crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-24 15:34:11

2088) Theodor W. Hänsch

Gist

Work

According to quantum physics, light and other electromagnetic radiation appear in the form of quanta, packets with fixed energies, which also correspond to energy transitions in atoms. Consequently, determining the frequency of light waves provides information about the atoms’ properties, benchmarks for time and length, and the possibility of determining physical constants. Around the year 2000, Theodor Hänsch and John Hall developed the frequency comb technique, in which laser light with a series of equidistant frequencies is used to measure frequencies with great precision.

Summary

Theodor W. Hänsch (born October 30, 1941, Heidelberg, Germany) is a German physicist who shared one-half of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physics with John L. Hall for their contributions to the development of laser spectroscopy, the use of lasers to determine the frequency (color) of light emitted by atoms and molecules. (The other half of the award went to Roy J. Glauber.)

Hänsch received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Heidelberg in 1969. The following year he moved to the United States and began teaching at Stanford University. In 1986 he returned to Germany to become director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, a post he held until 2016. He also joined the faculty at Ludwig Maximilians University.

Hänsch’s prizewinning research centered on measuring optical frequencies (frequencies of visible light). Although a procedure known as an optical frequency chain had already been created to measure such frequencies, it was extremely complex and could be performed in only a few laboratories. In the late 1970s Hänsch originated the idea for the optical frequency comb technique, in which ultrashort pulses of laser light create a set of precisely spaced frequency peaks that resemble the evenly spaced teeth of a hair comb. The technique offered a practical way of obtaining optical frequency measurements to an accuracy of 15 digits, or one part in one quadrillion. Hänsch, using key contributions by Hall, worked out the theory’s details in 2000.

The success of Hall and Hänsch soon led to the development of commercial devices with which very precise optical frequency measurements could readily be made. Their work had a number of practical applications, including the improvement of satellite-based navigation systems, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), and the synchronization of computer data networks. Physicists also used the two men’s findings to verify Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity to very high levels of precision and to test whether the values of fundamental physical constants related to optical frequencies were indeed constant or changed slightly over time.

Details

Theodor Wolfgang Hänsch (born 30 October 1941) is a German physicist. He received one-third of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for "contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique", sharing the prize with John L. Hall and Roy J. Glauber.

Hänsch is Director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik (quantum optics) and Professor of experimental physics and laser spectroscopy at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.

Biography

Hänsch received his secondary education at Helmholtz-Gymnasium Heidelberg and gained his Diplom and doctoral degree from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in the 1960s. Subsequently, he was a NATO postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University with Arthur L. Schawlow from 1970 to 1972. Hänsch became an assistant professor at Stanford University, California from 1975 to 1986. He was awarded the Comstock Prize in Physics from the National Academy of Sciences in 1983. In 1986, he received the Albert A. Michelson Medal from the Franklin Institute. In the same year Hänsch returned to Germany to head the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik. In 1989, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research. In 2005, he also received the Otto Hahn Award of the City of Frankfurt am Main, the Society of German Chemists and the German Physical Society. In that same year, the Optical Society of America awarded him the Frederic Ives Medal and the status of honorary member in 2008.

One of his students, Carl E. Wieman, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001.

In 1970 he invented a new type of laser that generated light pulses with an extremely high spectral resolution (i.e. all the photons emitted from the laser had nearly the same energy, to a precision of 1 part in a million). Using this device he succeeded to measure the transition frequency of the Balmer line of atomic hydrogen with a much higher precision than before. During the late 1990s, he and his coworkers developed a new method to measure the frequency of laser light to an even higher precision, using a device called the optical frequency comb generator. This invention was then used to measure the Lyman line of atomic hydrogen to an extraordinary precision of 1 part in a hundred trillion. At such a high precision, it became possible to search for possible changes in the fundamental physical constants of the universe over time. For these achievements he became co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2005.

Background to Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize was awarded to Professor Hänsch in recognition for work that he did at the end of the 1990s at the Max Planck Institute in Garching, near Munich, Germany. He developed an optical "frequency comb synthesiser", which makes it possible, for the first time, to measure with extreme precision the number of light oscillations per second. These optical frequency measurements can be millions of times more precise than previous spectroscopic determinations of the wavelength of light.

The work in Garching was motivated by experiments on the very precise laser spectroscopy of the hydrogen atom. This atom has a particularly simple structure. By precisely determining its spectral line, scientists were able to draw conclusions about how valid our fundamental physical constants are – if, for example, they change slowly with time. By the end of the 1980s, the laser spectroscopy of hydrogen had reached the maximum precision allowed by interferometric measurements of optical wavelengths.

The researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics thus speculated about new methods, and developed the optical frequency comb synthesizer. Its name comes from the fact that it generates a light spectrum out of what are originally single-colour, ultrashort pulses of light. This spectrum is made of hundreds of thousands of sharp spectral lines with a constant frequency interval.

Such a frequency comb is similar to a ruler. When the frequency of a particular radiation is determined, it can be compared to the extremely acute comb spectral lines, until one is found that "fits". In 1998, Professor Hänsch received a Philip Morris Research Prize for the development of this "measurement device".

One of the first applications of this new kind of light source was to determine the frequency of the very narrow ultraviolet hydrogen 1S-2S two-photon transition. Since then, the frequency has been determined with a precision of 15 decimal places.

The frequency comb now serves as the basis for optical frequency measurements in large numbers of laboratories worldwide. Since 2002, the company Menlo Systems, in whose foundation the Max Planck Institute in Garching played a role, has been delivering commercial frequency comb synthesizers to laboratories all over the world.

Laser development

Hänsch introduced intracavity telescopic beam expansion to grating tuned laser oscillators thus producing the first narrow-linewidth tunable laser. This development has been credited with having had a major influence in the development of further narrow-linewidth multiple-prism grating laser oscillators. In turn, tunable narrow-linewidth organic lasers, and solid-state lasers, using total illumination of the grating, have had a major impact in laser spectroscopy.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-10-31 16:02:42

2089) Yves Chauvin

Gist:

Work

Organic substances—a multitude of chemical compounds that contain the element carbon—are the basis of all life. Metathesis is an important type of chemical reaction in assembling or synthesizing organic substances. In metathesis double bonds between carbon atoms are broken and reorganized at the same time as atomic groups change place. In 1971 Yves Chauvin showed how such reactions proceed in detail, including how certain metallic compounds facilitate the process. Metathesis has enabled more effective and environmentally sound processes in industry.

Summary

Yves Chauvin (born October 10, 1930, Menen, Belgium—died January 27, 2015, Tours, France) was a French chemist who was corecipient, with Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock, of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2005 for developing metathesis, an important chemical reaction used in organic chemistry. Chauvin offered a detailed explanation of “how metatheses reactions function and what types of metal compound act as catalysts in the reactions.”

Chauvin graduated in 1954 from the Lyon School of Chemistry, Physics, and Electronics. From 1960 he spent most of his career conducting research at the French Institute of Petroleum (IFP), where he was named research director in 1991 and honorary research director upon his retirement in 1995. Chauvin held several patents and developed valuable petrochemical industrial processes, notably in regard to homogeneous catalysis. He was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2005.

Chauvin’s work centred on metathesis, in which catalysts create and break double carbon bonds of organic molecules in a way that causes different groups of atoms in the molecules to change places with one another. The shift of groups of atoms from their original position to a new location yields new molecules with new properties. Researchers in the 1950s had found that various catalysts could be used to carry out metathesis reaction. However, since it was not understood how the catalysts worked at a molecular level, the hunt for better catalysts was purely a hit-and-miss endeavour. In the early 1970s Chauvin achieved a breakthrough when he described the mechanism by which a metal atom bound to a carbon atom in one group of atoms causes the group to shift places with a group of atoms in another molecule. Although the catalyst starts the chemical reaction in which two new carbon-carbon bonds are formed, it comes away from the chemical reaction unaffected and ready to start the reaction again. Chauvin’s work showed how metathesis could take place, but its practical application required the development of new catalysts, the first of which were discovered by Schrock (in 1990) and Grubbs (in 1992). Their work led to the development of many new products, including advanced plastics, fuel additives, and pharmaceuticals and played a role in the advancement of “green chemistry”—the design of chemical processes and products in which the need for and the generation of various hazardous substances were reduced or eliminated.

