate school, Fenn's first job was with Monsanto, working in the Phosphate Division and producing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Fenn and his colleague James Mullen became disenchanted with the direction of work at Monsanto, and they resigned together in 1943. Fenn worked briefly at a small company named Sharples Chemicals that focused on the production of amyl chloride derivatives. In 1945, he joined Mullen at his new startup, Experiment, Inc, focusing on research and development. Fenn's first publication came in 1949 as a result of his work with Mullen. That this publication came ten years after he completed graduate school made Fenn somewhat of a rarity amongst academics.

In 1952, Fenn moved to Princeton University as Director of Project SQUID, a program to support research related to jet propulsion that was funded by the Office of Naval Research. During this period, Fenn started his work developing supersonic atomic and molecular beam sources, which are now widely used in chemical physics research. After working with Project SQUID, Fenn returned to Yale University in 1967. He held a joint appointment in the chemistry and engineering departments until 1987, conducting much of his research in Mason Laboratory. In 1987, Fenn had reached Yale's mandatory retirement age. He became a professor emeritus, entitling him to office space at the university, but costing him most of his laboratory space and research assistants.

After a dispute with Yale over his forced retirement and the rights to his invention of electrospray ionization, Fenn moved to Richmond, Virginia to join Virginia Commonwealth University's (VCU) department of chemistry as an analytical chemistry professor. VCU established an engineering department in the late 1990s, and Fenn held a joint professorship between the two departments until his death. Even in his 80s, Fenn enjoyed the opportunity to be in the lab doing research, saying, "I like to mingle and exchange with the young people. It gets me out from underfoot at home."

Nobel Prize

Fenn shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Koichi Tanaka and Kurt Wüthrich "for the development of methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules." Fenn and Tanaka split half of the award for their work in developing ionization techniques for using mass spectrometry to analyze large biological molecules. Wüthrich was honored for his work in developing nuclear magnetic resonance techniques to analyze similar molecules in solution. Fenn was honored largely for his contributions to the development of electrospray ionization, which made the analysis of large molecules by mass spectrometry feasible. Fenn's Nobel lecture after being presented with the award was entitled "Electrospray Wings for Molecular Elephants." He was surprised by his selection as a Nobel winner, saying "It's like winning the lottery, I'm still in shock." At the time of his award, Fenn was working at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-29 15:26:01

2066) Koichi Tanaka

Gist:

Work

When electrically charged molecules—ions—are accelerated by an electrical field, their speed depends on the ion’s charge and weight. By measuring the time it takes for the ions to pass a certain distance, the incidence of different molecules in a test can be determined. It was impossible, however, to use this technique on large molecules, such as proteins, before large ions could be produced in gaseous form. In 1987 Koichiro Tanaka showed that laser pulses could blast apart protein molecules so that ions in gaseous form are produced.

Summary

Tanaka Koichi (born August 3, 1959, Toyama City, Japan) is a Japanese scientist who, with John B. Fenn and Kurt Wüthrich, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2002 for developing techniques to identify and analyze proteins and other large biological molecules.

Tanaka received an engineering degree from Tohoku University in 1983. Later that year he joined Shimadzu Corporation, a maker of scientific and industrial instruments, and he remained there in various research capacities. In 2002 he was appointed fellow of the corporation, a position comparable to executive director.

Tanaka’s prizewinning work expanded the applications of mass spectrometry (MS), an analytic technique used in many fields of science since the early 20th century. MS can identify unknown compounds in minute samples of material, determine the amounts of known compounds, and help deduce molecular formulas of compounds. Scientists had long employed MS on small and medium-sized molecules, but they also hoped to one day use it to identify large molecules such as proteins. After the genetic code was deciphered and gene sequences were explored, the study of proteins and their interaction inside cells took on great importance.

In order to use MS, samples must be in the form of a gas of ions, or electrically charged molecules. Molecules such as proteins presented a problem because existing ionization techniques broke down their three-dimensional structure. Tanaka developed a way to convert samples of large molecules into gaseous form without such degradation. In the late 1980s Tanaka reported a method, called soft laser desorption, in which the sample, in solid or viscous form, is bombarded with a laser pulse. As molecules in the sample absorb the laser energy, they let go of each other (desorb) and form a cloud of ions suitable for MS. Tanaka’s soft laser desorption is a highly versatile technique and has proved particularly useful in the early detection of malaria and certain types of cancer.

Details

Koichi Tanaka (born August 3, 1959) is a Japanese electrical engineer who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for developing a novel method for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules with John Bennett Fenn and Kurt Wüthrich (the latter for work in NMR spectroscopy).

Early life and education

Tanaka was born and raised in Toyama, Japan, his biological mother died one month after he was born. Tanaka graduated from Tohoku University with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1983, afterward he joined Shimadzu Corporation, where he engaged in the development of mass spectrometers.

Soft laser desorption

For mass spectrometry analyses of a macromolecule, such as a protein, the analyte must be ionized and vaporized by laser irradiation. The problem is that the direct irradiation of an intense laser pulse on a macromolecule causes cleavage of the analyte into tiny fragments and the loss of its structure. In February 1985, Tanaka found that by using a mixture of ultra fine metal powder in glycerol as a matrix, an analyte can be ionized without losing its structure. His work was filed as a patent application in 1985, and after the patent application was made public reported at the Annual Conference of the Mass Spectrometry Society of Japan held in Kyoto, in May 1987 and became known as soft laser desorption (SLD).

However, there was some criticism about his winning the prize, saying that contribution by two German scientists, Franz Hillenkamp and Michael Karas was also big enough not to be dismissed, and therefore they should also be included as prize winners. This is because they first reported in 1985 a method, with higher sensitivity using a small organic compound as a matrix, that they named matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI). Also Tanaka's SLD is not used currently for biomolecules analysis, meanwhile MALDI is widely used in mass spectrometry research laboratories. But while MALDI was developed prior to SLD, it was not used to ionize proteins until after Tanaka's report.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-09-30 15:29:48

2067) Kurt Wüthrich

Gist:

Life

Kurt Wüthrich was born in Aarberg and grew up in Lyss, Bern Canton, Switzerland. His father came from a farming family, but worked as an accountant. Wüthrich studied at the University of Bern and received his PhD from the University of Basel in 1964. After working at the University of California, Berkeley and Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, he returned to Switzerland and the Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH). Wüthrich divides his time between ETH and Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Wüthrich is married with two children.

Work

The protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus act like tiny, spinning magnets. This causes atoms and molecules to adopt certain positions in a magnetic field. This alignment, however, can be disrupted by radio waves with specific frequencies that vary for different atoms. These resonance frequencies are also affected by the atoms' chemical environment. Thus, the phenomenon can be exploited to determine the compositions and structures of different molecules. In the 1980s, Kurt Wüthrich developed a method for mapping the structure of large biological molecules.

Summary

Kurt Wüthrich (born October 4, 1938, Aarberg, Switzerland) is a Swiss scientist who, with John B. Fenn and Tanaka Koichi, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2002 for developing techniques to identify and analyze proteins and other large biological molecules.

After receiving a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Basel in 1964, Wüthrich took his postdoctoral training in Switzerland and the United States. In 1969 he joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where he became a professor of biophysics in 1980. In 2001 he joined Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, as a visiting professor.

In the early 1980s Wüthrich began devising a way to apply nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to the study of large biological molecules. Developed in the late 1940s, NMR provides detailed information about a molecule’s structure (whereas mass spectrometry is better suited for revealing kinds and amounts of molecules). NMR requires placing a sample in a very strong magnetic field and bombarding it with radio waves. The nuclei of certain atoms, such as hydrogen, in the molecules respond by emitting their own radio waves, which can be analyzed to work out their structural details.

At the time when Wüthrich began his research, NMR worked best on small molecules. Following the deciphering of the genetic code and the exploration of gene sequences, the study of proteins, which are large molecules, took on great importance. When using NMR on large molecules, however, the numerous atomic nuclei present produced an indecipherable tangle of radio signals. Wüthrich’s solution, called sequential assignment, sorts out the tangle by methodically matching up each NMR signal with the corresponding hydrogen nucleus in the protein being analyzed. He also showed how to use that information to determine distances between numerous pairs of hydrogen nuclei and thereby build up a three-dimensional picture of the molecule. The first complete determination of a protein structure with Wüthrich’s method was achieved in 1985, and about 20 percent of protein structures known by 2002 had been determined with NMR.

Details

Kurt Wüthrich (born 4 October 1938 in Aarberg, Canton of Bern) is a Swiss chemist/biophysicist and Nobel Chemistry laureate, known for developing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods for studying biological macromolecules.

Education and early life

Born in Aarberg, Switzerland, Wüthrich was educated in chemistry, physics, and mathematics at the University of Bern before pursuing his PhD supervised by Silvio Fallab at the University of Basel, awarded in 1964.

Career

After his PhD, Wüthrich continued postdoctoral research with Fallab for a short time before leaving to work at the University of California, Berkeley for two years from 1965 with Robert E. Connick. That was followed by a stint working with Robert G. Shulman at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey from 1967 to 1969.

Wüthrich returned to Switzerland, to Zürich, in 1969, where he began his career there at the ETH Zürich, rising to Professor of Biophysics by 1980. He currently maintains a laboratory at the ETH Zürich, at The Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, California and at the iHuman Institute of ShanghaiTech University. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh (1997–2000), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (where he was an Honorary Professor) and Yonsei University.

During his graduate studies Wüthrich started out working with electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, and the subject of his PhD thesis was "the catalytic activity of copper compounds in autoxidation reactions". During his time as a postdoc in Berkeley he began working with the newly developed and related technique of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study the hydration of metal complexes. When Wüthrich joined the Bell Labs, he was put in charge of one of the first superconducting NMR spectrometers, and started studying the structure and dynamics of proteins. He has pursued this line of research ever since.

After returning to Switzerland, Wüthrich collaborated with, among others, Nobel laureate Richard R. Ernst on developing the first two-dimensional NMR experiments, and established the nuclear Overhauser effect as a convenient way of measuring distances within proteins. This research later led to the complete assignment of resonances for among others the bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor and glucagon.

In October 2010, Wüthrich participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students will get to engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize–winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch. Wüthrich is also a member on the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board and a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reform in the United Nations.

Awards and honors

He was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1991, the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 1993, the Otto Warburg Medal in 1999 and half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for "his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution". He received the Bijvoet Medal of the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research of Utrecht University in 2008. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2010. He was also awarded the 2018 Fray International Sustainability Award at SIPS 2018 by FLOGEN Star Outreach.

Personal details

On 2 April 2018, Dr. Wüthrich established permanent residency in Shanghai, China, after obtaining a Chinese permanent residence card.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-01 16:24:46

2068) Sydney Brenner

Gist:

Work

At the beginning of an organism's life, the number of cells it contains increases rapidly. New cells are formed throughout its lifetime, but cells also die in order to maintain a balance in the number of cells in existence. This process is regulated by genes and is called programmed cell death. Groundbreaking in the understanding of this phenomenon were studies on the development of the small roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, conducted by Sydney Brenner in the mid-1970s. Brenner's work made it possible to link genetic analysis to cell division and organ formation.

Summary

Sydney Brenner (born January 13, 1927, Germiston, South Africa—died April 5, 2019, Singapore) was a South-African born biologist who, with John E. Sulston and H. Robert Horvitz, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2002 for their discoveries about how genes regulate tissue and organ development via a key mechanism called programmed cell death, or apoptosis.

After receiving a Ph.D. (1954) from the University of Oxford, Brenner began work with the Medical Research Council (MRC) in England. He later directed the MRC’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (1979–86) and Molecular Genetics Unit (1986–91). In 1996 he founded the California-based Molecular Sciences Institute, and in 2000 Brenner accepted the position of distinguished research professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

In the early 1960s Brenner focused his research on overcoming the difficulty of studying organ development and related processes in higher animals, which have enormous numbers of cells. His search for a simple organism with many of the basic biological characteristics of humans led to the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, a near-microscopic soil worm that begins life with just 1,090 cells. Moreover, the animal is transparent, which allows scientists to follow cell divisions under a microscope; it reproduces quickly; and it is inexpensive to maintain. As researchers later learned, programmed cell death eliminates 131 cells in C. elegans, so that adults wind up with 959 body cells. Brenner’s investigations showed that a chemical compound could induce genetic mutations in the worm and that the mutations had specific effects on organ development. His work laid the foundation for future research on programmed cell death—Sulston and Horvitz both used C. elegans in their studies—and established C. elegans as one of the most important experimental tools in genetics research.

Details

Sydney Brenner (13 January 1927 – 5 April 2019) was a South African biologist. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and Sir John E. Sulston. Brenner made significant contributions to work on the genetic code, and other areas of molecular biology while working in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He established the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of developmental biology, and founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, United States.

Education and early life

Brenner was born in the town of Germiston in the then Transvaal (today in Gauteng), South Africa, on 13 January 1927. His parents, Leah (née Blecher) and Morris Brenner, were Jewish immigrants. His father, a cobbler, came to South Africa from Lithuania in 1910, and his mother from Riga, Latvia, in 1922. He had one sister, Phyllis.

He was educated at Germiston High School and the University of the Witwatersrand. Having joined the university at the age of 15, it was noted during his second year that he would be too young to qualify for the practice of medicine at the conclusion of his six-year medical course, and he was therefore allowed to complete a Bachelor of Science degree in Anatomy and Physiology. During this time he was taught physical chemistry by Joel Mandelstam, microscopy by Alfred Oettle and neurology by Harold Daitz. He also received an introduction to anthropology and paleontology from Raymond Dart and Robert Broom. The histologist Joseph Gillman and director of research in the Anatomy Department persuaded Brenner to continue towards an honours degree and beyond towards an MSc. Brenner accepted though this would mean he would not graduate from medical school and his bursary would be discontinued. He supported himself during this time by working as a laboratory technician. It was during this time, in 1945, that Brenner would publish his first scientific works. His masters thesis was in the field of cytogenetics and publications during this time in the field Brenner would later call Cell Physiology.

In 1946 Wilfred Le Gros Clark invited Brenner to his Department of Anatomy in Oxford, during a visit to South Africa. Brenner was persuaded to finish his medical education instead. Brenner returned to medical school where he failed Medicine, nearly failed Surgery and achieved a First Class in Obstetrics and Gynecology. Six months later Brenner had finished repeating Medicine and Surgery and in 1951 received the degrees of Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBCh).

Brenner received an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 which enabled him to complete a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree at the University of Oxford as a postgraduate student of Exeter College, Oxford, supervised by Cyril Hinshelwood.

Career and research

Following his DPhil, Brenner did postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley. He spent the next 20 years at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. There, during the 1960s, he contributed to molecular biology, then an emerging field. In 1976 he joined the Salk Institute in California.

Together with Jack Dunitz, Dorothy Hodgkin, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl M. Oughton, he was one of the first people in April 1953 to see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Francis Crick and James Watson; at the time he and the other scientists were working at the University of Oxford's Chemistry Department. All were impressed by the new DNA model, especially Brenner, who subsequently worked with Crick in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and the newly opened Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB). According to Beryl Oughton, later Rimmer, they all travelled together in two cars once Dorothy Hodgkin announced to them that they were off to Cambridge to see the model of the structure of DNA.

Brenner made several seminal contributions to the emerging field of molecular biology in the 1960s. The first was to prove that all overlapping genetic coding sequences were impossible. This insight separated the coding function from structural constraints as proposed in a clever code by George Gamow. This led Francis Crick to propose the concept of a hypothetical molecule (later identified as transfer RNA or tRNA) that transfer the genetic information from RNA to proteins. Brenner gave the name "adaptor hypothesis" in 1955. The physical separation between the anticodon and the amino acid on a tRNA is the basis for the unidirectional flow of information in coded biological systems. This is commonly known as the central dogma of molecular biology, i.e. information flows from nucleic acid to protein and never from protein to nucleic acid. Following this adaptor insight, Brenner conceived of the concept of messenger RNA during an April 1960 conversation with Crick and François Jacob, and together with Jacob and Matthew Meselson went on to prove its existence later that summer. Then, with Crick, Leslie Barnett, and Richard J. Watts-Tobin, Brenner genetically demonstrated the triplet nature of the code of protein translation through the Crick, Brenner, Barnett, Watts-Tobin et al. experiment of 1961, which discovered frameshift mutations. Brenner collaborating with Sarabhai, Stretton and Bolle in 1964, using amber mutants defective in the bacteriophage T4D major head protein, showed that the nucleotide sequence of the gene is co-linear with the amino acid sequence of the encoded polypeptide chain.

Together with the decoding work of Marshall Warren Nirenberg and others, the discovery of the triplet nature of the genetic code was critical to deciphering the code. Barnett helped set up Sydney Brenner's laboratory in Singapore, many years later.

Brenner, with George Pieczenik, created the first computer matrix analysis of nucleic acids using TRAC, which Brenner continued to use. Crick, Brenner, Klug and Pieczenik returned to their early work on deciphering the genetic code with a pioneering paper on the origin of protein synthesis, where constraints on mRNA and tRNA co-evolved allowing for a five-base interaction with a flip of the anticodon loop, and thereby creating a triplet code translating system without requiring a ribosome. This model requires a partially overlapping code. The published scientific paper is extremely rare in that its collaborators include three authors who independently became Nobel laureates.

Brenner then focused on establishing a free-living roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of animal development including neural development. He chose this 1-millimeter-long soil roundworm mainly because it is simple, is easy to grow in bulk populations, and turned out to be quite convenient for genetic analysis. One of the key methods for identifying important function genes was the screen for roundworms that had some functional defect, such as being uncoordinated, leading to the identification of new sets of proteins, such as the UNC proteins. For this work, he shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and John Sulston. The title of his Nobel lecture in December 2002, "Nature's Gift to Science", is a homage to this nematode; in it, he considered that having chosen the right organism turned out to be as important as having addressed the right problems to work on. In fact, the C. elegans community has grown rapidly in recent decades with researchers working on a wide spectrum of problems.

Brenner founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California in 1996. As of 2015 he was associated with the Salk Institute, the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, the Singapore Biomedical Research Council, the Janelia Farm Research Campus, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In August 2005, Brenner was appointed president of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. He was also on the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute, as well as being Professor of Genetics there. A scientific biography of Brenner was written by Errol Friedberg in the US, for publication by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in 2010.

Known for his penetrating scientific insight and acerbic wit, Brenner, for many years, authored a regular column ("Loose Ends") in the journal Current Biology. This column was so popular that "Loose ends from Current Biology", a compilation, was published by Current Biology Ltd. and became a collectors' item. Brenner wrote "A Life in Science", a paperback published by BioMed Central. He is also noted for his generosity with ideas and the great number of students and colleagues his ideas have stimulated.

In 2017, Brenner co-organized a seminal lecture series in Singapore describing ten logarithmic scales of time from the Big Bang to the present, spanning the appearance of multicellular life forms, the evolution of humans, and the emergence of language, culture and technology. Prominent scientists and thinkers, including W. Brian Arthur, Svante Pääbo, Helga Nowotny and Jack Szostak, spoke during the lecture series. In 2018, the lectures were adapted into a popular science book titled Sydney Brenner's 10-on-10: The Chronicles of Evolution, published by Wildtype Books.

Brenner also gave four lectures on the history of molecular biology, its impact on neuroscience and the great scientific questions that lie ahead. The lectures were adapted into the book, In the Spirit of Science: Lectures by Sydney Brenner on DNA, Worms and Brains.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-02 16:16:24

2069)Howard Robert Horvitz

Gist:

Work

At the beginning of an organism's life, the number of cells it contains increases rapidly. New cells are formed throughout its lifetime, but cells also die in order to maintain a balance in the number of cells in existence. This process is regulated by genes and is called programmed cell death. Through his studies of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, in 1986, Robert Horvitz identified two of the genes needed for programmed cell death to occur. He later showed that another gene protects against cell death, and also identified genes that regulate how dead cells are removed.

Summary

H. Robert Horvitz (born May 8, 1947, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American biologist who, with Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2002 for their discoveries about how genes regulate tissue and organ development via a key mechanism called programmed cell death, or apoptosis.

Horvitz received a B.A. (1972) and a Ph.D. (1974) from Harvard University. In 1978, after a stint with Brenner at the Medical Research Council in England, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a full professor in 1986.

In the 1970s Horvitz began his prizewinning work on programmed cell death, a process that is essential for normal development in all animals. During fetal development of humans, huge numbers of cells must be eliminated as body structures form. For example, programmed cell death sculpts the fingers and toes by removing tissue that was originally present between the digits. Likewise, it removes surplus nerve cells produced during early development of the brain. In a typical adult human, about one trillion new cells develop each day; a similar number must be eliminated to maintain health and to keep the body from becoming overgrown with surplus cells.

Horvitz’s research focused on determining if a specific genetic program controls cell death. His studies centred on the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, a near-microscopic soil worm that had been identified by Brenner as an ideal organism on which to study programmed cell death. In 1986 Horvitz reported the first two “death genes,” ced-3 and ced-4, which participate in the cell-killing process. Later he showed that another gene, ced-9, protects against cell death by interacting with ced-3 and ced-4. Horvitz also established that humans have a counterpart ced-3 gene. Scientists later found that most of the genes involved in controlling programmed cell death in C. elegans have counterparts in humans. Such knowledge about programmed cell death contributed to important advances not only in developmental biology but also in medicine, especially concerning cancer treatments.

Details

Howard Robert Horvitz (born May 8, 1947) is an American biologist whose research on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, whose "seminal discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death" were "important for medical research and have shed new light on the pathogenesis of many diseases".

Early life and education

Horvitz was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Jewish parents, the son of Mary R. (Savit), a school teacher, and Oscar Freedom Horvitz, a GAO accountant. He majored in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined Alpha Epsilon Pi and spent his summers working for IBM, at first wiring panels for accounting machines and then in his final summer helping to develop IBM's Conversational Programming System.

During his senior year, Horvitz took his first courses in biology and was encouraged by his professors to continue to study biology in graduate school, despite his limited coursework in the field. After he completed his undergraduate studies in 1968, he enrolled in graduate studies in biology at Harvard University, where he studied T4-induced modifications of E. coli RNA polymerase under the direction of Walter Gilbert and James Watson. He completed his PhD in 1974.

Career

In 1974, Horvitz took a postdoctoral position at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, England, where he worked with his future Nobel prize co-winners Sydney Brenner and John Sulston on the genetics and cell lineage of C. elegans. In 1978, Horvitz was offered a faculty position at MIT, where he is currently Professor of Biology and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Horvitz serves as the chair of the board of trustees for Society for Science & the Public and is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.

Research

At LMB, Horvitz worked with Sulston to track every non-gonadal cell division that occurred during larval development, and published a complete description of these lineages in 1977. Later, in cooperation with Sulston and Martin Chalfie, Horvitz began investigations first characterizing several cell lineage mutants and then seeking genes that controlled cell lineage or that controlled specific lineages. In 1981, they identified and characterized the gene lin-4, a "heterochronic" mutant that changes the timeline of cell fates.

In his early work at MIT, Horvitz continued his work on cell lineage and cell fate, using C. elegans to investigate whether there was a genetic program controlling cell death, or apoptosis. In 1986, he identified the first "death genes", ced-3 and ced-4. He showed that functional ced-3 and ced-4 genes were a prerequisite for cell death to be executed. He went on to show that another gene, ced-9, protects against cell death by interacting with ced-4 and ced-3, as well as identifying a number of genes that direct how a dead cell is eliminated. Horvitz showed that the human genome contains a ced-3-like gene.

Horvitz's later research continued to use C. elegans to analyze the genetic control of animal development and behavior, as well as to link discoveries in the nematode to human diseases, particularly cancer and neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He made further advancements in defining the molecular pathway of programmed cell death, and has identified several key components, including: EGL-1, a protein which activates apoptosis by inhibiting CED-9; transcription factors ces-1 and ces-2, and ced-8, which controls the timing of cell death. He continued working on heterochronic mutants and other aspects of cell lineage, and established lines of research in signal transduction, morphogenesis, and neural development. Horvitz has collaborated with Victor Ambros and David Bartel on a project to characterize the complete set of the more than 100 microRNAs in the C. elegans genome.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-03 16:15:32

2070) John Sulston

Gist:

Work

At the beginning of an organism's life, the number of cells it contains increases rapidly. New cells are formed throughout its lifetime, but cells also die in order to maintain a balance in the number of cells in existence. This process is regulated by genes and is called programmed cell death. In 1976, John Sulston described in detail how the cells of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans divided and matured, and showed that certain cells' deaths were a part of the organism's normal development. He also discovered that the first mutation in a gene that is active in the cell-death process.

Summary

John Sulston (born March 27, 1942, Cambridge, England—died March 6, 2018) was a British biologist who, with Sydney Brenner and H. Robert Horvitz, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2002 for their discoveries about how genes regulate tissue and organ development via a key mechanism called programmed cell death, or apoptosis.

Sulston earned a B.A. (1963) and a Ph.D. (1966) from the University of Cambridge. Following three years of postdoctoral work in the United States, he joined Brenner’s group at the Medical Research Council in England (1969). From 1992 to 2000 Sulston was director of the Sanger Institute in Cambridge.

Sulston’s award-winning research examined programmed cell death. The process—in which certain cells, at the right time and place, get a signal to commit suicide—is vital for normal development in all animals. During the fetal development of humans, huge numbers of cells must be eliminated as body structures form. Programmed cell death sculpts the fingers and toes, for instance, by removing tissue that was present between the digits. Likewise, it removes surplus nerve cells produced during early development of the brain. In a typical adult human, about one trillion new cells develop each day; a similar number must be eliminated to maintain health and to keep the body from becoming overgrown with surplus cells.

In the 1970s Sulston mapped a complete cell lineage for the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, a minute soil worm that had been identified by Brenner as an ideal organism on which to study programmed cell death. Sulston traced the descent of every cell, through division and differentiation, from the fertilized egg. From this he showed that, in worm after worm, exactly the same 131 cells are eliminated by programmed cell death as the animals develop into adults. Sulston also identified the first known mutations in genes involved in the process. His work contributed to important advances in developmental biology and offered insight into the pathogenesis of certain diseases.

Details

Sir John Edward Sulston (27 March 1942 – 6 March 2018) was a British biologist and academic who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the cell lineage and genome of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans in 2002 with his colleagues Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He was a leader in human genome research and Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester. Sulston was in favour of science in the public interest, such as free public access of scientific information and against the patenting of genes and the privatisation of genetic technologies.

Early life and education

Sulston was born in Fulmer, Buckinghamshire, England to Arthur Edward Aubrey Sulston and Josephine Muriel Frearson, née Blocksidge. His father was an Anglican priest and administrator of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. His mother quit her job as an English teacher at Watford Grammar School, to care for him and his sister Madeleine. and home-tutored them until he was five. At age five he entered the local preparatory school, York House School, where he soon developed an aversion to games. He developed an early interest in science, having fun with dissecting animals and sectioning plants to observe their structure and function. Sulston won a scholarship to Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood and then to Pembroke College, Cambridge graduating in 1963 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences (Chemistry). He joined the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, after being interviewed by Alexander Todd and was awarded his PhD in 1966 for research in nucleotide chemistry.