Details

Yves Chauvin (10 October 1930 – 27 January 2015) was a French chemist and Nobel Prize laureate. He was honorary research director at the Institut français du pétrole and a member of the French Academy of Science. He was known for his work for deciphering the process of olefin metathesis for which he was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock.

Life

Yves Chauvin was born on 10 October 1930 in Menen, Belgium, to French parents; his father worked as an electrical engineer. He graduated in 1954 from the École supérieure de chimie physique électronique de Lyon. He began working in the chemical industry but was frustrated there. He is quoted as saying, "If you want to find something new, look for something new...there is a certain amount of risk in this attitude, as even the slightest failure tends to be resounding, but you are so happy when you succeed that it is worth taking the risk." In 1960, Chauvin began working for the French Petroleum Institute in Rueil-Malmaison. He became honorary director of research there following his retirement from the institute in 1995. Chauvin also served as an emeritus (retired) director of research at the Lyon School of Chemistry, Physics, and Electronics.

Awards and recognitions

He was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock, for his work from the early 1970s in the area of olefin metathesis. Chauvin was embarrassed to receive his award and initially indicated that he might not accept it. He did however receive his award from the King of Sweden and deliver his Nobel lecture. He was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2005.

Research

Chauvin's work centred on metathesis, which involves organic (carbon-based) compounds. In metathesis, chemists break double bonds more easily by introducing a catalyst—that is, a substance that starts or speeds up a chemical reaction. Chemists began performing metathesis in the 1950s without knowing exactly how the reaction worked. This lack of understanding hindered the search for more efficient catalysts.

In the early 1970s Chauvin achieved a breakthrough when he described the mechanism by which a metal atom bound to a carbon atom in one group of atoms causes the group to shift places with a group of atoms in another molecule and explained metathesis in detail. He showed that the reaction involves two double bonds. One of the double bonds connects two parts of an organic molecule. The other double bond connects a metal-based catalyst to a fragment of an organic molecule. In metathesis, these two double bonds combine and split to make four single bonds. The single bonds form a ring that connects the metal catalyst, the organic fragment, and the two parts of the organic molecule. The metal catalyst then breaks off from the ring, carrying away part of the organic molecule. This process leaves the fragment attached to the remainder of the organic molecule with a double bond, forming a new organic compound. Scholars have compared this reaction to a dance in which two sets of partners join hands to form a ring and then split apart again to form two new partnerships.

Chauvin's description of metathesis led Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock to develop catalysts that carried out the reaction more efficiently. The three chemists' work has enabled manufacturers to make organic compounds, including some plastics and medicines, using less energy because the required reaction pressures and temperatures became lower, and using fewer harmful and expensive chemicals, and creating fewer contaminant reaction by-products and hazardous waste that must be extracted from the desired synthetic. It was for this process they were awarded with 2005 Chemistry Nobel Prize.

Death

Chauvin died, at the age of 84, on 27 January 2015 in Tours, France.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-11-01 16:31:01

2090) Robert H. Grubbs

Gist:

Work

Organic substances—a multitude of chemical compounds that contain the element carbon—are the basis of all life. Metathesis is an important type of chemical reaction in assembling or synthesizing organic substances. In metathesis double bonds between carbon atoms are broken and reorganized at the same time as atomic groups change place. Around 1992 Robert Grubbs discovered a metallic compound that effectively facilitates metathesis and is stable in the air. Metathesis has enabled more effective and environmentally sound processes in industry.

Summary

Robert H. Grubbs (born February 27, 1942, near Possum Trot, Kentucky, U.S.—died December 19, 2021, Duarte, California) was an American chemist who, with Richard R. Schrock and Yves Chauvin, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2005 for developing metathesis, an important type of chemical reaction used in organic chemistry. Schrock and Grubbs were honoured for their advances in more-effective catalysts based on a mechanism first proposed by Chauvin.

Grubbs studied chemistry at the University of Florida (B.S., 1963; M.S., 1965) and at Columbia University, New York City (Ph.D., 1968). After a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, he joined the chemistry faculty at Michigan State University. In 1978 he moved to the California Institute of Technology, where he was named the Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry in 1990.

Grubbs’s prizewinning research centred on metathesis, a reaction in which catalysts create and break double carbon bonds of organic molecules in a way that causes different groups of atoms in the molecules to change places with one another. This changing of places results in new molecules with new properties. Building on the work of Chauvin, who in the 1970s had shown how metathesis could take place, Grubbs and his associates in 1992 reported the discovery of a catalyst that contained the metal ruthenium. It was stable in air and worked on the double carbon bonds in a molecule selectively, without disrupting the bonds between other atoms in the molecule, unlike the significant but unstable molybdenum-based catalysts reported by Schrock two years earlier. The new catalyst also had the ability to jump-start metathesis reactions in the presence of water, alcohols, and carboxyl acids. Grubbs’s discovery helped pave the way for practical applications of metathesis, including the development of new products such as advanced plastics and pharmaceuticals. Catalysts used in metathesis also contributed to the rise of “green chemistry,” which involves using techniques that minimize pollution in chemical processes.

Details

Robert Howard Grubbs ForMemRS (February 27, 1942 – December 19, 2021) was an American chemist and the Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. He was a co-recipient of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on olefin metathesis.

Grubbs was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2015 for developments in catalysts that have enabled commercial products.

He was a co-founder of Materia, a university spin-off startup to produce catalysts.

Early life and education

Grubbs was born on February 27, 1942, on a farm in Marshall County, Kentucky, midway between Possum Trot and Calvert City. His parents were Howard and Faye (Atwood) Grubbs. Faye was a schoolteacher. After serving in World War II, the family moved to Paducah, Kentucky, where Howard trained as a diesel mechanic, and Robert attended Paducah Tilghman High School.

At the University of Florida, Grubbs initially intended to study agriculture chemistry. However, he was convinced by professor Merle A. Battiste to switch to organic chemistry. Working with Battiste, he became interested in how chemical reactions occur. He received his B.S. in 1963 and M.S. in 1965 from the University of Florida.

Next, Grubbs attended Columbia University, where he worked with Ronald Breslow on organometallic compounds which contain carbon-metal bonds. Grubbs received his Ph.D. in 1968.

Career

Grubbs worked with James Collman at Stanford University as a National Institutes of Health fellow during 1968–1969. With Collman, he began to systematically investigate catalytic processes in organometallic chemistry, a then relatively new area of research.

In 1969, Grubbs was appointed to the faculty of Michigan State University, where he began his work on olefin metathesis. Harold Hart, Gerasimos J. Karabatsos, Gene LeGoff, Don Farnum, Bill Reusch and Pete Wagner served as his early mentors at MSU. Grubbs was an assistant professor from 1969 to 1973, and an associate professor from 1973 to 1978.[16] He received a Sloan Fellowship for 1974–1976. In 1975, he went to the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim, Germany, on a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

In 1978, Grubbs moved to California Institute of Technology as a professor of chemistry. As of 1990 he became the Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry.

As of 2021, Grubbs has an h-index of 160 according to Google Scholar and of 137 according to Scopus.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-11-02 15:55:12

2091) Richard R. Schrock

Gist:

Life

Richard Schrock was born in Berne, Indiana, in the U.S. After studies at the University of California, Riverside, he received his doctor’s degree at Harvard University in 1971. After a few years as a researcher at the DuPont chemical company in Wilmington, Delaware, he began working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has remained ever since. He has also been actively involved in a company engaged in development and applications within his research area. Richard Schrock is married and has two children.

Work

Organic substances—a multitude of chemical compounds that contain the element carbon—are the basis of all life. Metathesis is an important type of chemical reaction in assembling or synthesizing organic substances. In metathesis double bonds between carbon atoms are broken and reorganized at the same time as atomic groups change place. In 1990 Richard Schrock succeeded in producing a metallic compound that effectively facilitates metathesis. Metathesis has enabled more effective and environmentally sound processes in industry.

Summary

Richard R. Schrock (born Jan. 4, 1945, Berne, Ind., U.S.) is an American chemist who, with Robert H. Grubbs and Yves Chauvin, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2005 for developing metathesis, one of the most important types of chemical reactions used in organic chemistry. Schrock was honoured as “the first to produce an efficient metal-compound catalyst for metathesis.”

Schrock received a B.A. (1967) from the University of California, Riverside, and a Ph.D. (1971) from Harvard University. He held a one-year National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge and spent three years doing research at E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. In 1975 he joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was named the Frederick G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry in 1989. Schrock also served as associate editor of the American Chemical Society journal Organometallics, and he won the 1996 ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry for his work in inorganic polymer chains.

At MIT Schrock conducted research on metathesis, a reaction in which catalysts create and break double carbon bonds of organic molecules in a way that causes different groups of atoms in the molecules to change places with one another. This shift yields new molecules with new properties. Working with a mechanism first proposed in the early 1970s by Chauvin, he systematically tested catalysts that contained tantalum, tungsten, or other metals in an effort to understand which metals could be used and how they worked. In a major advance in 1990 Schrock and his associates reported the development of efficient metathesis catalysts that used the metal molybdenum. Their chemistry was based on a class of metal-containing compounds, called Schrock carbenes, that Schrock had been developing since the 1970s. The new metathesis catalysts, however, were sensitive to the effects of air and water, which reduced their activity. (Grubbs later discovered catalysts that solved this particular problem.) Schrock’s work contributed to the development of many useful products, including advanced plastics, fuel additives, agents to control harmful plants and insects, and new drugs. Catalysts for metathesis also played a role in the creation of “green chemistry,” in which the need for and the generation of hazardous substances in chemical processes were reduced or eliminated.

Details

Richard Royce Schrock (born January 4, 1945) is an American chemist and Nobel laureate recognized for his contributions to the olefin metathesis reaction used in organic chemistry.

Education

Born in Berne, Indiana, Schrock went to Mission Bay High School in San Diego, California. He holds a B.A. (1967) from the University of California, Riverside and a Ph.D. (1971) from Harvard University under the direction of John A. Osborn (fr).

Career

Following his PhD, Schrock carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge with Jack Lewis. In 1972, he was hired by DuPont, where he worked at the Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware in the group of George Parshall. He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and became full professor in 1980.

He has been the Frederick G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry, at MIT since 1989, and is now Professor Emeritus. Schrock is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences and was elected to the Board of Overseers of Harvard University in 2007.

He is co-founder and member of the board of a Swiss-based company, XiMo, inc., now owned by Verbio, AG, which is focused on the development and application of proprietary metathesis catalysts.

In 2018, Schrock joined the faculty of his alma mater, the University of California, Riverside, where he is now the Distinguished Professor and George K. Helmkamp Founder's Chair of Chemistry. He cited his interest in mentoring junior faculty and students. “My experience as an undergraduate at UCR in research in the laboratory of James Pitts and the quality of the classes in chemistry prepared me for my Ph.D. experience at Harvard. I look forward to returning to UCR for a few years to give back some of what it gave to me,” Schrock said.

Research

In 1974 Schrock discovered the alpha hydrogen abstraction reaction, which creates alkylidene complexes from alkyls and alkylidyne complexes from alkylidenes. At MIT Schrock was the first to elucidate the structure and mechanism of so-called 'black box' olefin metathesis catalysts. He showed that the alpha abstraction reaction could be used to prepare molybdenum or tungsten alkylidene and alkylidyne complexes in large variety through ligand variations. Catalysts could then be designed at a molecular level for a given purpose. Schrock has done much work to demonstrate that metallacyclobutanes are the key intermediates in olefin metathesis, while metallacyclobutadienes are the key intermediates in alkyne metathesis. Projects outside of metathesis include elucidating the mechanism of dinitrogen fixation and developing single molecule catalysts which form ammonia from dinitrogen, mimicking the activity of nitrogenase enzymes in biology.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-11-03 16:31:56

2092) Barry Marshall

Gist:

Life

Barry Marshall was born in Kalgoorlie, Australia, but spent his childhood from the age of eight in Perth, where he also studied to become a doctor. It was during his employment at the Royal Perth Hospital that he carried out the work with colleague Robin Warren that led to his receiving the Nobel Prize. Marshall has continued his affiliation with the hospital and university in Perth, but is also connected to US universities, including the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Barry Marshall is married with four children.

Work

Gastric ulcers are a common illness, but their cause was long unknown. It was discovered that the most common cause is bacterial infection. After Robin Warren discovered colonies of bacteria at gastric ulcer sites, he was contacted by his colleague Barry Marshall, who then successfully cultivated the previously unknown bacteria Helicobacter pylori. Warren and Marshall proved in 1982 that patients could only be cured if the bacteria were eliminated. This is now achieved by treatment with antibiotics, and gastric ulcers are no longer a chronic illness.

Summary

Barry J. Marshall (born September 30, 1951, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, Australia) is an Australian physician who won, with J. Robin Warren, the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discovery that stomach ulcers are an infectious disease caused by bacteria.

Marshall obtained a bachelor’s degree from the University of Western Australia in 1974. From 1977 to 1984 he worked at Royal Perth Hospital, and he later taught medicine at the University of Western Australia, where he also was a research fellow.

In the early 1980s Marshall became interested in the research of Warren, who in 1979 had first observed the presence of spiral-shaped bacteria in a biopsy of a patient’s stomach lining. The two began working together to determine the significance of the bacteria. They conducted a study of stomach biopsies from 100 patients that systematically showed that the bacteria were present in almost all patients with gastritis, duodenal ulcer, or gastric ulcer. Based on these findings, Warren and Marshall proposed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori was involved in causing those diseases. This contradicted the commonly held belief that peptic ulcers resulted from an excess of gastric acid that was released in the stomach as the result of emotional stress, the ingestion of spicy foods, or other factors. It also challenged the traditional treatments, which included antacid medicines and dietary changes, by supporting a curative regimen of antibiotics and acid-secretion inhibitors. Hoping to persuade skeptics, Marshall drank a culture of H. pylori and within a week began suffering stomach pain and other symptoms of acute gastritis. Stomach biopsies confirmed that he had gastritis and showed that the affected areas of his stomach were infected with H. pylori. Marshall subsequently took antibiotics and was cured.

Prior to winning the Nobel Prize, Marshall had received the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award (1995) and the Benjamin Franklin Medal (1999) for his work on H. pylori. He also wrote several books, including Helicobacter Pioneers (2002), a collection of historical first-hand accounts of scientists who studied Helicobacter.

Details

Barry James Marshall (born 30 September 1951) is an Australian physician, Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, Professor of Clinical Microbiology and Co-Director of the Marshall Centre at the University of Western Australia. Marshall and Robin Warren showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) plays a major role in causing many peptic ulcers, challenging decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused primarily by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid. This discovery has allowed for a breakthrough in understanding a causative link between Helicobacter pylori infection and stomach cancer.

Early life and education

Marshall was born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia and lived in Kalgoorlie and Carnarvon until moving to Perth at the age of eight. His father held various jobs, and his mother was a nurse. He is the eldest of four siblings. He attended Marist College, Churchlands for his secondary education and the University of Western Australia School of Medicine, where he received a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) in 1974. He married his wife Adrienne in 1972 and has four children, a son and three daughters.

Career and research

In 1979, Marshall was appointed Registrar in Medicine at the Royal Perth Hospital. He met Dr. Robin Warren, a pathologist interested in gastritis, during internal medicine fellowship training at Royal Perth Hospital in 1981. Together, they both studied the presence of spiral bacteria in association with gastritis. In 1982, they performed the initial culture of H. pylori and developed their hypothesis on the bacterial cause of peptic ulcers and gastric cancer. It has been claimed that the H. pylori theory was ridiculed by established scientists and doctors, who did not believe that any bacteria could live in the acidic environment of the stomach. Marshall was quoted as saying in 1998 that "everyone was against me, but I knew I was right." On the other hand, it has also been argued that medical researchers showed a proper degree of scientific scepticism until the H. pylori hypothesis could be supported by evidence.

In 1982 Marshall and Warren obtained funding for one year of research. The first 30 out of 100 samples showed no support for their hypothesis. However, it was discovered that the lab technicians had been throwing out the cultures after two days. This was standard practice for throat swabs where other organisms in the mouth rendered cultures unusable after two days. Due to other hospital work, the lab technicians did not have time to immediately throw out the 31st test on the second day, and so it stayed from Thursday through to the following Monday. In that sample, they discovered the presence of H. pylori. They later found out that H. pylori grows more slowly than the conventional two days required by other mucosal bacteria, and that stomach cultures were not contaminated by other organisms.