Career

Between 1966 and 1969 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. His academic advisor Colin Reese had arranged for him to work with Leslie Orgel, who would turn his scientific career onto a different pathway. Orgel introduced him to Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner, who worked in Cambridge. He became inclined to biological research.

Although Orgel wanted Sulston to remain with him, Sydney Brenner persuaded Sulston to return to Cambridge to work on the neurobiology of Caenorhabditis elegans at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB). Sulston soon produced the complete map of the worm's neurons. He continued work on its DNA and subsequently the whole genome sequencing. In 1998, the whole genome sequence was published in collaboration with the Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, so that C. elegans became the first animal to have its complete genome sequenced.

Sulston played a central role in both the C. elegans and human genome sequencing projects. He had argued successfully for the sequencing of C. elegans to show that large-scale genome sequencing projects were feasible. As sequencing of the worm genome proceeded, the Human Genome Project began. At this point he was made director of the newly established Sanger Centre (named after Fred Sanger), located in Cambridgeshire, England.

In 2000, after the 'working draft' of the human genome sequence was completed, Sulston retired from directing the Sanger Centre. With Georgina Ferry, he narrated his research career leading to the human genome sequence in The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics, and the Human Genome (2002).

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-04 15:29:24

2071) Alexei Abrikosov

Gist:

Work

When certain substances are cooled to extremely low temperatures, they become superconductors, conducting electrical current entirely without resistance. With one type of superconductivity, the magnetic field is forced away from the conductor, but with another type of superconductivity, the magnetic field is admitted into the conductor. The different types of superconductivity cannot be described with the same theory. At the end of the 1950s, Alexei Abrikosov formulated a theory for the second type of superconductor. He introduced a mathematical function that described vortexes whereby an external magnetic field can intrude into the conductor.

Summary

Alexey A. Abrikosov (born June 25, 1928, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now in Russia]—died March 29, 2017, Sunnyvale, California, U.S.) was a Russian physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2003 for his pioneering contribution to the theory of superconductivity. He shared the award with Vitaly L. Ginzburg of Russia and Anthony J. Leggett of Great Britain.

Abrikosov received doctorates in physics from the Institute for Physical Problems (now the P.L. Kapitsa Institute) in Moscow in 1951 and 1955. In the following decades he worked at scientific institutions and universities in the U.S.S.R. In 1991 he joined Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and became a distinguished scientist in its materials science division.

Abrikosov’s prizewinning work focused on superconductivity, the disappearance of electrical resistance in various solids when they are cooled below a certain critical (and typically very low) temperature. The phenomenon was first identified in 1911, and in the following decades scientists explained why certain metals, termed type I superconductors, lose electrical resistance. However, there was a second group of metals, termed type II superconductors, that continued to superconduct even in the presence of very powerful magnetic fields, with superconductivity and magnetism existing within them at the same time. Building on the work done by Ginzburg and others, Abrikosov devised a theoretical explanation for type II superconductivity. This enabled other scientists to create and test new superconducting materials and build more powerful electromagnets. Among the practical results were magnets critical for the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners used in medical diagnostics.

Details

Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov (June 25, 1928 – March 29, 2017) was a Soviet, Russian and American theoretical physicist whose main contributions are in the field of condensed matter physics. He was the co-recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics, with Vitaly Ginzburg and Anthony James Leggett, for theories about how matter can behave at extremely low temperatures.

Education and early life

Abrikosov was born in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, on June 25, 1928, to a couple of physicians: Aleksey Abrikosov and Fani Abrikosova, née Wulf. His mother was Jewish. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1948. From 1948 to 1965, he worked at the Institute for Physical Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he received his Ph.D. in 1951 for the theory of thermal diffusion in plasmas, and then his Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (a "higher doctorate") degree in 1955 for a thesis on quantum electrodynamics at high energies. Abrikosov moved to the US in 1991 and lived there until his death in 2017, in Palo Alto, California. While in the US, Abrikosov was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2000, and in 2001, to be a foreign member of the Royal Society.

Career

From 1965 to 1988, he worked at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics (USSR Academy of Sciences). He has been a professor at Moscow State University since 1965. In addition, he held tenure at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology from 1972 to 1976, and at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys from 1976 to 1991. He served as a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1987 to 1991. In 1991, he became a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In two works in 1952 and 1957, Abrikosov explained how magnetic flux can penetrate a class of superconductors. This class of materials are called type-II superconductors. The accompanying arrangement of magnetic flux lines is called the Abrikosov vortex lattice.

Together with Lev Gor'kov and Igor Dzyaloshinskii, Abrikosov has written an iconic book on theoretical solid-state physics, which has been used to train physicists in the field for decades.

From 1991 until his retirement, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory in the U.S. state of Illinois. Abrikosov was an Argonne Distinguished Scientist at the Condensed Matter Theory Group in Argonne's Materials Science Division. When he received the Nobel Prize, his research was focused on the origins of magnetoresistance, a property of some materials that change their resistance to electrical flow under the influence of a magnetic field.

Honours and awards

Abrikosov was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1966, the Fritz London Memorial Prize in 1972, and the USSR State Prize in 1982. In 1989 he received the Landau Prize from the Academy of Sciences, Russia. Two years later, in 1991, Abrikosov was awarded the Sony Corporation's John Bardeen Award. The same year he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics. He was also a member of the Royal Academy of London, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and in 2000 was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-05 15:47:38

2072) Vitaly Ginzburg

Gist:

Work

When certain substances are cooled to extremely low temperatures, they become superconductors, conducting electrical current entirely without resistance. With one type of superconductivity, the magnetic field is forced away from the conductor, but with another type of superconductivity, the magnetic field is admitted into the conductor. In 1950 Vitaly Ginzburg and Lev Landau formulated a theory that incorporated a mathematical function to clarify the interplay between superconductivity and magnetism. The theory was intended for the first type of superconductivity, but it enabled a theory for the second type of superconductivity.

Summary

Vitaly Ginzburg (born October 4 [September 21, Old Style], 1916, Moscow, Russia—died November 8, 2009, Moscow) was a Russian physicist and astrophysicist, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2003 for his pioneering work on superconductivity. He shared the award with Alexey A. Abrikosov of Russia and Anthony J. Leggett of Great Britain. Ginzburg was also noted for his work on theories of radio wave propagation, radio astronomy, and the origin of cosmic rays. He was a member of the team that developed the Soviet thermonuclear bomb.

After graduating from Moscow State University (1938), Ginzburg was appointed to the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences in 1940, and from 1971 to 1988 he headed the institute’s theory group. He also taught at Gorky University (1945–68) and at the Moscow Technical Institute of Physics (from 1968).

In the late 1940s, under the leadership of physicist Igor Tamm, he worked with colleagues Andrey Sakharov and Yury Romanov to build a thermonuclear bomb. The first design, proposed by Sakharov in 1948, consisted of alternating layers of deuterium and uranium-238 between a fissile core and a surrounding chemical high explosive. Known as Sloika (“Layer Cake”), the design was refined by Ginzburg in 1949 through the substitution of lithium-6 deuteride for the liquid deuterium. When bombarded with neutrons, lithium-6 breeds tritium, which can fuse with deuterium to release more energy. Ginzburg and Sakharov’s design was tested on August 12, 1953, and more than 15 percent of the energy released came from nuclear fusion. Ginzburg received the State Prize of the Soviet Union in 1953 and the Lenin Prize in 1966.

Ginzburg conducted his prizewinning research on superconductivity in the 1950s. First identified in 1911, superconductivity is the disappearance of electrical resistance in various solids when they are cooled below a characteristic temperature, which is typically very low. Scientists formulated various theories on why the phenomenon occurs in certain metals termed type I superconductors. Ginzburg developed such a theory, and it proved so comprehensive that Abrikosov later used it to build a theoretical explanation for type II superconductors. Ginzburg’s achievement also enabled other scientists to create and test new superconducting materials and build more powerful electromagnets.

Another significant theory developed by Ginzburg was that cosmic radiation in interstellar space is produced not by thermal radiation but by the acceleration of high-energy electrons in magnetic fields, a process known as synchrotron radiation. In 1955 Ginzburg (with I.S. Shklovsky) discovered the first quantitative proof that the cosmic rays observed near Earth originated in supernovas. Upon the discovery in 1967 of pulsars (neutron stars formed in supernova explosions), he expanded his theory to include pulsars as a related source of cosmic rays.

Details

Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, (4 October 1916 – 8 November 2009) was a Russian physicist who was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003, together with Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett for their "pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids."

His career in physics was spent in the former Soviet Union and was one of the leading figure in former Soviet program of nuclear weapons, working towards designs of the thermonuclear devices. He became a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and succeeded Igor Tamm as head of the Department of Theoretical Physics of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (FIAN). In his later life, Ginzburg become an outspoken atheist and was critical of clergy's influence in Russian society.

Biography

Vitaly Ginzburg was born to a Jewish family in Moscow on 4 October 1916— the son of an engineer, Lazar Yefimovich Ginzburg, and a doctor, Augusta Wildauer who was a graduate from the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University in 1938. After attending his mother's alma mater, he defended his qualifications of the candidate's (Kandidat Nauk) dissertation in 1940, and his comprehensive thesis for the doctor's (Doktor Nauk) qualification in 1942. In 1944, he became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Among his achievements are a partially phenomenological theory of superconductivity, the Ginzburg–Landau theory, developed with Lev Landau in 1950; the theory of electromagnetic wave propagation in plasmas (for example, in the ionosphere); and a theory of the origin of cosmic radiation. He is also known to biologists as being part of the group of scientists that helped bring down the reign of the politically connected anti-Mendelian agronomist Trofim Lysenko, thus allowing modern genetic science to return to the USSR.

In 1937, Ginzburg married Olga Zamsha. In 1946, he married his second wife, Nina Ginzburg (nee Yermakova), who had spent more than a year in custody on fabricated charges of plotting to assassinate the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

As a renowned professor and researcher, Ginzburg was an obvious candidate for the Soviet bomb project. From 1948 through 1952 Ginzburg worked under Igor Kurchatov to help with the hydrogen bomb. Ginzburg and Igor Tamm both proposed ideas that would make it possible to build a hydrogen bomb. When the bomb project moved to Arzamas-16 to continue in even more secrecy, Ginzburg was not allowed to follow. Instead he stayed in Moscow and supported from afar, staying under watch due to his background and past. As the work got continuously more classified, Ginzburg was phased out of the project and allowed to pursue his true passion, superconductors. During the Cold War, the thirst for knowledge and technological advancement was never-ending. This was no different with the research done on superconductors. The Soviet Union believed an the research done on superconductors would place them ahead of their American counterparts. Both sides sought to leverage the potential military applications of superconductors.

Ginzburg was the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk. He also headed the Academic Department of Physics and Astrophysics Problems, which Ginzburg founded at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1968.

Ginzburg identified as a secular Jew, and following the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union, he was very active in Jewish life, especially in Russia, where he served on the board of directors of the Russian Jewish Congress. He is also well known for fighting anti-Semitism and supporting the state of Israel.

In the 2000s (decade), Ginzburg was politically active, supporting the Russian liberal opposition and human rights movement. He defended Igor Sutyagin and Valentin Danilov against charges of espionage put forth by the authorities. On 2 April 2009, in an interview to the Radio Liberty Ginzburg denounced the FSB as an institution harmful to Russia and the ongoing expansion of its authority as a return to Stalinism.

Ginzburg worked at the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of Soviet and Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow since 1940. Russian Academy of Sciences is a major institution where mostly all Nobel Prize laureates of physics from Russia have done their studies and/or research works.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-06 15:23:38

2073) Anthony James Leggett

Gist:

Work

When certain substances are cooled to extremely low temperatures, they become superconductors, conducting electrical current entirely without resistance. 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. After it was discovered that at extremely low temperatures helium-3 also becomes superconducting, Anthony Leggett formulated a theory that explained this.

Summary

Anthony J. Leggett (born March 26, 1938, London, England) is a British physicist, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2003 for his seminal work on superfluidity. He shared the award with the Russian physicists Alexey A. Abrikosov and Vitaly L. Ginzburg.

Leggett received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oxford in 1964. In 1967 he joined the faculty of the University of Sussex, where he served until 1983, when he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Leggett conducted his pioneering research on superfluidity, a phenomenon in which certain extremely cold liquid substances flow without internal resistance, or viscosity. Superfluids exhibit a variety of odd behaviour, including the ability to flow up the sides and out the top of containers. Scientists had known since the 1930s that the common form of helium, the isotope helium-4, becomes a superfluid when chilled. Although a theoretical explanation was produced for the phenomenon, researchers in the 1970s discovered it did not work for the much rarer helium isotope helium-3, which was also found to be a superfluid. Leggett filled the gap in theoretical research by showing that electrons in helium-3 form pairs in a situation similar to, but much more complicated than, the electron pairs that form in superconducting metals. His work in identifying and describing the phase transitions that occur during these pairing interactions found wide application in science, ranging from cosmology to the study of subatomic particles and liquid crystals.

Leggett was knighted in 2004.

Details

Sir Anthony James Leggett (born 26 March 1938) is a British–American theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Leggett is widely recognised as a world leader in the theory of low-temperature physics, and his pioneering work on superfluidity was recognised by the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics. He has shaped the theoretical understanding of normal and superfluid helium liquids and strongly coupled superfluids. He set directions for research in the quantum physics of macroscopic dissipative systems and use of condensed systems to test the foundations of quantum mechanics.