In 1983 they submitted their findings thus far to the Gastroenterological Society of Australia, but the reviewers turned their paper down, rating it in the bottom 10% of those they received that year.

After failed attempts to infect piglets in 1984, Marshall, after having a baseline endoscopy done, drank a broth containing cultured H. pylori, expecting to develop, perhaps years later, an ulcer. He was surprised when, only three days later, he developed vague nausea and halitosis, due to the achlorhydria. There was no acid to kill bacteria in the stomach and their waste products manifested as bad breath, noticed by his wife. On days 5–8, he developed achlorhydric (no acid) vomiting. On day eight, he had a repeat endoscopy, which showed massive inflammation (gastritis), and a biopsy from which H. pylori was cultured, showing it had colonised his stomach. On the fourteenth day after ingestion, a third endoscopy was done, and Marshall began to take antibiotics. Marshall did not develop antibodies to H. pylori, suggesting that innate immunity can sometimes eradicate acute H. pylori infection. Marshall's illness and recovery, based on a culture of organisms extracted from a patient, fulfilled Koch's postulates for H. pylori and gastritis, but not for peptic ulcers. This experiment was published in 1985 in the Medical Journal of Australia and is among the most cited articles from the journal.

After his work at Fremantle Hospital, Marshall did research at Royal Perth Hospital (1985–86) and at the University of Virginia, USA (1986–present), before returning to Australia while remaining on the faculty of the University of Virginia. He held a Burnet Fellowship at the University of Western Australia (UWA) from 1998 to 2003. Marshall continues research related to H. pylori and runs the H. pylori Research Laboratory at UWA.

In 2007, Marshall was appointed Co-Director of The Marshall Centre for Infectious Diseases Research and Training, founded in his honour. In addition to Helicobacter pylori research, the Centre conducted varied research into infectious disease identification and surveillance, diagnostics and drug design, and transformative discovery. His research group expanded to embrace new technologies, including Next-Generation Sequencing and genomic analysis. Marshall also accepted a part-time appointment at the Pennsylvania State University that same year. He established the Noisy Guts Project in 2017 – a research team dedicated to investigating new diagnostics and treatments for Irritable Bowel Syndrome. This resulted in a spin-out company Noisy Guts Pty Ltd which develops functional food products. In August 2020, Marshall, along with Simon J. Thorpe, accepted a position at the scientific advisory board of Brainchip INC, a computer chip company.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-11-04 15:25:51

2093) Robin Warren

Gist:

Life

Robin Warren was born in Adelaide, Australia. Warren received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Adelaide in 1961. He worked at several hospitals before becoming a pathologist at Royal Perth Hospital in 1968, where he began collaborating with co-recipient Barry Marshall. Warren’s wife Winifred, used to read their papers and suggest ways of making their work more widely readable. Warren retired in 1999, after which he has spent time performing his hobby, photography.

Work

Gastric ulcers are a common illness, but their cause was long unknown. It was discovered that the most common cause is bacterial infection. After Robin Warren discovered colonies of bacteria at gastric ulcer sites, he was contacted by his colleague Barry Marshall, who then successfully cultivated the previously unknown bacteria Helicobacter pylori. Warren and Marshall proved in 1982 that patients could only be cured if the bacteria were eliminated. This is now achieved by treatment by antibiotics, and gastric ulcers are no longer a chronic disease.

Summary

Robin Warren (born June 11, 1937, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia—died July 23, 2024, Perth, Western Australia) was an Australian pathologist who was corecipient, with Barry J. Marshall, of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discovery that stomach ulcers are an infectious disease caused by bacteria.

Warren received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Adelaide in 1961. He worked at several hospitals before becoming in 1968 a pathologist at Royal Perth Hospital, where he remained until his retirement in 1999.

When Warren began his prizewinning research, physicians believed that peptic ulcers (sores in the stomach lining) were caused by an excess of gastric acid, which was commonly blamed on a stressful lifestyle or rich diet. In 1979 he first observed the presence of spiral-shaped bacteria in a biopsy of the stomach lining from a patient. It defied the conventional wisdom that bacteria could not survive in the highly acidic environment of the stomach, and many scientists dismissed his reports. His research during the next two years showed, however, that the bacteria were often in stomach tissue and almost always in association with gastritis (an inflammation of the stomach lining).

In the early 1980s Warren began working with Marshall to pin down the clinical significance of the bacteria. They studied 100 stomach biopsies and found that the bacteria were present in almost all patients with gastritis, duodenal ulcer, or gastric ulcer. Citing these findings, Warren and Marshall proposed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori was involved in causing those illnesses. Their work led to a new treatment—a regimen of antibiotics and acid-secretion inhibitors—for peptic ulcer disease.

In 2007 Warren was made a Companion of the Order of Australia.

Details

John Robin Warren (11 June 1937 – 23 July 2024) was an Australian pathologist, Nobel laureate, and researcher who is credited with the 1979 re-discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, together with Barry Marshall. The duo proved to the medical community that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is the cause of most peptic ulcers.

Early life and education

Warren received his M.B.B.S. degree from the University of Adelaide, having completed his high school education at St Peter's College, Adelaide.

Career

Warren trained at the Royal Adelaide Hospital and became a Registrar in Clinical Pathology at the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science (IMVS). There, he worked in laboratory haematology, which generated his interest in pathology.

In 1963, Warren was appointed Honorary Clinical Assistant in Pathology and Honorary Registrar in Haematology at Royal Adelaide Hospital. Subsequently, he lectured in pathology at Adelaide University and then became Clinical Pathology Registrar at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. In 1967, Warren was elected to the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia and became a senior pathologist at the Royal Perth Hospital, where he spent the majority of his career.

Nobel Prize work

At the University of Western Australia, with his colleague Barry J. Marshall, Warren proved that the bacterium is the infectious cause of stomach ulcers. Warren helped develop a convenient diagnostic test (14
C-urea breath-test) for detecting H. pylori in ulcer patients.

In 2005, Warren and Marshall were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

An Australian documentary was made in 2006 about Warren and Marshall's road to the Nobel Prize, called "The Winner's Guide to the Nobel Prize". He was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2007.

Asteroid 254863 Robinwarren, discovered by Italian amateur astronomer Silvano Casulli in 2005, was named in his honour. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 22 April 2016 (M.P.C. 99893).

Personal life and death

Warren married Winifred Theresa Warren (née Williams) in the early 1960s, and together they had five children. Winifred Warren became an accomplished psychiatrist. Following her death in 1997, Warren retired from medicine.

Warren died in Perth, Australia, on 23 July 2024, at the age of 87.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-11-05 15:53:26

2094) John C. Mather

Gist:

Work

Various types of particles and radiation travel through outer space, including cosmic background radiation, which has been carefully studied through measurements from the COBE satellite. John Mather, a driving force in the project, had particular responsibility for a part that in 1989 indicated that cosmic background radiation’s spectrum corresponds to black-body radiation—radiation emitted by a dark, glowing body. The result provided evidence that the background radiation is a remnant from the creation of the universe in the Big Bang.

Summary

John C. Mather (born August 7, 1946, Roanoke, Virginia, U.S.) is an American physicist, who was corecipient, with George F. Smoot, of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics for discoveries supporting the big-bang model.

Mather studied physics at Swarthmore University (B.S., 1968) and the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D., 1974). He later joined the staff of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center, serving as a senior astrophysicist.

In the 1980s Mather and Smoot were instrumental in developing the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) for NASA. The satellite was launched in 1989 and measured cosmic microwave background radiation formed during the early phases of creation of the universe. The resulting data supports the hypothesis that the universe emerged from a state of high temperature and density—the so-called big bang that occurred at least 10 billion years ago.

In 1995 Mather became the senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, which was launched in 2021. He wrote a book about the COBE project, The Very First Light: The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe (1996, revised 2008, with John Boslough).

Details

John Cromwell Mather (born August 7, 1946) is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE) with George Smoot.

This work helped cement the big-bang theory of the universe. According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE-project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science."

Mather is a senior astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Maryland and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. In 2007, Time magazine listed Mather among the 100 Most Influential People in The World. In October 2012, he was listed again by Time magazine in a special issue on New Space Discoveries as one of the 25 most influential people in space.

Mather 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.

Mather served as the senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) from 1995 until 2023, when he was succeeded by Jane Rigby.

In 2014, Mather delivered an address on the James Webb Space Telescope at the second Starmus Festival in the Canary Islands.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-11-06 16:50:55

2095) George Smoot

Gist:

Life

George Smoot was born in Yukon, Florida, into a family where many practiced law. His father, however, broke with tradition and became an engineer, while his mother taught school. His parents strongly encouraged his interest in mathematics and physics when he was growing up, and Sputnik drew both his and the world’s attention to space. Money was scarce in the family, and during his time at school, Smoot worked to earn extra money so he could afford studies at MIT. After his doctorate, he moved to Berkeley, where he made his Nobel Prize-winning discoveries.

Work

Various types of particles and radiation travel through outer space, including cosmic background radiation, which has been carefully studied through measurements from the COBE satellite. George Smoot led a project that in 1992 was able to point out small variations in radiation in different directions. This provides a clue to how stars and other heavenly bodies have come into existence. The variations can be explained by a kind of quantum mechanical fluctuations that have caused matter in certain places to form clumps that then have grown because of gravitation.

Summary

George F. Smoot (born Feb. 20, 1945, Yukon, Fla., U.S.) is an American physicist, who was corecipient, with John C. Mather, of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2006 for discoveries supporting the big-bang model.

Smoot received a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. The following year he joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley.

In the 1980s Smoot and Mather helped develop the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Launched in 1989, the satellite measured the cosmic microwave background radiation formed during the early phases of creation of the universe. The resulting data support the theory that the universe was created in a primordial explosion known as the big bang.

Details

George Fitzgerald Smoot III (born February 20, 1945) is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and the second contestant to win the $1 million prize on Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C. Mather that led to the "discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".

This work helped further the Big Bang theory of the universe using the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite. According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science." Smoot donated his share of the Nobel Prize money, less travel costs, to a charitable foundation.

Smoot has been at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1970. He is Chair of the Endowment Fund "Physics of the Universe" of Paris Center for Cosmological Physics. Apart from being elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Smoot has been honored by several universities worldwide with doctorates or professorships. He was also the recipient of the Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2006), the Daniel Chalonge Medal from the International School of Astrophysics (2006), the Einstein Medal from the Albert Einstein Society (2003), the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award from the US Department of Energy (1995), and the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal from NASA (1991). He is a member of the advisory board of the journal Universe.

Smoot 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.

Early life

Smoot was born in Yukon, Florida. His maternal grandfather was Johnson Tal Crawford. He graduated from Upper Arlington High School in Upper Arlington, Ohio, in 1962. He studied mathematics before switching to physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he obtained dual bachelor's degrees in mathematics and physics in 1966 and a Ph.D. in particle physics in 1970. A distant relative, Oliver R. Smoot, was the MIT student who was used as the unit of measure known as the smoot.

Initial research

George Smoot switched to cosmology and began work at Berkeley, collaborating with Luis Walter Alvarez on the High Altitude Particle Physics Experiment, a stratospheric weather balloon designed to detect antimatter in Earth's upper atmosphere, the presence of which was predicted by the now discredited steady state theory of cosmology.

He then took up an interest in cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), previously discovered by Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson in 1964. There were, at that time, several open questions about this topic, relating directly to fundamental questions about the structure of the universe. Certain models predicted the universe as a whole was rotating, which would have an effect on the CMB: its temperature would depend on the direction of observation. With the help of Alvarez and Richard A. Muller, Smoot developed a differential radiometer which measured the difference in temperature of the CMB between two directions 60 degrees apart. The instrument, which was mounted on a Lockheed U-2 plane, made it possible to determine that the overall rotation of the universe was zero, which was within the limits of accuracy of the instrument. It did, however, detect a variation in the temperature of the CMB of a different sort. That the CMB appears to be at a higher temperature on one side of the sky than on the opposite side, referred to as a dipole pattern, has been explained as a Doppler effect of the Earth's motion relative to the area of CMB emission, which is called the last scattering surface. Such a Doppler effect arises because the Sun, and in fact the Milky Way as a whole, is not stationary, but rather is moving at nearly 600 km/s with respect to the last scattering surface. This is probably due to the gravitational attraction between our galaxy and a concentration of mass like the Great Attractor.

COBE

At that time, the CMB appeared to be perfectly uniform excluding the distortion caused by the Doppler effect as mentioned above. This result contradicted observations of the universe, with various structures such as galaxies and galaxy clusters indicating that the universe was relatively heterogeneous on a small scale. However, these structures formed slowly. Thus, if the universe is heterogeneous today, it would have been heterogeneous at the time of the emission of the CMB as well, and observable today through weak variations in the temperature of the CMB. It was the detection of these anisotropies that Smoot was working on in the late 1970s. He then proposed to NASA a project involving a satellite equipped with a detector that was similar to the one mounted on the U-2 but was more sensitive and not influenced by air pollution. The proposal was accepted and incorporated as one of the instruments of the satellite COBE, which cost $160 million. COBE was launched on November 18, 1989, after a delay owing to the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger. After more than two years of observation and analysis, the COBE research team announced on 23 April 1992 that the satellite had detected tiny fluctuations in the CMB, a breakthrough in the study of the early universe. The observations were "evidence for the birth of the universe" and led Smoot to say regarding the importance of his discovery that "if you're religious, it's like looking at God."

The success of COBE was the outcome of extensive teamwork involving more than 1,000 researchers, engineers and other participants. John Mather coordinated the entire process and also had primary responsibility for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the CMB measured by COBE. Smoot had the main responsibility of measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation.

Smoot collaborated with San Francisco Chronicle journalist Keay Davidson to write the general-audience book Wrinkles in Time, that chronicled his team's efforts. In the book The Very First Light, John Mather and John Boslough complement and broaden the COBE story, and suggest that Smoot violated team policy by leaking news of COBE's discoveries to the press before NASA's formal announcement, a leak that, to Mather, smacked of self-promotion and betrayal. Smoot eventually apologized for not following the agreed publicity plan and Mather said tensions eventually eased. Mather acknowledged that Smoot had "brought COBE worldwide publicity" the project might not normally have received.

Other projects

After COBE, Smoot took part in another experiment involving a stratospheric balloon, Millimeter Anisotropy eXperiment IMaging Array, which had improved angular resolution compared to COBE, and refined the measurements of the anisotropies of the CMB. Smoot has continued CMB observations and analysis and was a collaborator on the third generation CMB anisotropy observatory Planck satellite. He is also a collaborator of the design of the Supernova/Acceleration Probe, a satellite which is proposed to measure the properties of dark energy. He has also assisted in analyzing data from the Spitzer Space Telescope in connection with measuring far infrared background radiation. Smoot also was a leader in a group that launched the Mikhailo Lomonosov April 28, 2016.

Smoot is credited by Mickey Hart for inspiring the album Mysterium Tremendum, which is based, in part on "sounds" that can be extracted from the background signature of the Big Bang.

As of September 2019, Smoot is an artificial intelligence scientist for the GTA Foundation, whose business is storing genomic sequencing data and using it in scientific applications.

In November 2020, he joined Dead Sea Premier as head of research for their NUNA advanced technology anti-aging medical device development.

In April 2021, he joined the Xiaomi eco-system company Viomi as chief scientist for their AI-development.

In January 2023, George Fitzgerald Smoot III joined the National Council for Science and Technology under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-11-08 15:42:27

2096) Roger D. Kornberg

Gist:

Life

Roger Kornberg was born in St Louis, Missouri in the United States. His parents were biochemists and his father, Arthur Kornberg, won the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Roger Kornberg studied chemistry at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later completed his PhD in chemical physics at Stanford University, California, in 1972. After spending time at Cambridge, England, and at Harvard Medical School, Kornberg returned to Stanford in 1978, where he carried out the research that led to his Nobel Prize. Roger Kornberg is married with three children.

Work

An organism's genes are stored inside DNA molecules. From DNA, genes are transferred to RNA and then converted during protein formation. In the case of bacteria without cell nuclei, the process by which information stored in DNA is transferred to RNA was mapped during the 1960s. Concerning organisms with cells with delimited nuclei (eukaryotic cells), Roger Kornberg succeeded in mapping the process by studying yeast in the first decade of the new millennium. His contributions included determining the structure of the enzyme active in the process–RNA polymerase– and creating images of how the RNA molecule is constructed.