Early life and education

Leggett was born in Camberwell, South London, and raised Catholic. His father's forebears were village cobblers in a small village in Hampshire; Leggett's grandfather broke with this tradition to become a greengrocer; his father would relate how he used to ride with him to buy vegetables at the Covent Garden market in London. His mother's parents were of Irish descent; her father had moved to Britain and worked as a clerk in the naval dockyard in Chatham. His maternal grandmother, who survived into her eighties, was sent out to domestic service at the age of twelve. She eventually married his grandfather and raised a large family, then in her late sixties emigrated to Australia to join her daughter and son-in-law, and finally returned to the UK for her last years.

His father and mother were each the first in their families to receive a university education; they met and became engaged while students at the Institute of Education at the University of London, but were unable to get married for some years because his father had to care for his own mother and siblings. His father worked as a secondary school teacher of physics, chemistry and mathematics. His mother also taught secondary school mathematics for a time, but had to give this up when he was born. He was eventually followed by two sisters, Clare and Judith, and two brothers, Terence and Paul, all raised in their parents' Roman Catholic faith. Leggett ceased to be a practising Catholic in his early twenties.

Soon after he was born, his parents bought a house in Upper Norwood, south London. When he was 18 months old, WWII broke out and he was evacuated to Englefield Green, a small village in Surrey on the edge of the great park of Windsor Castle, where he stayed for the duration of the war. After the end of the war, he returned to the Upper Norwood house and lived there until 1950; his father taught at a school in north-east London and his mother looked after the five children full-time. He attended the local Catholic primary school, and later, following a successful performance in the 11-plus, which he took rather earlier than most, and then transferred to Wimbledon College.

He later attended Beaumont College, a Jesuit school in Old Windsor. He and his two younger brothers, Terrence and Paul, attended Beaumont as a consequence of his father's appointment to teach science at the college. While there, Leggett primarily studied classics, since that was generally regarded as the most prestigious field at the time; this study led directly to his Greats degree while at Oxford. Despite Leggett's emphasis on classics at Beaumont, his father ran an evening 'science club' for his younger son and a couple of others. In his last year at Beaumont, Leggett won every single prize for the subjects that he studied that year.

Leggett won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, in December 1954 and entered the University the following year with the intention of reading the degree technically known as Literae Humaniores (classics). After completing his first degree he began a second undergraduate degree, this time in physics at Merton College, Oxford. One person who was willing to overlook Leggett's unorthodox credentials was Dirk ter Haar, then a reader in theoretical physics and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford; so Leggett signed up for research under ter Haar's supervision. As with all of ter Haar's students in that period, the tentatively assigned thesis topic was "Some Problems in the Theory of Many-Body Systems", which left a considerable degree of latitude.

Dirk took a great interest in the personal welfare of his students and their families, and was meticulous in making sure they received adequate support; indeed, he encouraged Leggett to apply for a Prize Fellowship at Magdalen, which he held from 1963 to 1967. In the end Leggett's thesis consisted of studies of two somewhat disconnected problems in the general area of liquid helium, one on higher-order phonon interaction processes in superfluid 4He and the other on the properties of dilute solutions of 4He in normal liquid 3He (a system which unfortunately turned out to be much less experimentally accessible than the other side of the phase diagram, dilute solutions of 3He in 4He). The University of Oxford awarded Leggett an Honorary DLitt in June 2005.[citation needed]

Career

Leggett spent the period August 1964 – August 1965 as a postdoctoral research fellow at UIUC, and David Pines and his colleagues (John Bardeen, Gordon Baym, Leo Kadanoff and others) provided a fertile environment. He then spent a year in the group of Professor Takeo Matsubara at Kyoto University in Japan.

After one more postdoctoral year which he spent in "roving" mode, spending time at Oxford, Harvard, and Illinois, in the autumn of 1967 he took up a lectureship at the University of Sussex, where he was to spend the majority of the next fifteen years of his career. During the mid 1970s, he spent considerable time in Japan at the University of Tokyo and also at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana.

In early 1982 he accepted an offer from UIUC of the MacArthur Chair with which the university had recently been endowed. As he had already committed himself to an eight-month stay as a visiting scientist at Cornell in early 1983, he finally arrived in Urbana in the early fall of that year, and has been there ever since.

Leggett's own research interests shifted away from superfluid 3He since around 1980; he worked inter alia on the low-temperature properties of glasses, high-temperature superconductivity, the Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) atomic gases and above all on the theory of experiments to test whether the formation of quantum mechanics will continue to describe the physical world as we push it up from the atomic level towards that of everyday life.

From 2006 to 2016, he also held a position at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Canada.

As of April 2023, he serves as chief scientist at the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory, a research institute at the UIUC.

In 2013, he became the founding director of the Shanghai Center for Complex Physics.

Research

His research focuses on cuprate superconductivity, superfluidity in highly degenerate atomic gases, low temperature properties of amorphous solids, conceptual issues in the formulation of quantum mechanics and topological quantum computation.

The edition of 29 December 2005 of the International Herald Tribune printed an article, "New tests of Einstein's 'spooky' reality", which referred to Leggett's Autumn 2005 debate at a conference in Berkeley, California, with fellow Nobel laureate Norman Ramsey of Harvard University. Both debated the worth of attempts to change quantum theory. Leggett thought attempts were justified, Ramsey opposed. Leggett believes quantum mechanics may be incomplete because of the quantum measurement problem.

Awards and honours

Leggett is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences (foreign member), the Indian National Science Academy, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1980, the American Physical Society, and American Institute of Physics, and Life Fellow of the Institute of Physics.

He was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics (with V. L. Ginzburg and A. A. Abrikosov) for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK). He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the 2004 Queen's Birthday Honours "for services to physics". He also won the 2002/2003 Wolf Foundation Prize for research on condensed forms of matter (with B. I. Halperin). He was also honoured with the Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal (1999). He has been elected as a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (2011).

Personal life

In June 1973, he married Haruko Kinase. They met at Sussex University, in Brighton, England. In 1978, they had a daughter Asako. His wife Haruko earned a PhD in cultural anthropology from UIUC and has done research on the hospice system. Their daughter, Asako, also graduated from UIUC with a joint major in geography and chemistry. She holds dual US/UK citizenship.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-07 15:21:37

2074) Peter Agre

Gist:

Work

One of the fundamental processes of life is the transportation of water molecules through the surface layer of the cells that comprise organisms. Channels that allow the passage of water but not other substances are crucial for processes such as the kidney’s capacity to recover water from urine. For a long time no one knew what these water canals looked like, but in 1990 Peter Agre succeeded in isolating a protein that he proved was the sought-after water canal. The protein was given the name aquaporin.

Summary

Peter Agre (born January 30, 1949, Northfield, Minnesota, U.S.) is an American doctor, corecipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2003 for his discovery of water channels in cell membranes. He shared the award with Roderick MacKinnon, also of the United States.

In 1974 Agre earned an M.D. degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In 1981, following postgraduate training and a fellowship, he returned to Johns Hopkins, where in 1993 he advanced to professor of biological chemistry. In 2008 he became director of the school’s Malaria Research Institute. Agre also served as vice-chancellor for science and technology at Duke University Medical Center (2005–08).

In the 1980s Agre began conducting his pioneering research on water channels in cell membranes. First mentioned by scientists in the mid-1800s, these specialized openings allow water to flow in and out of cells. They are essential to living organisms, and scientists sought to find the channels, determine their structure, and understand how they worked. In 1988 Agre was able to isolate a type of protein molecule in the cell membrane that he later came to realize was the long-sought water channel. His research included comparing how cells with and without the protein in their membranes responded when placed in a water solution. He discovered that cells with the protein swelled up as water flowed in, while those lacking the protein remained the same size. Agre named the protein aquaporin. Researchers subsequently discovered a whole family of the proteins in animals, plants, and even bacteria. Two different aquaporins were later found to play a major role in the mechanism by which human kidneys concentrate urine and return the extracted water to the blood.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Agre’s honours include election to the National Academy of Sciences (2000) and to the American Academy of Arts and Science (2003). He also headed various organizations, notably the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (2009–10).

Details

Peter Agre (born January 30, 1949) is an American physician, Nobel Laureate, and molecular biologist, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute. In 2003, Agre and Roderick MacKinnon shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes." Agre was recognized for his discovery of aquaporin water channels. Aquaporins are water-channel proteins that move water molecules through the cell membrane. In 2009, Agre was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and became active in science diplomacy.

Biography

Agre is the second of six children born in Northfield, Minnesota, to parents of Norwegian and Swedish descent. Agre is a Lutheran. Fascinated by international travel after a high school camping trip through the Soviet Union, Agre was an inconsistent student until he developed an interest in science from his father who was a college chemistry professor.

Agre graduated from Roosevelt High School (Minnesota) before he received his B.A. in Chemistry from Augsburg University in Minneapolis and his M.D. in 1974 from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. From 1975 to 1978 he completed his clinical training in Internal Medicine at Case Western Reserve University's Case Medical Center under Charles C.J. Carpenter. He subsequently did a Hematology-Oncology fellowship at North Carolina Memorial Hospital of UNC Chapel Hill. In 1981, Agre returned to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to join the lab of Vann Bennett in the Department of Cell Biology.

In 1984, Agre was recruited onto the faculty of the Department of Medicine led by Victor A. McKusick. He subsequently joined the Department of Biological Chemistry led by Dan Lane. Agre rose to full professor in 1992 and remained at Johns Hopkins until 2005. Agre then served as the Vice Chancellor for Science and Technology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, where he guided the development of Duke's biomedical research. In 2008, he returned to Johns Hopkins, where he directs the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute (JHMRI) in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and holds a joint appointment in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Professional awards

In addition to the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Agre was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2000, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, the American Philosophical Society in 2004, the National Academy of Medicine in 2005, and the American Society for Microbiology in 2011. Agre has received 19 honorary doctorates from universities around the world, including Japan, Norway, Greece, Mexico, Hungary, and the United States.

In 2004, Agre received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In February 2014, he was named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University for his accomplishments as an interdisciplinary researcher and excellence in teaching the next generation of scholars. The Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships were established in 2013 by a gift from Michael Bloomberg.

Personal life

Agre and his wife Mary have been married since 1975, and have three daughters, one son, and two young granddaughters. Agre is an Eagle Scout and recipient of the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award (DESA). Two of his brothers, also physicians, and his son Clarke, a public defender, are also Eagle Scouts. Agre enjoys wilderness canoeing in the arctic and cross-country skiing, having completed the 60 mile Vasaloppet ski race in Sweden five times. Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2012, Agre has had to reduce his activities.

"I identify more with Huckleberry Finn than with Albert Einstein," he told Scouting magazine.

Agre is known among science students for his humanity and humility. He appeared on The Colbert Report, discussing his role as a founding member of Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA), sound science in politics, and the decline of American knowledge of science, among other topics.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-08 15:48:57

2075) Roderick MacKinnon

Gist:

Life

Roderick MacKinnon was born in Burlington, Massachusetts. As an adult, he studied not far from Massachusetts' capital, Boston. He first studied biochemistry at Brandeis University and then earned a medical degree from Tufts University in 1982. After a few years working as a doctor, MacKinnon returned to Brandeis University as a researcher at age 30. He later moved to Harvard University in 1989 and then to Rockefeller University, New York, in 1996, where he conducted the research that led to his Nobel Prize. MacKinnon is married to Alice Lee, an organic chemist.

Work

One of life's most fundamental processes is the transportation of charged atoms (ions) through the outer walls of the cells that make up living organisms. Known as ion channels, these pathways are vitally important to signal transfers in nerves and muscles, although just how they are constructed long remained a mystery. In 1998, using x-ray crystallography (that is, mapping molecule structures using the diffraction patterns that occur when x-rays pass through crystals), Roderick MacKinnon succeeded in demonstrating what a potassium ion channel looks like.

Summary

Roderick MacKinnon (born February 19, 1956, Burlington, Massachusetts, U.S.) is an American doctor, corecipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2003 for his pioneering research on ion channels in cell membranes. He shared the award with Peter Agre, also of the United States.

MacKinnon earned an M.D. degree from Tufts University School of Medicine in 1982. After practicing medicine for several years, he turned to basic research, beginning in 1986 with postdoctoral work on ion channels at Brandeis University. In 1989 he joined Harvard University, and in 1996 he moved to Rockefeller University as a professor and laboratory head. A year later he was appointed an investigator at Rockefeller’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Of particular importance to the nervous system and the heart, ion channels are specialized openings in cell membranes that enable ions, such as potassium and sodium, to easily flow in and out of cells; similar structures also exist for the passage of water. MacKinnon’s groundbreaking work focused on “filters” in channels that passed one type of ion while blocking others. To understand how these filters work, he obtained sharper images of channels using X-ray diffraction. In 1998 he determined the three-dimensional molecular structure of an ion channel. The channel, MacKinnon discovered, has an architecture sized in a way that easily strips potassium ions—but not sodium ions—of their associated water molecules and allows them to slip through. He also found a molecular “sensor” in the end of the channel nearest the cell’s interior that reacts to conditions around the cell, sending signals that open and close the channel at the appropriate times. His pioneering work allowed scientists to pursue the development of drugs for diseases in which ion channels play a role.

Details

Roderick MacKinnon (born February 19, 1956) is an American biophysicist, neuroscientist, and businessman. He is a professor of molecular neurobiology and biophysics at Rockefeller University who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Peter Agre in 2003 for his work on the structure and operation of ion channels.

Biography:

Early life and education

MacKinnon was born in Burlington, Massachusetts and initially attended the University of Massachusetts Boston. MacKinnon then transferred to Brandeis University after one year, and there he received a bachelor's degree in biochemistry in 1978, studying calcium transport through the cell membrane for his honors thesis in Christopher Miller's laboratory. It was also at Brandeis where MacKinnon met his future wife and working-colleague Alice Lee.