Summary

Roger D. Kornberg (born 1947, St. Louis, Mo., U.S.) is an American chemist, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2006 for his research on the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription.

Kornberg studied chemistry at Harvard University (B.S., 1967) and Stanford University (Ph.D., 1972). He later served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School (1976–78) before becoming a professor at Stanford in 1978.

Kornberg’s prizewinning research centred on the process by which DNA is converted into RNA. Known as transcription, it enables genetic information to be transferred to different parts of the body, a process that is crucial to an organism’s survival. Problems in transcription contribute to a number of illnesses, including cancer and heart disease. Kornberg’s studies revealed how transcription works at the molecular level for eukaryotes, a group of organisms that includes mammals.

Kornberg’s father, Arthur Kornberg, won the 1959 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. They are the sixth father-son tandem to win Nobel Prizes.

Details

Roger David Kornberg (born April 24, 1947) is an American biochemist and professor of structural biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 for his studies of the process by which genetic information from DNA is copied to RNA, "the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription."

Early life and education

Kornberg was born in St. Louis, Missouri, into a Jewish family, the eldest son of biochemist Arthur Kornberg, who won the Nobel Prize, and Sylvy Kornberg who was also a biochemist. He earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 1967 and his Ph.D. in chemical physics from Stanford in 1972 supervised by Harden M. McConnell.

Career

Kornberg became a postdoctoral research fellow at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England and then an Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School in 1976, before moving to his present position as Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford Medical School in 1978. Since 2004, Kornberg has been the editor of the Annual Review of Biochemistry. He serves on the Board of Directors of Annual Reviews.

Research

Kornberg identified the role of RNA polymerase II and other proteins in DNA transcription, creating three-dimensional images of the protein cluster using X-ray crystallography.

Kornberg and his research group have made several fundamental discoveries concerning the mechanisms and regulation of eukaryotic transcription. While a graduate student working with Harden McConnell at Stanford in the late 1960s, he discovered the "flip-flop" and lateral diffusion of phospholipids in bilayer membranes. Meanwhile, as a postdoctoral fellow working with Aaron Klug and Francis Crick at the MRC in the 1970s, Kornberg discovered the nucleosome as the basic protein complex packaging chromosomal DNA in the nucleus of eukaryotic cells (chromosomal DNA is often termed "chromatin" when it is bound to proteins in this manner). Within the nucleosome, Kornberg found that roughly 200 bp of DNA are wrapped around an octamer of histone proteins. With Yahli Lorch, Kornberg showed that a nucleosome on a promoter prevents the initiation of transcription, leading to the recognition of a functional role for the nucleosome, which serves as a general gene repressor.

Kornberg's research group at Stanford later succeeded in the development of a faithful transcription system from baker's yeast, a simple unicellular eukaryote, which they then used to isolate in a purified form all of the several dozen proteins required for the transcription process. Through the work of Kornberg and others, it has become clear that these protein components are remarkably conserved across the full spectrum of eukaryotes, from yeast to human cells.

Using this system, Kornberg made the major discovery that transmission of gene regulatory signals to the RNA polymerase machinery is accomplished by an additional protein complex that they dubbed Mediator. As noted by the Nobel Prize committee, "the great complexity of eukaryotic organisms is actually enabled by the fine interplay between tissue-specific substances, enhancers in the DNA and Mediator. The discovery of Mediator is therefore a true milestone in the understanding of the transcription process."

At the same time as Kornberg was pursuing these biochemical studies of the transcription process, he devoted two decades to the development of methods to visualize the atomic structure of RNA polymerase and its associated protein components. Initially, Kornberg took advantage of expertise with lipid membranes gained from his graduate studies to devise a technique for the formation of two-dimensional protein crystals on lipid bilayers. These 2D crystals could then be analyzed using electron microscopy to derive low-resolution images of the protein's structure. Eventually, Kornberg was able to use X-ray crystallography to solve the 3-dimensional structure of RNA polymerase at atomic resolution. He has recently extended these studies to obtain structural images of RNA polymerase associated with accessory proteins. Through these studies, Kornberg has created an actual picture of how transcription works at a molecular level. According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the truly revolutionary aspect of the picture Kornberg has created is that it captures the process of transcription in full flow. What we see is an RNA-strand being constructed, and hence the exact positions of the DNA, polymerase and RNA during this process."

Lipids membrane

As a graduate student at Stanford University, Kornberg's studied the rotation of phospholipids and defined for the first time the dynamics of lipids in the membrane. Kornberg called the movement of lipid from one leaflet to the other flip-flop because he had studied only a few years before electronic circuit elements called flip-flops. The term gave rise to the naming of proteins called flippases and floppases.

Industrial collaborations

Kornberg has served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the following companies: Cocrystal Discovery, Inc (Chairman), ChromaDex Corporation (Chairman), StemRad, Ltd, Oplon Ltd (Chairman), and Pacific Biosciences. Kornberg has also been a director for the following companies: OphthaliX Inc., Protalix BioTherapeutics, Can-Fite BioPharma, Ltd, Simploud and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Ltd.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-11-09 15:46:49

2097) Andrew Fire

Gist:

Work

RNA has multiple functions. Among these, messenger RNA carries genetic information from DNA to protein formation. RNA is often a single-stranded spiral, but also exists in double-stranded form. In 1998, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello discovered through their studies of the roundworm C. elegans a phenomenon dubbed RNA interference. In this phenomenon, double-stranded RNA blocks messenger RNA so that certain genetic information is not converted during protein formation. This silences these genes, i.e. renders them inactive. The phenomenon plays an important regulatory role within a genome.

Summary

Andrew Z. Fire (born April 27, 1959, Stanford, Calif., U.S.) is an American scientist, who was a corecipient, with Craig C. Mello, of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2006 for discovering a mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information.

Fire received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics (1978) from the University of California, Berkeley. He was subsequently accepted into the graduate biology program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he worked with American molecular biologist Philip A. Sharp, who was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his independent discovery of introns—long sections of DNA that do not encode proteins but are located within genes. Fire received a Ph.D. in biology from MIT in 1983 and then went to Cambridge, Eng., joining the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology. At Cambridge, Fire worked with South African-born biologist Sydney Brenner and studied the genetic mechanisms that influence the early development of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.

In 1986 Fire joined the staff at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore, Md., where he conducted his prizewinning research. Working with Mello, Fire helped discover RNA interference (RNAi), a mechanism in which genes are silenced by double-stranded RNA. Naturally occurring in plants, animals, and humans, RNAi regulates gene activity and helps defend against viral infection. The two men published their findings in 1998. Possible applications of RNAi include developing treatments for such diseases as AIDS, cancer, and hepatitis.

In 2003 Fire joined the faculty at Stanford University, taking professorships in pathology and genetics. His later research was concerned with understanding the mechanisms that enable cells to distinguish foreign DNA and RNA from the cells’ own genetic material. This work was aimed in part at elucidating the role of RNAi in silencing the activity of foreign genetic material introduced into cells by infectious agents. Fire also investigated the role of RNAi and other genetic mechanisms in enabling cells to adapt to changes that occur throughout an organism’s development.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Fire received several other major awards during his career, including the Meyenburg Prize (2002) from the German Cancer Research Center, the Wiley Prize (2003), and the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology (2003).

Details

Andrew Zachary Fire (born April 27, 1959) is an American biologist and professor of pathology and of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Craig C. Mello, for the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi). This research was conducted at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and published in 1998.

Biography

Andrew Z Fire was born in Palo Alto, California and raised in Sunnyvale, California in a Jewish family. He graduated from Fremont High School. He attended the University of California, Berkeley for his undergraduate degree, where he received a B.A. in mathematics in 1978 at the age of 19. He then proceeded to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a Ph.D. in biology in 1983 under the mentorship of Nobel laureate geneticist Phillip Sharp.

Fire moved to Cambridge, England, as a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow. He became a member of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology group headed by Nobel laureate biologist Sydney Brenner.

From 1986 to 2003, Fire was a staff member of the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Embryology in Baltimore, Maryland. The initial work on double stranded RNA as a trigger of gene silencing was published while Fire and his group were at the Carnegie Labs. Fire became an adjunct professor in the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins University in 1989 and joined the Stanford faculty in 2003. Throughout his career, Fire has been supported by research grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Fire is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors and the National Center for Biotechnology, National Institutes of Health.