After receiving his bachelor's degree from Brandeis University, MacKinnon entered medical school at Tufts University. He got his M.D. in 1982 and received training in Internal Medicine at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. He did not feel satisfied enough with the medical profession, so in 1986 he returned to Christopher Miller's laboratory at Brandeis for postdoctoral studies.

Career

In 1989 he was appointed assistant professor at Harvard University where he studied the interaction of the potassium channel with a specific toxin derived from scorpion venom, acquainting himself with methods of protein purification and X-ray crystallography. In 1996 he moved to Rockefeller University as a professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics where he started to work on the structure of the potassium channel. These channels are of particular importance to the nervous system and the heart and enable potassium ions to cross the cell membrane.

Scientific contributions

Potassium channels demonstrate a seemingly counterintuitive activity: they permit the passage of potassium ions, whereas they do not allow the passage of the much smaller sodium ions. Before MacKinnon's work, the detailed molecular architecture of potassium channels and the exact means by which they conduct ions remained speculative.

In 1998, despite barriers to the structural study of integral membrane proteins that had thwarted most attempts for decades, MacKinnon and colleagues determined the three-dimensional molecular structure of a potassium channel from an actinobacterium, Streptomyces lividans, utilizing X-ray crystallography. With this structure and other biochemical experiments, MacKinnon and colleagues were able to explain the exact mechanism by which potassium channel selectivity occurs.

His prize-winning research was conducted primarily at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) of Cornell University, and at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

MacKinnon was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2005. In 2007 he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-09 15:50:32

2076) Paul Lauterbur

Gist:

Work

Protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus behave like small spinning magnets. Accordingly, atoms and molecules assume a certain orientation in a magnetic field. This can be dislodged, however, by radio waves of certain frequencies that are characteristic for different atoms. By introducing variations in the magnetic field during the 1970s, Paul Lauterbur contributed to use of the phenomenon to create images of the human body’s interior. The incidence of hydrogen atoms is measured and differences in the water content of different tissues provides a basis for magnetic resonance imaging.

Summary

Paul Lauterbur (born May 6, 1929, Sidney, Ohio, U.S.—died March 27, 2007, Urbana, Ill.) was an American chemist who, with English physicist Sir Peter Mansfield, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2003 for the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a computerized scanning technology that produces images of internal body structures, especially those comprising soft tissues.

Lauterbur received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh in 1962. He served as a professor at the University of New York at Stony Brook from 1969 to 1985, when he accepted the position of professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of its Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory.

In the early 1970s Lauterbur began work using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), which is the selective absorption of very high-frequency radio waves by certain atomic nuclei subjected to a strong stationary magnetic field. NMR is a key tool in chemical analysis, using the absorption measurements to provide information about the molecular structure of various solids and liquids. Lauterbur realized that if the magnetic field was deliberately made nonuniform, information contained in the signal distortions could be used to create two-dimensional images of a sample’s internal structure. This discovery laid the groundwork for the development of MRI as Mansfield transformed Lauterbur’s work into a practical medical tool. Noninvasive and lacking the harmful side effects of X-ray and computed tomography (CT) examinations, MRI became widely used in medicine.

Details

Paul Christian Lauterbur (May 6, 1929 – March 27, 2007) was an American chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) possible.

Lauterbur was a professor at Stony Brook University from 1963 until 1985, where he conducted his research for the development of the MRI. In 1985 he became a professor along with his wife Joan at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 22 years until his death in Urbana. He never stopped working with undergraduates on research, and he served as a professor of chemistry, with appointments in bioengineering, biophysics, the College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign and computational biology at the Center for Advanced Study.

Early life

Lauterbur was of Luxembourgish ancestry. Born and raised in Sidney, Ohio, Lauterbur graduated from Sidney High School, where a new Chemistry, Physics, and Biology wing was dedicated in his honor. As a teenager, he built his own laboratory in the basement of his parents' house. His chemistry teacher at school understood that he enjoyed experimenting on his own, so the teacher allowed him to do his own experiments at the back of class.

When he was drafted into the United States Army in the 1950s, his superiors allowed him to spend his time working on an early nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machine; he had published four scientific papers by the time he left the Army. Paul became an atheist later on.

Education and career

Lauterbur received a BS in chemistry from the Case Institute of Technology, now part of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio where he became a Brother of the Alpha Delta chapter of Phi Kappa Tau fraternity. He then went to work at the Mellon Institute laboratories of the Dow Corning Corporation, with a 2-year break to serve at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland. While working at Mellon Institute he pursued graduate studies in chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. Earning his PhD in 1962, the following year Lauterbur accepted a position as associate professor at Stony Brook University. As a visiting faculty in chemistry at Stanford University during the 1969–1970 academic year, he undertook NMR-related research with the help of local businesses Syntex and Varian Associates. Lauterbur returned to Stony Brook, continuing there until 1985 when he moved to the University of Illinois.

The development of the MRI

Lauterbur credits the idea of the MRI to a brainstorm one day at a suburban Pittsburgh Eat'n Park Big Boy Restaurant, with the MRI's first model scribbled on a table napkin while he was a student and researcher at both the University of Pittsburgh and the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research. The further research that led to the Nobel Prize was performed at Stony Brook University in the 1970s.

The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952, which went to Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell, was for the development of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the scientific principle behind MRI. However, for decades magnetic resonance was used mainly for studying the chemical structure of substances. It wasn't until the 1970s with Lauterbur's and Mansfield's developments that NMR could be used to produce images of the body.

Lauterbur used the idea of Robert Gabillard (developed in his doctoral thesis, 1952) of introducing gradients in the magnetic field which allows for determining the origin of the radio waves emitted from the nuclei of the object of study. This spatial information allows two-dimensional pictures to be produced.

While Lauterbur conducted his work at Stony Brook, the best NMR machine on campus belonged to the chemistry department; he had to visit it at night to use it for experimentation and would carefully change the settings so that they would return to those of the chemists' as he left. The original MRI machine is located at the Chemistry building on the campus of Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York.

Some of the first images taken by Lauterbur included those of a 4-mm-diameter clam his daughter had collected on the beach at the Long Island Sound, green peppers and two test tubes of heavy water within a beaker of ordinary water; no other imaging technique in existence at that time could distinguish between two different kinds of water. This last achievement is particularly important as the human body consists mostly of water.

When Lauterbur first submitted his paper with his discoveries to Nature, the paper was rejected by the editors of the journal. Lauterbur persisted and requested them to review it again, upon which time it was published and is now acknowledged as a classic Nature paper. The Nature editors pointed out that the pictures accompanying the paper were too fuzzy, although they were the first images to show the difference between heavy water and ordinary water. Lauterbur said of the initial rejection: "You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature."

Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom took Lauterbur's initial work another step further, replacing the slow (and prone to artefacts) projection-reconstruction method used by Lautebur's original technique with a method that used frequency and phase encoding by spatial gradients of magnetic field. Owing to Larmor precession, a mathematical technique called a Fourier transformation could then be used to recover the desired image, greatly speeding up the imaging process.

Lauterbur unsuccessfully attempted to file patents related to his work to commercialize the discovery. The State University of New York chose not to pursue patents, with the rationale that the expense would not pay off in the end. "The company that was in charge of such applications decided that it would not repay the expense of getting a patent. That turned out not to be a spectacularly good decision," Lauterbur said in 2003. He attempted to get the federal government to pay for an early prototype of the MRI machine for years in the 1970s, and the process took a decade. The University of Nottingham did file patents which later made Mansfield wealthy.

Nobel Prize

Lauterbur was awarded the Nobel Prize along with Mansfield in the fall of 2003. Controversy occurred when Raymond Damadian took out full-page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times headlined "The Shameful Wrong That Must Be Righted" saying that the Nobel committee had not included him as a Prize winner alongside Lauterbur and Mansfield for his early work on the MRI. Damadian claimed that he discovered MRI and the two Nobel-winning scientists refined his technology.

The New York Times published an editorial saying that while scientists credit Damadian for holding an early patent in MRI technology, Lauterbur and Mansfield expanded upon Herman Carr's technique in order to produce first 2D and then 3D MR images. The editorial deems this to be worthy of a Nobel prize even though it states clearly in Alfred Nobel's will that prizes are not to be given out solely on the basis of improving an existing technology for commercial use. The newspaper then points out a few cases in which precursor discoveries had been awarded with a Nobel, along with a few deserving cases in which it had not, such as Rosalind Franklin, Oswald Avery, Robert Gabillard [fr].

Death

Lauterbur died aged 77 in March 2007 of kidney disease at his home in Urbana, Illinois. University of Illinois Chancellor Richard Herman said, "Paul's influence is felt around the world every day, every time an MRI saves the life of a daughter or a son, a mother or a father."

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-10 16:10:55

2077) Peter Mansfield

Gist:

Work

Protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus behave like small spinning magnets. Accordingly, atoms and molecules assume a certain orientation in a magnetic field. This can be dislodged, however, by radio waves of certain frequencies that are characteristic for different atoms. By developing calculation methods during the 1970s, Peter Mansfield contributed to use of the phenomenon to create images of the human body’s interior. The incidence of hydrogen atoms is measured and differences in the water content of different tissues provides a basis for magnetic resonance imaging.

Summary

Sir Peter Mansfield (born October 9, 1933, London, England—died February 8, 2017) was an English physicist who, with American chemist Paul Lauterbur, won the 2003 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a computerized scanning technology that produces images of internal body structures, especially those comprising soft tissues.

Mansfield received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of London in 1962. Following two years as a research associate in the United States, he joined the faculty of the University of Nottingham, where he became professor in 1979 and professor emeritus in 1994. Mansfield was knighted in 1993.

Mansfield’s prize-winning work expanded upon nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), which is the selective absorption of very high-frequency radio waves by certain atomic nuclei subjected to a strong stationary magnetic field. A key tool in chemical analysis, it uses the absorption measurements to provide information about the molecular structure of various solids and liquids. In the early 1970s Lauterbur laid the foundations for MRI after realizing that if the magnetic field was deliberately made nonuniform, information contained in the signal distortions could be used to create two-dimensional images of a sample’s internal structure. Mansfield transformed Lauterbur’s discoveries into a practical technology in medicine by developing a way of using the nonuniformities, or gradients, introduced in the magnetic field to identify differences in the resonance signals more precisely. He also created new mathematical methods for quickly analyzing information in the signal and showed how to attain extremely rapid imaging. Because MRI does not have the harmful side effects of X-ray or computed tomography (CT) examinations and is noninvasive, the technology proved an invaluable tool in medicine.

Details

Sir Peter Mansfield (9 October 1933 – 8 February 2017) was an English physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Paul Lauterbur, for discoveries concerning Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Mansfield was a professor at the University of Nottingham.

Early life

Mansfield was born in Lambeth, London on 9 October 1933, to Sidney George (b. 1904, d. 1966) and Lillian Rose Mansfield (b. 1905, d. 1984; née Turner). Mansfield was the youngest of three sons, Conrad (b. 1925) and Sidney (b. 1927).

Mansfield grew up in Camberwell. During World War II he was evacuated from London, initially to Sevenoaks and then twice to Torquay, Devon, where he was able to stay with the same family on both occasions. On returning to London after the war he was told by a school master to take the 11+ exam. Having never heard of the exam before, and having no time to prepare, Mansfield failed to gain a place at the local Grammar school. His mark was, however, high enough for him to go to a Central School in Peckham. At the age of 15 he was told by a careers teacher that science wasn't for him. He left school shortly afterwards to work as a printer's assistant.

At the age of 18, having developed an interest in rocketry, Mansfield took up a job with the Rocket Propulsion Department of the Ministry of Supply in Westcott, Buckinghamshire. Eighteen months later he was called up for National Service.

Education

After serving in the army for two years, Mansfield returned to Westcott and started studying for A-levels at night school. Two years later he was admitted to study physics at Queen Mary College, University of London.

Mansfield graduated with a BSc from Queen Mary in 1959. His final-year project, supervised by Jack Powles, was to construct a portable, transistor-based spectrometer to measure the Earth's magnetic field. Towards the end of this project Powles offered Mansfield a position in his NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) research group. Powles' interest was in studying molecular motion, mainly liquids. Mansfield's project was to build a pulsed NMR spectrometer to study solid polymer systems. He received his PhD in 1962; his thesis was titled Proton magnetic resonance relaxation in solids by transient methods.

Career

Following his PhD, Mansfield was invited to postdoctoral research with Charlie Slichter at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he carried out an NMR study of doped metals.

In 1964, Mansfield returned to England to take up a place as a lecturer at Nottingham University where he could continue his studies in multiple-pulse NMR. He was successively appointed Senior Lecturer in 1968 and Reader in 1970. During this period his team developed the MRI equipment with the help of grants from the Medical Research Council. It was not until the 1970s with Paul Lauterbur's and Mansfield's developments that NMR could be used to produce images of the body. In 1979 Mansfield was appointed Professor of the Department of Physics until his retirement in 1994.

1962: Research Associate, Department of Physics, University of Illinois
1964: Lecturer, Department of Physics, University of Nottingham
1968: Senior Lecturer, Department of Physics, University of Nottingham
1970: Reader, Department of Physics, University of Nottingham
1972–73: Senior Visitor, Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg
1979: Professor, Department of Physics, University of Nottingham

Mansfield is credited with inventing 'slice selection' for MRI - i.e. the method by which a localised axial slice of a subject can be selectively imaged, rather than the entire subject - and understanding how the radio signals from MRI can be mathematically analysed, making interpretation of the signals into a useful image a possibility. He is also credited with discovering how fast imaging could be possible by developing the MRI protocol called echo-planar imaging. Echo-planar imaging allows T2* weighted images to be collected many times faster than previously possible. It also has made functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) feasible.