Nobel Prize

In 2006, Fire and Craig Mello shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work first published in 1998 in the journal Nature. Fire and Mello, along with colleagues SiQun Xu, Mary Montgomery, Stephen Kostas, and Sam Driver, reported that tiny snippets of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) effectively shut down specific genes, driving the destruction of messenger RNA (mRNA) with sequences matching the dsRNA. As a result, the mRNA cannot be translated into protein. Fire and Mello found that dsRNA was much more effective in gene silencing than the previously described method of RNA interference with single-stranded RNA. Because only small numbers of dsRNA molecules were required for the observed effect, Fire and Mello proposed that a catalytic process was involved. This hypothesis was confirmed by subsequent research.

The Nobel Prize citation, issued by Sweden's Karolinska Institute, said: "This year's Nobel Laureates have discovered a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information." The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) quoted Nick Hastie, director of the Medical Research Council's Human Genetics Unit, on the scope and implications of the research:

It is very unusual for a piece of work to completely revolutionise the whole way we think about biological processes and regulation, but this has opened up a whole new field in biology.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-11-10 15:31:09

2098) Craig Mello

Gist:

Work

RNA has multiple functions. Among these, messenger RNA carries genetic information from DNA to protein formation. RNA is often a single-stranded spiral, but also exists in double-stranded form. In 1998, Craig Mello and Andrew Fire discovered through their studies of the roundworm C. elegans a phenomenon dubbed RNA interference. In this phenomenon, double-stranded RNA blocks messenger RNA so that certain genetic information is not converted during protein formation. This silences these genes, i.e. renders them inactive. The phenomenon plays an important regulatory role within a genome.

Summary

Craig C. Mello (born Oct. 18, 1960, New Haven, Conn., U.S.) is an American scientist, who was a corecipient, with Andrew Z. Fire, of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2006 for discovering RNA interference (RNAi), a mechanism that regulates gene activity.

Mello grew up in northern Virginia, and, as a young boy, he developed an intense curiosity in the living world. His curiosity was largely influenced by his father, James Mello, a paleontologist who had served as the associate director of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Mello was intrigued by fundamental concepts such as evolution. He felt that these concepts encouraged humans to ask questions about the world around them, a belief that led to his rejection of religion at a young age. Mello attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, studying biochemistry and molecular biology and receiving a B.S. degree in 1982. He began his graduate studies in biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he worked in the laboratory of American molecular biologist David Hirsh, who was investigating the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. While conducting research in Hirsh’s lab, Mello was introduced to American molecular biologist Dan Stinchcomb. When Stinchcomb decided to move to Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., to start his own research laboratory, Mello decided to follow him. At Harvard Mello became deeply involved in research on C. elegans, and his studies led him to American scientist Andrew Z. Fire, who was working at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Baltimore, Md. Both Mello and Fire were working to find a way to insert DNA into C. elegans, a process known as DNA transformation. After exchanging ideas and elaborating on one another’s experiments, they successfully developed a procedure for DNA transformation in nematodes. In 1990, following the completion of his thesis, C. elegans DNA Transformation, Mello graduated from Harvard with a Ph.D. in biology.

Mello worked at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Wash., from 1990 to 1994. He continued studying C. elegans, though his focus had shifted to identifying genes involved in regulating nematode development. In 1994 Mello joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He became interested in an RNA injection technique used to silence genes. Silencing genes in C. elegans enabled Mello to identify the functions of the genes he had discovered while working in Seattle. He soon found that some nematode embryos that had been injected with RNA to silence certain genes were able to transmit the silencing effect to their offspring. Mello and Fire worked in collaboration to uncover the cellular mechanism driving this active silencing phenomenon and discovered that the genes were being silenced by double-stranded RNA. Known as RNAi, this mechanism regulates gene activity and helps defend against viral infection. In 1998 they published their findings, for which they later received the Nobel Prize. RNAi has proved a valuable research tool, enabling scientists to block genes in order to uncover the basic functions and roles of genes in disease. RNAi can also be used to develop new treatments for a number of diseases, including AIDS, cancer, and hepatitis. Following the RNAi publication, Mello focused his research on applying the silencing technique to the study of embryonic cell differentiation in C. elegans. In 2000 Mello was awarded the title of Howard Hughes Medical Investigator because of his significant contributions to science.

Details

Craig Cameron Mello (born October 18, 1960) is an American biologist and professor of molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Andrew Z. Fire, for the discovery of RNA interference. This research was conducted at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and published in 1998. Mello has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2000.

Early life

Mello was born in New Haven, Connecticut on October 18, 1960. He was the third child of James and Sally Mello. His father, James Mello, was a paleontologist and his mother, Sally Mello, was an artist. His paternal grandparents immigrated to the US from the Portuguese islands of Azores. His parents met while attending Brown University and were the first children in their respective families to attend college. His grandparents on both sides withdrew from school as teenagers to work for their families. James Mello completed his Ph.D. in paleontology from Yale University in 1962. The Mello family moved to Falls Church in northern Virginia so that James could take a position with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Washington, DC. He was raised as Roman Catholic.

After a brief stay in Falls Church, the family moved to Fairfax, Virginia, when James Mello switched from the USGS to a position as assistant director at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Among Craig's fondest early memories were field trips with his father and the whole family to Colorado and Wyoming and more frequent trips to the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia.

The Mello family had a very strong tradition of discussions around the dinner table and this experience was very important to young Mello. He learned to argue, to listen, and to admit it when he was wrong about something. At a time when young Mello was not performing so well in school, these daily discussions helped to build his confidence and self-esteem. Mello struggled during the first few years of grade school. He started first grade at the age of five in a local private school because he was too young to enter first grade in the public system. He doesn't know if he was a slow learner, or just not interested, but he did not do well in school until the seventh grade. In second grade, Mello only pretended that he could read and he was embarrassed by being called on in class. He much preferred playing outdoors, in the woods and creeks, to time spent in the classroom. Meanwhile, his older siblings were model students, raising the teacher's expectations for him. During these early years, Mello had no doubt that he would be a scientist when he grew up. He is now the father of two daughters and a step-daughter and step-son.

Education

Mello attended Fairfax High School (Fairfax, Virginia). After receiving his high school diploma, Mello attended Brown University as a biochemistry and molecular biology major. Mello would never let Miller finish a lecture without asking him for more references, questions, or evidence for concepts discussed in the lecture. He received his Bachelor of Science from Brown in 1982.

Mello attended the University of Colorado, Boulder for graduate studies in molecular, cellular and developmental biology with David Hirsh. After Hirsh decided to take a position in industry, Mello moved to Harvard University where he could continue his research with Dan Stinchcomb. Mello completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1990. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the laboratory of James Priess.

Nobel prize

In 2006, Mello and Fire received the Nobel Prize for work that began in 1998, when Mello and Fire along with their colleagues (SiQun Xu, Mary Montgomery, Stephen Kostas, and Sam Driver) published a paper in the journal Nature detailing how tiny snippets of RNA fool the cell into destroying the gene's messenger RNA (mRNA) before it can produce a protein - effectively shutting specific genes down.

In the annual Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scientific Meeting held on November 13, 2006 in Ashburn, Virginia, Mello recounted the phone call that he received announcing that he had won the prize. He recalls that it was shortly after 4:30 am and he had just finished checking on his daughter, and returned to his bedroom. The phone rang (or rather the green light was blinking) and his wife told him not to answer, as it was a prank call. Upon questioning his wife, she revealed that it had rung while he was out of the room and someone was playing a bad joke on them by saying that he had won the Nobel prize. When he told her that they were actually announcing the Nobel prize winners on this very day, he said "her jaw dropped." He answered the phone, and the voice on the other end told him to get dressed, and that in half an hour his life was about to change.

The Nobel citation, issued by Sweden's Karolinska Institute, said: "This year's Nobel Laureates have discovered a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information."

Mello and Fire's research, conducted at the Carnegie Institution for Science (Fire) and the University of Massachusetts Medical School (Mello), had shown that in fact RNA plays a key role in gene regulation. According to Professor Nick Hastie, director of the Medical Research Council's Human Genetics Unit, said: "It is very unusual for a piece of work to completely revolutionize the whole way we think about biological processes and regulation, but this has opened up a whole new field in biology."