Whilst working at Nottingham University, Mansfield tested the first full body prototype, installed just before Christmas, 1978. Mansfield was so keen, that he volunteered to test it himself and produced the first scan of a live patient. The prototype machine is now an exhibit, in the Medical Section of the Science Museum.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-12 20:03:56

2078) David Gross

Gist:

David J. Gross is the Chancellor’s Chair Professor of Theoretical Physics and the former Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining KITP, he was the Thomas Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics at Princeton University. Gross was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Politzer and Wilczek) “for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.” Other awards include Sakurai Prize, MacArthur fellowship, Dirac Medal, Oskar Klein Medal, Harvey Prize, High Energy and Particle Physics Prize (European Physical Society), Grande Médaille d’Or (French Academy of Sciences). Memberships include U.S. National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Philosophical Society, Indian Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2020, he became the past President of the American Physical Society.

Summary

David Gross (born February 19, 1941, Washington, D.C., U.S.) is an American physicist who, with H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004 for discoveries regarding the strong force—the nuclear force that binds together quarks (the smallest building blocks of matter) and holds together the nucleus of the atom.

Gross graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1962 and received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966. In 1969 he joined the faculty at Princeton University, where he began working with Wilczek, then a graduate student. From 1997 to 2012 Gross was director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The prizewinning work of Gross and Wilczek—and Politzer working independently—arose from physics experiments conducted in the early 1970s with particle accelerators to study quarks and the force that acts on them. (See fundamental interaction.) During their research the three scientists observed that quarks were so tightly bound together that they could not be separated as individual particles but that the closer quarks approached one another, the weaker the strong force became. When quarks were brought very close together, the force was so weak that the quarks acted almost as if they were free particles not bound together by any force. When the distance between two quarks increased, however, the force became greater—an effect analogous to the stretching of a rubber band. This phenomenon became known as asymptotic freedom, and it led to a completely new physical theory, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), to describe the strong force. QCD enabled scientists to complete the standard model of particle physics, which describes the fundamental particles in nature and how they interact with one another.

Gross also did research in superstring theory, and in 1987 he was coinventor of a new superstring model. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Gross’s numerous awards include a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (1987).

Details

David Jonathan Gross (/ɡroʊs/; born February 19, 1941) is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. Along with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of asymptotic freedom. Gross is the Chancellor's Chair Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and was formerly the KITP director and holder of their Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics. He is also a faculty member in the UCSB Physics Department and is affiliated with the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University in California. He is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Early life and education

Gross was born to a Jewish family in Washington, D.C., in February 1941. His parents were Nora (Faine) and Bertram Myron Gross (1912–1997). Gross received his bachelor's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, in 1962. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1966, under the supervision of Geoffrey Chew.

Research and career

In 1973, Gross, working with his first graduate student, Frank Wilczek, at Princeton University, discovered asymptotic freedom—the primary feature of non-Abelian gauge theories—which led Gross and Wilczek to the formulation of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong nuclear force. Asymptotic freedom is a phenomenon where the nuclear force weakens at short distances, which explains why experiments at very high energy can be understood as if nuclear particles are made of non-interacting quarks. Therefore, the closer quarks are to each other, the less the strong interaction (or color charge) is between them; when quarks are in extreme proximity, the nuclear force between them is so weak that they behave almost as free particles. The flip side of asymptotic freedom is that the force between quarks grows stronger as one tries to separate them. This is the reason why the nucleus of an atom can never be broken into its quark constituents.

QCD completed the Standard Model, which details the three basic forces of particle physics—the electromagnetic force, the weak force, and the strong force. Gross was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, with Politzer and Wilczek, for this discovery.

Gross, with Jeffrey A. Harvey, Emil Martinec, and Ryan Rohm also formulated the theory of the heterotic string. The four were whimsically nicknamed the "Princeton String Quartet." He continues to do research in this field at the KITP.

He was a junior fellow at Harvard University (1966–69) and a Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton University until 1997, when he began serving as Princeton's Thomas Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics Emeritus. He has received many honors, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1987 and the Dirac Medal in 1988.

Activism

In 2003, Gross was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.

Gross 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.

In 2015, Gross 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.

Family

Gross' first wife was Shulamith (Toaff), and they had two children. He also has a stepdaughter by his second wife, Jacquelyn Savani. He has three brothers, including Larry Gross, professor of communication, Samuel R. Gross, professor of law, and Theodore (Teddy) Gross, a playwright.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-13 15:47:53

2079) Hugh David Politzer

Gist:

Work

The atomic nucleus is held together by a powerful, strong interaction that binds together the protons and neutrons that comprise the nucleus. The strong interaction also holds together the quarks that make up protons and neutrons. This interaction is so strong that no free quarks have ever been observed. However, in 1973 David Politzer, David Gross, and Frank Wilczek came up with a theory postulating that when quarks come really close to one another, the attraction abates and they behave like free particles. This is called asymptotic freedom.

Summary

H. David Politzer (born Aug. 31, 1949, New York, N.Y., U.S.) is an American physicist who, with David J. Gross and Frank Wilczek, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004 for discoveries regarding the strong force—the nuclear force that binds together quarks (the smallest building blocks of matter) and holds together the nucleus of the atom.

Politzer studied physics at the University of Michigan (B.S., 1969) and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1974). In 1975 he began teaching at the California Institute of Technology, and from 1986 to 1988 he served as head of the school’s physics department.

In the early 1970s Politzer—along with Gross and Wilczek, who were pursuing parallel research at Princeton University—used particle accelerators to study quarks and the force that acts on them. (See fundamental interaction.) They discovered that quarks were so tightly bound together that they could not be separated as individual particles but that the closer quarks approached one another, the weaker the strong force became. When quarks were brought very close together, the force was so weak that the quarks acted almost as if they were free particles not bound together by any force. When the distance between two quarks increased, the force became greater—an effect analogous to the stretching of a rubber band. This phenomenon became known as asymptotic freedom, and it led to a new physical theory, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), to describe the strong force. QCD completed the standard model, a theory that describes the fundamental particles in nature and how they interact with one another.

Politzer had a featured role in the film Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), a fictional look at the Manhattan Project.

Details

Hugh David Politzer (born August 31, 1949) is an American theoretical physicist and the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Gross and Frank Wilczek for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics.

Life and career

Politzer was born in New York City. His father was Alan (Hungarian: Aladár) born in Nádszeg, Kingdom of Hungary. His mother was Valerie Politzer and they escaped to England from Czechoslovakia in 1939 and immigrated to the U.S. after World War II. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1966, received his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Michigan in 1969, and his PhD in 1974 from Harvard University, where his graduate advisor was Sidney Coleman.

In his first published article, which appeared in 1973, Politzer described the phenomenon of asymptotic freedom: the closer quarks are to each other, the weaker the strong interaction will be between them. When quarks are in extreme proximity, the nuclear force between them is so weak that they behave almost like free particles. This result—independently discovered at around the same time by Gross and Wilczek at Princeton University—was extremely important in the development of quantum chromodynamics. With Thomas Appelquist, Politzer also played a central role in predicting the existence of "charmonium", a subatomic particle formed of a charm quark and a charm antiquark.

Politzer was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1974 to 1977 before moving to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he is currently professor of theoretical physics. In 1986, he was awarded the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics by the American Physical Society. In 1989, he appeared in a minor role in the movie Fat Man and Little Boy, as Manhattan Project physicist Robert Serber. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2004 was awarded jointly to David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction."

Politzer 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.

Politzer was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.

Politzer plays the banjo and has done research on the physics of the instrument.

Trivia

Politzer was the lead vocalist in the 1980s for Professor Politzer and the Rho Mesons, which put out their single, "The Simple Harmonic Oscillator".

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-14 16:15:43

2080) Frank Wilczek

Gist:

Work

The atomic nucleus is held together by a powerful, strong interaction that binds together the protons and neutrons that comprise the nucleus. The strong interaction also holds together the quarks that make up protons and neutrons. This interaction is so strong that no free quarks have ever been observed. However, in 1973 Frank Wilczek, David Gross, and David Politzer came up with a theory postulating that when quarks come really close to one another, the attraction abates and they behave like free particles. This is called asymptotic freedom.

Summary

Frank Wilczek (born May 15, 1951, New York, New York, U.S.) is an American physicist who, with David J. Gross and H. David Politzer, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004 for discoveries regarding the strong force—the nuclear force that binds together quarks (the smallest building blocks of matter) and holds together the nucleus of the atom.

After graduating from the University of Chicago (B.S., 1970), Wilczek studied under Gross at Princeton University, earning an M.S. in mathematics (1972) and a Ph.D. in physics (1974). He later served on the faculty at Princeton (1974–81) and taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1980–88). In 1989 Wilczek became a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, a post he held until 2000, when he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the early 1970s Wilczek and Gross used particle accelerators to study quarks and the force that acts on them. (See fundamental interaction.) The two scientists—and Politzer working independently—observed that quarks were so tightly bound together that they could not be separated as individual particles but that the closer quarks approached one another, the weaker the strong force became. When quarks were brought very close together, the force was so weak that the quarks acted almost as if they were free particles not bound together by any force. When the distance between two quarks increased, however, the force became greater—an effect analogous to the stretching of a rubber band. The discovery of this phenomenon, known as asymptotic freedom, led to a completely new physical theory, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), to describe the strong force. QCD put the finishing touches on the standard model of particle physics, which describes the fundamental particles in nature and how they interact with one another.

Wilczek also contributed to the study of questions relating to cosmology, condensed matter physics, and black holes. His books included The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces (2008), A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design (2015), and Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality (2021). In addition to the Nobel Prize, Wilczek received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (1982) and the Templeton Prize (2022) among numerous other honours.

Details

Frank Anthony Wilczek (born May 15, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate. He is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Founding Director of T. D. Lee Institute and Chief Scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), distinguished professor at Arizona State University (ASU) and full professor at Stockholm University.

Wilczek, along with David Gross and H. David Politzer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction". In May 2022, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for his investigations into the fundamental laws of nature, that has transformed our understanding of the forces that govern our universe and revealed an inspiring vision of a world that embodies mathematical beauty.

Early life and education

Born in Mineola, New York, Wilczek is of Polish and Italian origin. His grandparents were immigrants who "really did work with their hands", according to Wilczek, but his father took night school classes to educate himself, working as a repairman to support his family. Wilczek's father became a "self-taught engineer", whose interests in technology and science inspired his son.

Wilczek was educated in the public schools of Queens, attending Martin Van Buren High School. It was around this time Wilczek's parents realized that he was exceptional, in part as a result of their son having been administered an IQ test.

After skipping two grades, Wilczek started high school in the 10th grade, when he was 13 years old. He was particularly inspired by two of his high school physics teachers, one of whom taught a course that helped students with the national Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Wilczek was a finalist in 1967 and ultimately won fourth place, based on a mathematical project involving group theory.

He received his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and membership in Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Chicago in 1970. During his last year as a math major at Chicago, he attended a course taught by Peter Freund on group theory in physics, which Wilczek later described as being "basically particle physics", and very influential:

Peter Freund played a big role in my life, though, because he taught this course on group theory, or symmetry in physics that—he was so enthusiastic, and he really gushed—and it's beautiful material. Still to this day I think the quantum theory of angular momentum is one of the absolute pinnacles of human achievement. Just beautiful.

Wilczek went to Princeton as a mathematics graduate student. After a year and a half, he transferred from mathematics to physics, with David Gross as his thesis advisor.

He earned a Master of Arts in Mathematics in 1972 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1974, both from Princeton University.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-15 15:41:59

2081) Aaron Ciechanover

Gist:

Work

An important process in our cells is the production of proteins. But proteins must also be broken down. At the beginning of the 1980s, Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko, and Irwin Rose showed that one protein, ubiquitin, has a special mission in this context. When it is time for a protein to be broken down, a ubiquitin molecule attaches itself to the protein. The ubiquitin molecule serves as a key that enters a proteasome, a protein complex that divides the protein into smaller pieces. These can be used in the construction of other substances in the cell.

Summary

Aaron J. Ciechanover (born October 1, 1947, Haifa, British Protectorate of Palestine [now Haifa, Israel]) is an Israeli biochemist who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose for their joint discovery of the mechanism by which the cells of most living organisms cull unwanted proteins.

Ciechanover received an M.D. (1974) from Hebrew University–Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem and a D.Sc. (1981) from the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, where he was taught by Hershko. In 1977 Ciechanover joined the faculty at the Technion, where he held a variety of academic positions.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Ciechanover, Hershko, and Rose worked together at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, where much of their prizewinning research was done. The process that they discovered involves a series of carefully orchestrated steps by which cells degrade, or destroy, the proteins that no longer serve any useful purpose. In the first step a molecule called ubiquitin (from the Latin ubique, meaning “everywhere,” because it occurs in so many different cells and organisms) attaches to a protein targeted for destruction and accompanies it to a proteasome—essentially a sac of powerful enzymes that break the protein into its component amino acids. The outer membrane of the proteasome admits only proteins carrying a ubiquitin molecule, which detaches before entering the proteasome and is reused.

Ciechanover, Hershko, and Rose also demonstrated that ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation helps control a number of other critical biochemical processes, including cell division, the repair of defects in DNA, and gene transcription, the process in which genes use their coded instructions to manufacture a protein. Diseases such as cystic fibrosis result when the protein-degradation system does not work normally, and researchers hoped to use the findings to develop drugs against such illnesses.

Details

Aaron Ciechanover (born October 1, 1947) is an Israeli biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for characterizing the method that cells use to degrade and recycle proteins using ubiquitin.

Biography:

Early life

Ciechanover was born in Haifa, British Mandate of Palestine on 1 October 1947 into a Jewish family. He is the son of Bluma (Lubashevsky), a teacher of English, and Yitzhak Ciechanover, an office worker in a law firm. His parents immigrated to Israel from Poland in the 1920s.

Education

He earned a master's degree in science in 1971 and graduated from Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem in 1974. He received his doctorate in biochemistry in 1981 from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa before conducting postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Harvey Lodish at the Whitehead Institute at MIT from 1981 to 1984.

Recent

Ciechanover is currently a Technion Distinguished Research Professor in the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Research Institute at the Technion. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the Russian Academy of Sciences and is a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. In 2008, he was a visiting Distinguished Chair Professor at NCKU, Taiwan. As part of Shenzhen's 13th Five-Year Plan funding research in emerging technologies and opening "Nobel laureate research labs", in 2018 he opened the Ciechanover Institute of Precision and Regenerative Medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen campus.

Nobel Prize

Ciechanover is one of Israel's first Nobel Laureates in science, earning his Nobel Prize in 2004 for his work in ubiquitination. He is honored for playing a central role in the history of Israel and in the history of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-16 15:58:48

2082) Avram Hershko

Gist:

Work

An important process in our cells is the production of proteins. But proteins must also be broken down. At the beginning of the 1980s, Avram Hershko, Aaron Ciechanover and Irwin Rose showed that one protein, ubiquitin, has a special mission in this context. When it is time for a protein to be broken down, a ubiquitin molecule attaches itself to the protein. The ubiquitin molecule serves as a key that enters a proteasome, a protein complex that divides the protein into smaller pieces. These can be used in the construction of other substances in the cell.

Summary

Avram Hershko (born December 31, 1937, Karcag, Hungary) is a Hungarian-born Israeli biochemist who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Aaron J. Ciechanover and Irwin Rose for their joint discovery of the mechanism by which the cells of most living organisms remove unwanted proteins.

Hershko’s family emigrated from Hungary to Israel. He studied at the Hebrew University–Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem, receiving an M.D. (1965) and a Ph.D. (1969). In 1972 he joined the faculty of the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, where Ciechanover was one of his students. Hershko became a distinguished professor at the Technion in 1998.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Hershko and Ciechanover worked with Rose at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. There the three scientists did much of their prizewinnning research on how cells degrade, or destoy, the proteins that are no longer useful. The process begins when a molecule called ubiquitin (from the Latin ubique, meaning “everywhere,” because it occurs in so many different cells and organisms) attaches itself to the protein targeted for destruction. It then accompanies the protein to a proteasome, which is essentially a structure of powerful enzymes that break the protein into its component amino acids. The outer membrane of the proteasome admits only proteins carrying a ubiquitin molecule, which detaches before entering the proteasome and is reused.

Hershko, Ciechanover, and Rose also demonstrated that ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation helps control a number of other critical biochemical processes, including cell division, the repair of defects in DNA, and gene transcription, the process in which genes use their coded instructions to manufacture a protein. Diseases such as cystic fibrosis result when the protein-degradation system does not work normally, and researchers hoped to use the findings to develop drugs for the treatment of such illnesses.

Details

Avram Hershko (born December 31, 1937) is a Hungarian-Israeli biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004.

Biography

He was born Herskó Ferenc in Karcag, Hungary, into a Jewish family, the son of Shoshana/Margit 'Manci' (née Wulc) and Moshe Hershko, both teachers. During the Second World War, his father was forced into labor service in the Hungarian army and then taken as a prisoner by the Soviet Army. For years, Avram's family didn't known anything about what had happened to his father. Avram, his mother and older brother Chaim/Laszlo 'Laci' were put in a ghetto in Szolnok. During the final days of the ghetto, most Jews were sent to be murdered in Auschwitz, but Avram and his family managed to board trains that took them to a concentration camp in Austria, where they were forced into labor until the end of the war. Avram and his mother and brother survived the war and returned to their home. His father returned as well, 4 years after they had last seen him.

Hershko and his family emigrated to Israel in 1950 and settled in Jerusalem. He received his MD in 1965 and his PhD in 1969 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem-Hadassah Medical Center. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion in Haifa and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine.

Along with Aaron Ciechanover and Irwin Rose, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. The ubiquitin-proteasome system has a critical role in maintaining the homeostasis of cells and is believed to be involved in the development and progression of diseases such as cancer, muscular and neurological diseases, and immune and inflammatory responses.

His contributions to science directly helped cure one of his long-time friends of cancer.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-18 16:01:19

2083) Irwin Rose

Gist:

Work

An important process in our cells is the production of proteins. But proteins must also be broken down. At the beginning of the 1980s, Irwin Rose, Aaron Ciechanover, and Avram Hershko showed that one protein, ubiquitin, has a special mission in this context. When it is time for a protein to be broken down, a ubiquitin molecule attaches itself to the protein. The ubiquitin molecule serves as a key that enters a proteasome, a protein complex that divides the protein into smaller pieces. These can be used in the construction of other substances in the cell.

Summary

Irwin Rose (born July 16, 1926, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died June 2, 2015, Deerfield, Massachusetts) was an American biochemist who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Aaron J. Ciechanover and Avram Hershko for their joint discovery of the process by which the cells of most living organisms remove unwanted proteins.

Rose received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Chicago in 1952. He later served (1954–63) on the faculty at the Yale University School of Medicine and was a senior member (1963–95) of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. In 1997 he accepted a special appointment as emeritus researcher at the University of California, Irvine.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Ciechanover and Hershko were visiting scientists at Fox Chase, where they worked with Rose on their Nobel Prize-winning research. The process that the three men discovered involves a series of carefully orchestrated steps by which cells degrade, or destroy, the proteins that no longer serve any useful purpose. In the first step a molecule called ubiquitin (from the Latin ubique, meaning “everywhere,” because it occurs in so many different cells and organisms) attaches to the protein targeted for destruction and accompanies it to a proteasome—essentially a sac of powerful enzymes that divide the protein into its component amino acids. The outer membrane of the proteasome admits only proteins carrying a ubiquitin molecule. The ubiquitin molecule detaches before entering the proteasome, and cells reuse it to tag another protein for destruction.

Rose, Ciechanover, and Hershko also demonstrated that ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation helps control a number of other critical biochemical processes, including cell division, the repair of defects in DNA, and gene transcription, the process in which genes use their coded instructions to manufacture a protein. Such diseases as cystic fibrosis result when the protein-degradation system does not work normally. Using the findings of Rose, Ciechanover, and Hershko, researchers hoped to eventually develop drugs against such illnesses.

Details

Irwin Allan Rose (July 16, 1926 – June 2, 2015) was an American biologist. Along with Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.

Education and early life

Rose was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a secular Jewish family, the son of Ella (Greenwald) and Harry Royze, who owned a flooring store. Rose attended Washington State University for one year prior to serving in the Navy during World War II. Upon returning from the war he received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1948 and his PhD in biochemistry in 1952, both from the University of Chicago. He did his post-doctoral studies at NYU.

Career and research

Rose served on the faculty of Yale School of Medicine's department of biochemistry from 1954 to 1963. He then joined the Fox Chase Cancer Center in 1963 and stayed there until he retired in 1995. He joined University of Pennsylvania during the 1970s and served as a Professor of Physical Biochemistry. He was a distinguished professor-in-residence in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine at the time his Nobel Prize was announced in 2004.

Irwin (Ernie) trained several postdoctoral research fellows while at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. These included Art Haas, the first to see Ubiquitin chains, Keith Wilkinson, the one to first identify APF-1 as Ubiquitin, and Cecile Pickart.

Published work

When Irwin Rose started on his prizewinning work on ubiquitin he was already very distinguished as an enzymologist.

Classical enzymology

Only a selection of Rose's very extensive work in this field is mentioned here.

In collaboration with Marianne Grunberg-Manago, Saul Korey and Severo Ochoa he investigated the Mg2+- or Mn2+-dependent formation of acetyl-CoA from acetate and ATP catalyzed by acetate kinase, an essential reaction for priming the tricarboxylate cycle, describing the purification of the enzyme and measuring the equilibrium constant of the reaction.

With Edward O'Connell, Rose investigated the mechanisms of the reaction catalyzed by phosphoglucose isomerase and, with Sidney Rieder, of triose phosphate isomerase

With Jessie Warms, he studied the mechanism of hexokinase of sarcoma tumor, finding that it was located in the mitochondria of liver and brain, and bound in accord with a Mg2+-dependent equilibrium.

He had a general interest in the role of magnesium in cells, and studied it on the basis of the equilibrium of the reaction catalyzed by adenylate kinase, a complicated question, because numerous complexes of Mg2+, H+ and K+ with ATP, ADP and AMP need to be taken into account.

Starting from Ogston's theory, Rose was concerned with the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalysed reactions, investigating various enzymes, and later glutamine synthetase. This was the topic of a review article written with Kenneth Hanson.

Ubiquitin

After its discovery by Gideon Goldstein and colleagues in 1975, ubiquitin was extensively studied by Rose, with Avram Hershko, Aaron Ciechanover, A. L. Haas and H. Heller, one of many papers on the subject.

Awards and honors

Rose was awarded the Nobel prize in 2004.

Personal life

Rose was married to Zelda Budenstein and had four children. He died on June 2, 2015, at Deerfield, Massachusetts. His widow died in 2016.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-19 15:29:13

2084) Richard Axel

Gist:

Work

In 1991, Richard Axel and Linda Buck discovered how hundreds of genes in our DNA code for the odorant sensors located in the olfactory sensory neurons in our noses. Each receptor is a protein that changes when an odorant attaches itself to the receptor. This causes an electric signal to be sent to the brain. Small differences between different odorant sensors mean that certain odorants cause a signal to be released from a certain receptor. Smells are composed of a large number of different substances and we interpret the varying signals from our receptors as specific scents.

Summary

Richard Axel (born July 2, 1946, New York, New York, U.S.) is an American scientist who, with Linda B. Buck, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2004 for pioneering research on the olfactory system.

Axel received an A.B. (1967) from Columbia University and an M.D. (1970) from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In 1978 he became a member of the pathology and biochemistry faculty at Columbia, where in the early 1980s Buck worked under him as a postdoctoral student. Axel joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) as an investigator in 1984.

In 1991 Buck and Axel jointly published their seminal paper, based on research they had conducted with laboratory rats, that detailed their discovery of the family of 1,000 genes that encode, or produce, an equivalent number of olfactory receptors. Responsible for detecting the odorant molecules in the air, these receptors are located on olfactory receptor cells, which are clustered within a small area in the back of the nasal cavity. The two scientists then explained how the olfactory system works by showing that each receptor cell has only one type of odour receptor, which is specialized to recognize a limited number of odours. After odorant molecules bind to receptors, the receptor cells send electrical signals to the olfactory bulb in the brain. The brain combines information from several types of receptors in specific patterns, which are experienced as distinct odours.

Axel and Buck later determined that most of their findings concerning the sense of smell are virtually identical in rats, humans, and other animals, although they discovered that humans have only about 350 types of working olfactory receptors, about one-third the number in rats. The genes that encode olfactory receptors in humans account for about 3 percent of all human genes. Axel’s HHMI laboratory also studied how sensory information is represented and sought to create a topographic map of olfactory representation in the brain.

Details

Richard Axel (born July 2, 1946) is an American molecular biologist and university professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His work on the olfactory system won him and Linda Buck, a former postdoctoral research scientist in his group, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004.

Education and early life

Born in New York City to Polish Jewish immigrants, Axel grew up in Brooklyn. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1963,[2] (along with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Allan Lichtman, Ron Silver, and Alexander Rosenberg), received his B.A. in 1967 from Columbia University, and his M.D. in 1971 from Johns Hopkins University. However, he was poorly suited to medicine and graduated on the promise to his department chairman that he would not practice clinically. He found his calling in research and returned to Columbia later that year, eventually becoming a full professor in 1978.

Research and career

During the late 1970s, Axel, along with microbiologist Saul J. Silverstein and geneticist Michael H. Wigler, discovered a technique of cotransformation via transfection, a process which allows foreign DNA to be inserted into a host cell to produce certain proteins. A family of patents, now colloquially referred to as the "Axel patents", covering this technique were filed for February 1980 and were issued in August 1983. As a fundamental process in recombinant DNA research as performed at pharmaceutical and biotech companies, this patent proved quite lucrative for Columbia University, earning it almost $100 million a year at one time, and a top spot on the list of top universities by licensing revenue. The Axel patents expired in August 2000.

In their landmark paper published in 1991, Buck and Axel cloned olfactory receptors, showing that they belong to the family of G protein coupled receptors. By analyzing rat DNA, they estimated that there were approximately one thousand different genes for olfactory receptors in the mammalian genome. This research opened the door to the genetic and molecular analysis of the mechanisms of olfaction. In their later work, Buck and Axel have shown that each olfactory receptor neuron remarkably only expresses one kind of olfactory receptor protein and that the input from all neurons expressing the same receptor is collected by a single dedicated glomerulus of the olfactory bulb.

Axel's primary research interest is on how the brain interprets the sense of smell, specifically mapping the parts of the brain that are sensitive to specific olfactory receptors. He holds the titles of University Professor at Columbia University, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and of Pathology at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In addition to contributions to neurobiology, Axel has also made seminal discoveries in immunology, and his lab was one of the first to identify the link between HIV infection and immunoreceptor CD4.

In addition to making contributions as a scientist, Axel has also mentored many leading scientists in the field of neurobiology. Seven of his trainees have become members of the National Academy of Sciences, and currently six of his trainees are affiliated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's investigator and early scientist award programs.

Awards and honors

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Axel has won numerous awards and honors. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1983. In 2005, Axel received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Axel was awarded the Double Helix Medal in 2007. CSHL Double Helix Medal Honoree and was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2014. His nomination reads:

Richard Axel is a distinguished molecular biologist and neuroscientist. He developed gene transfer techniques that permit the introduction of virtually any gene into any cell permitting the production of a large number of clinically important proteins and leading to the isolation of a gene for CD4, the cellular receptor for the AIDS virus, HIV. He then applied molecular biology to neuroscience revealing over a thousand genes involved in the recognition of odours, a discovery for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 2004. He currently explores how odour recognition is translated into internal representations in the brain.

Personal life

Axel is married to fellow scientist and olfaction pioneer Cornelia Bargmann. Previously, he had been married to Ann Axel, who is a social worker at Columbia University Medical Center. Owing to his tall stature, Axel played basketball during high school.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-20 15:31:21

2085) Linda B. Buck

Gist

Life

Linda Buck was born in Seattle, Washington in the United States. Her mother's interest in puzzles and her father's ingenuity sowed the seed that would go on to bloom into her interest in science. Buck was free to pursue her interests and learned to think independently and critically. While taking a course in immunology at the University of Washington, Buck was enticed to pursue biology. After receiving her Bachelor's degree in microbiology in 1975, Buck moved to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, where she received a PhD in immunology in 1980. She then moved to Columbia University, New York, where she teamed up with Richard Axel.

Work

Together with Richard Axel in 1991, Linda Buck discovered how hundreds of genes in our DNA code for the odorant sensors located in the olfactory sensory neurons in our noses. Each receptor is a protein that changes when an odorant attaches itself to the receptor. This causes an electric signal to be sent to the brain. Small differences between different odorant sensors mean that certain odorants cause a signal to be released from a certain receptor. Smells are composed of a large number of different substances and we interpret the varying signals from our receptors as specific scents.

Summary

Linda B. Buck (born January 29, 1947, Seattle, Washington, U.S.) is an American scientist and corecipient, with Richard Axel, of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2004 for discoveries concerning the olfactory system.

Buck received a B.S. (1975) in both microbiology and psychology from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. (1980) in immunology from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She first worked with Axel in the early 1980s at Columbia University in New York City, where Axel was a professor and Buck was his postdoctoral student. Buck held various positions with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and at Harvard Medical School from 1984 until 2002, when she joined the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

In 1991 Buck and Axel jointly published a landmark scientific paper, based on research they had conducted with laboratory rats, that detailed their discovery of the family of 1,000 genes that encode, or produce, an equivalent number of olfactory receptors. These receptors are proteins responsible for detecting the odorant molecules in the air and are located on olfactory receptor cells, which are clustered within a small area in the back of the nasal cavity. The two scientists then clarified how the olfactory system functions by showing that each receptor cell has only one type of odour receptor, which is specialized to recognize a few odours. After odorant molecules bind to receptors, the receptor cells send electrical signals to the olfactory bulb in the brain. The brain combines information from several types of receptors in specific patterns, which are experienced as distinct odours.

Axel and Buck later determined that most of the details they uncovered about the sense of smell are virtually identical in rats, humans, and other animals, although they discovered that humans have only about 350 types of working olfactory receptors, about one-third the number in rats. Nevertheless, the genes that encode olfactory receptors in humans account for about 3 percent of all human genes. The work helped boost scientific interest in the possible existence of human pheromones, odorant molecules known to trigger sexual activity and certain other behaviour in many animals, and Buck’s HHMI laboratory carried on research into how odour perceptions are translated into emotional responses and instinctive behaviour.

Details

Linda Brown Buck (born January 29, 1947) is an American biologist best known for her work on the olfactory system. She was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Richard Axel, for their work on olfactory receptors. She is currently on the faculty of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

Personal life

Linda B. Buck was born in Seattle, Washington on January 29, 1947. Her father was an electrical engineer who spent his time inventing and building different items in his spare time, while her mother was a homemaker who spent a majority of her free time solving word puzzles. Buck was the second of three children, all of them girls. Her father has Irish ancestry as well as ancestors dating back to the American revolution. Her mother is of Swedish ancestry. In 1994 Buck met Roger Brent, also a biologist. The two married in 2006.

Education

Buck received her B.S. in psychology and microbiology in 1975 from the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the first female University of Washington alumnus to win the Nobel Prize. She was awarded her Ph.D. in immunology in 1980 under the direction of Professor Ellen Vitetta at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

Career and research

In 1980, Buck began postdoctoral research at Columbia University under Benvenuto Pernis (1980–1982). In 1982, she joined the laboratory of Richard Axel, also at Columbia in the Institute of Cancer Research. After reading Sol Snyder's group research paper at Johns Hopkins University, Buck set out to map the olfactory process at the molecular level, tracing the travel of odors through the cells of the nose to the brain. Buck and Axel worked with rat genes in their research and identified a family of genes that code for more than 1000 odor receptors and published these findings in 1991. Later that year, Buck became an assistant professor in the Neurobiology Department at Harvard Medical School where she established her own lab. After finding how odors are detected by the nose, Buck published her findings in 1993 on how the inputs from different odor receptors are organized in the nose. Essentially, her primary research interest is on how pheromones and odors are detected in the nose and interpreted in the brain. She is a Full Member of the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and an Affiliate Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2004)

In her landmark paper published in 1991 with Richard Axel, Linda Buck discovered hundreds of genes code for the odorant sensors located in the olfactory neurons of our noses. Each receptor is a protein that changes when an odor attaches to the receptor, causing an electrical signal to be sent to the brain. Differences between odorant sensors mean that certain odors cause a signal to be released from a certain receptor. We are then able to interpret varying signals from our receptors as specific scents. To do this, Buck and Axel cloned olfactory receptors, showing that they belong to the family of G protein-coupled receptors. By analyzing rat DNA, they estimated that there were approximately 1,000 different genes for olfactory receptors in the mammalian genome. This research opened the door to the genetic and molecular analysis of the mechanisms of olfaction. In their later work, Buck and Axel have shown that each olfactory receptor neuron remarkably only expresses one kind of olfactory receptor protein and that the input from all neurons expressing the same receptor is collected by a single dedicated glomerulus of the olfactory bulb.

Awards and honors

Buck was awarded the Takasago Award for Research in Olfaction (1992), Unilever Science Award (1996), R.H. Wright Award in Olfactory Research (1996), Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research (1996), Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize (2002), and Gairdner Foundation International Award (2003). In 2005, she received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. Buck was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 2003 and the Institutes of Medicine in 2006. Buck has been a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008. She also sits on the Selection Committee for Life Science and Medicine which chooses winners of the Shaw Prize. In 2015, Buck was awarded an honorary doctorate by Harvard University and elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS).

Retractions

Buck retracted 3 papers, published in Nature (pub. 2001, retracted 2008), Science (pub 2006, retracted 2010) and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (pub 2005, retracted 2010) due to falsification/fabrication of results by lead author and collaborator Zhihua Zou.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-21 15:34:35

2086) Roy J. Glauber

Gist:

Work

According to quantum physics, which was developed at the beginning of the 20th century, light and other electromagnetic radiation appear in the form of quanta, packets with fixed energies, which can be described as both waves and as particles, photons. However, no real in-depth theory of light based on quantum theory existed before Roy Glauber established the foundation for quantum optics in 1963. This required the development of the laser. Its concentrated and coherent light gave rise to more quantum physical phenomena than regular light.

Summary

Roy J. Glauber (born September 1, 1925, New York City, New York, U.S.—died December 26, 2018, Newton, Massachusetts) was an American physicist, who won one-half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2005 for contributions to the field of optics, the branch of physics that deals with the physical properties of light and its interactions with matter. (The other half of the award was shared by John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch.)

Glauber received a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949. He then conducted research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and at the California Institute of Technology. In 1952 he returned to Harvard, where he continued to teach into the early 21st century.

Glauber’s prizewinning work centred on his development of a theory that advanced the understanding of light by describing the behaviour of light particles (light quanta, or photons). Presented in the early 1960s, the theory merged the field of optics with quantum physics (which deals with the behaviour of matter on the atomic and subatomic scales), and it formed the basis for the development of a new field, quantum optics. Glauber’s research helped clarify how light had both wavelike and particle-like characteristics and explained the fundamental differences between the light emitted by hot objects, such as electric light bulbs, and the light emitted by lasers. (Hot sources of light emit incoherent light, which consists of many different frequencies and phases, whereas lasers emit coherent light, light with a uniform frequency and phase.)

Practical applications of Glauber’s work included the development of highly secure codes in the field known as quantum cryptography. His research also had a central role in efforts to develop a new generation of computers, so-called quantum computers, which would be extraordinarily fast and powerful and use quantum mechanical phenomena to process data as qubits, or quantum bits, of information.

Details

Roy Jay Glauber (September 1, 1925 – December 26, 2018) was an American theoretical physicist. He was the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. Born in New York City, he was awarded one half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence", with the other half shared by John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch. In this work, published in 1963, he created a model for photodetection and explained the fundamental characteristics of different types of light, such as laser light and light from light bulbs. His theories are widely used in the field of quantum optics. In statistical physics he pioneered the study of the dynamics of first-order phase transitions, since he first defined and investigated the stochastic dynamics of an Ising model in a paper published in 1963. He served on the National Advisory Board of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the research arms of Council for a Livable World.

Education

Glauber was born in 1925 in New York City the son of Felicia (Fox) and Emanuel B. Glauber. He was a member of the 1941 graduating class of the Bronx High School of Science, the first graduating class from that school. He then went on to do his undergraduate work at Harvard University. After his sophomore year he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project, where (at the age of 18) he was one of the youngest scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His work involved calculating the critical mass for the atom bomb. After two years at Los Alamos, he returned to Harvard, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1946 and his PhD in 1949.

Research

Glauber's recent research dealt with problems in a number of areas of quantum optics, a field which, broadly speaking, studies the quantum electrodynamical interactions of light and matter. He also continued work on several topics in high-energy collision theory, including the analysis of hadron collisions, and the statistical correlation of particles produced in high-energy reactions.

Roy Glauber’s early work on multiple scattering theory, started in the 1950s and was continued with his students such as Victor Franco.

Specific topics of his research included: the quantum mechanical behavior of trapped wave packets; interactions of light with trapped ions; atom counting-the statistical properties of free atom beams and their measurement; algebraic methods for dealing with fermion statistics; coherence and correlations of bosonic atoms near the Bose–Einstein condensation; the theory of continuously monitored photon counting-and its reaction on quantum sources; the fundamental nature of "quantum jumps"; resonant transport of particles produced multiply in high-energy collisions; the multiple diffraction model of proton-proton and proton-antiproton scattering.

Awards and honors

Glauber received the Albert A. Michelson Medal from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia (1985), the Max Born Award from the Optical Society of America (1985), the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics from the American Physical Society (1996), and the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics Glauber was awarded the 'Medalla de Oro del CSIC' ('CSIC's Gold Medal') in a ceremony held in Madrid, Spain. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1997.

After Glauber was selected for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2005, a University of Texas at Austin Physics Professor, George Sudarshan, claimed that he had been overlooked by the Nobel Prize Committee for the award, having published some of the earliest papers on quantum optics. Glauber, a theorist, was awarded half the prize, along with physics experimenters John Hall and Theodor Hänsch, recognized for their work on precision spectroscopy.

Ig Nobel

For many years before winning his Nobel Prize, Glauber took part in the Ig Nobel Prize ceremonies, where he appeared each year as "Keeper of the Broom," sweeping the stage clean of the paper airplanes that have traditionally been thrown during the event. He missed the 2005 event as he was being awarded his real Nobel Prize for Physics.

Personal life

Glauber lived in Arlington, Massachusetts. He was a guest scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1967, during a sabbatical. In 1951, he became a temporary lecturer at the California Institute of Technology, where he replaced Richard Feynman.

Glauber had a son and a daughter, and five grandchildren. He died on December 26, 2018, in Newton, Massachusetts. He was one of the last surviving witness to the Trinity nuclear test. He was buried in Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-22 15:57:28

2087) John L. Hall

Gist

John Lewis Hall (born August 21, 1934) is an American physicist. He won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics with Theodor W. Hänsch and Roy Glauber for his work in precision spectroscopy.

Details

John Lewis Hall (born August 21, 1934) is an American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics. He shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics with Theodor W. Hänsch and Roy Glauber for his work in precision spectroscopy.

Biography

Born in Denver, Colorado, Hall holds three degrees from Carnegie Institute of Technology, a B.S. in 1956, an M.S. in 1958, and a Ph.D. in 1961. He completed his postdoctoral studies at the Department of Commerce's National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he remained from 1962 until his retirement in 2004. He has lectured at the University of Colorado Boulder since 1967.

Hall is currently a NIST Senior Fellow, emeritus, and remains a Fellow at JILA, formerly the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, and lecturer at the CU-Boulder Physics Department. JILA is a research institute managed jointly by CU-Boulder and NIST.

Hall shared half of the Nobel Prize with Theodor W. Hänsch for their pioneering work on laser-based precision spectroscopy and the optical frequency comb technique. The other half of the prize was awarded to Roy J. Glauber.

Hall has received many other honors for his pioneering work, including the Optical Society of America's Max Born Award "for pioneering the field of stable lasers, including their applications in fundamental physics and, most recently, in the stabilization of femtosecond lasers to provide dramatic advances in optical frequency metrology".

Hall 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.

In 2015, Hall 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.

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