Involvement in RNAi biotechnology industry

Mello is involved in several RNAi-based biotechnology companies. He is a co-founder of RXi Pharmaceuticals where he Chairs the Scientific Advisory Board. In June 2010, he joined the Technology Advisory Board of Beeologics, a company focused on development of RNAi products for honeybee health and various veterinary and agricultural applications, which, according to Mello, "could very well be the first company to obtain FDA approval for an RNAi therapy". In September 2011 Monsanto acquired Beeologics.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-11-22 23:35:46

2099) Albert Fert

Gist:

Work

When materials are reduced to just a few atomic layers—a few nanometers in thickness—their properties change. Independently of one another, Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg discovered the phenomenon Giant Magneto Resistance (GMR) in 1988. GMR involves small changes in magnetic fields creating major differences in electrical resistance. It has also had an impact on electronics, especially read heads, where information stored magnetically is converted to electric current. Thanks to GMR, hard drives have become much smaller.

Summary

Albert Fert (born March 7, 1938, Carcassonne, France) is a French scientist who, with Peter Grünberg, received the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent codiscovery of giant magnetoresistance.

Fert received master’s degrees in mathematics and physics from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1962. He earned a doctorate in physical science from the Université Paris-Sud in 1970 and was made a professor there in 1976. He served as research director for the university’s condensed-matter physics laboratory (1970–95) before moving to Unité Mixte de Physique—a laboratory jointly operated by the Université Paris-Sud and the technology firm Thales.

The principle of magnetoresistance was discovered by Lord Kelvin in 1857 when he observed that a conductor’s electrical resistance could be altered by exposing it to an external magnetic field. Fert found that he could drastically increase the resistance within a system by alternating nanometre-thick layers of magnetic and nonmagnetic materials. While this technique was initially too expensive for commercial application, it became an industry-standard manufacturing process for magnetic storage devices such as computer hard drives and portable media players.

Details

Albert Fert (born 7 March 1938) is a French physicist and one of the discoverers of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks. Currently, he is an emeritus professor at Paris-Saclay University in Orsay, scientific director of a joint laboratory (Unité mixte de recherche) between the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (National Scientific Research Centre) and Thales Group, and adjunct professor at Michigan State University. He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Peter Grünberg.

Biography

In 1962 Albert Fert graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he attended courses by the physicists Alfred Kastler and Jacques Friedel. (As an undergraduate he had strong interests in photography and cinema, and was a great admirer of the work of Ingmar Bergman.)

After the École Normale Supérieure, Fert attended the University of Grenoble and in 1963 received his Ph.D. (doctorat de troisième cycle) from the University of Paris with a thesis prepared in the fundamental electronic Orsay Faculty of Sciences and in the physical spectrometry laboratory of the University of Grenoble Faculty of Sciences.

On his return from military service in 1965, Fert became assistant professor at the Orsay Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris XI (Université Paris-Sud). Under the direction of Ian Campbell at the Laboratory of Solid Physics he prepared for a doctorate Sc.D. (doctorat des sciences) in Physical Sciences on the electrical transport properties of nickel and iron, which he completed in 1970. He was named professor in 1976.

Fert worked as research director for the university's condensed-matter physics laboratory (1970–1995) prior to moving to Unité Mixte de Physique, a laboratory jointly run by the Université Paris-Sud and the technology company Thales.

In 1988, Albert Fert at Orsay in France, and Peter Gruenberg at Jülich in Germany, simultaneously and independently discovered giant magnetoresistance (GMR) in magnetic multilayers. This discovery is considered to mark the birth of spintronics, a new subfield of electronics that exploits not only the electric charge of the electrons but also their magnetism (associated with their intrinsic angular momentum, or spin). Spintronics has already contributed important applications; the introduction of GMR read heads in hard disks has led to a considerable increase in the density of information storage. Other spintronic properties are exploited in magnetic random access memory (MRAM), which may soon impact computer and phone technology. In 2007, Fert and Prof. Grünberg jointly received the Japan Award (300.000 Euro) for their discovery of GMR.

In October 2006, Professor Fert received an honorary doctorate from the Department of Physics of the University of Kaiserslautern.

Fert has made many contributions to the development of spintronics. Following his 2007 Nobel Prize, he began to explore possible spintronics applications of topological properties at surfaces and interfaces. His most recent works are on the topologically protected magnetic solitons called skyrmions and on the conversion between charge current and spin current by topological insulators.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-11-23 21:43:56

2100) Peter Grünberg

Gist:

Work

When materials are reduced to just a few atomic layers—a few nanometers in thickness—their properties change. Independently of one another, Peter Grünberg and Albert Fert discovered the phenomenon Giant Magneto Resistance (GMR) in 1988. GMR involves small changes in magnetic fields creating major differences in electrical resistance. It has also had an impact on electronics, especially read heads, where information stored magnetically is converted to electric current. Thanks to GMR, hard drives have become much smaller.

Summary

Peter Grünberg (born May 18, 1939, Plzeň, Czechoslovakia [now in the Czech Republic]—died April 2018, Jülich, Germany) was a Czech-born German scientist who, with Albert Fert, received the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent codiscovery of giant magnetoresistance.

Grünberg completed his undergraduate studies in physics in 1962 at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Ger. He was awarded a master’s degree (1966) and doctorate (1969) by the Darmstadt University of Technology. From 1972 until his retirement in 2004, he was a research scientist at the Institute of Solid State Research at the Helmholtz Research Centre in Jülich, Ger.

In 1857 Lord Kelvin was the first to observe that it was possible to alter the electric resistance of a conducting material by placing it in an external magnetic field. Grünberg expanded on this principle by placing a layer of nonmagnetic metal between layers of magnetized metal to create an effect that Fert termed giant magnetoresistance. By changing the direction of magnetization within the system, the resistance could be greatly increased or reduced. The practical application of this phenomenon was an exponential expansion in the capacity of magnetic storage devices such as computer hard drives.

Details

Peter Andreas Grünberg (18 May 1939 – 7 April 2018) was a German physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his discovery with Albert Fert of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disk drives.

Life and career

Grünberg was born in Plzeň, Czechoslovakia, which at the time was known as Pilsen in the German-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic) to the Sudeten German family of Anna and Feodor A. Grünberg. They first lived in Dýšina to the east of Plzeň. Grünberg was a Catholic.

After the war, the family was interned; the parents were brought to a camp. His father, a Russia-born engineer who since 1928 had worked for Škoda, died on 27 November 1945 in Czech imprisonment and is buried in a mass grave in Plzeň which is also inscribed with Grünberg Theodor † 27. November 1945. His mother Anna (who died in 2002 aged 100) had to work in agriculture and stayed with her parents in the Petermann house in Untersekerschan (Dolní Sekyřany), where her children (Peter's sister was born in 1937) were brought later. The remaining Grünberg family, like almost all Germans, was expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1946. Seven-year-old Peter came to Lauterbach, Hesse where he attended gymnasium.

Grünberg received his intermediate diploma in 1962 from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. He then attended the Technische Universität Darmstadt, where he received his BSc diploma in physics in 1966 and his Ph.D. in 1969. While there, he met and married his wife, Helma Prauser, who became a schoolteacher. From 1969 to 1972, he did postdoctoral work at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He later joined the Institute for Solid State Physics at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany, where he became a leading researcher in the field of thin film and multilayer magnetism until his retirement in 2004.

In 1984–1985 he served as visiting scientist at Argonne National Laboratories, Lemont, Illinois, USA. From 1984 to 1992 he had Habilitation process and was a lecturer (Junior Professor), and since 1992 till 2004 a Tenured Professor (ausserplanmässiger Professor) at the University of Cologne, Germany. He was also a visiting professor at the Tohoku University at Sendai-shi, Miyagi-ken, Japan from 1998 till 2004.

In 2007, Grünberg was awarded Honorary Doctorate from the RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, in 2008 Honorary Doctorate from the Saarland University, and from Gebze Institute of Technology, and in 2009 from the University of Athens.

Important work

In 1986 he discovered the antiparallel exchange coupling between ferromagnetic layers separated by a thin non-ferromagnetic layer, and in 1988 he discovered the giant magnetoresistive effect (GMR). GMR was simultaneously and independently discovered by Albert Fert from the Université de Paris Sud. It has been used extensively in read heads of modern hard drives. Another application of the GMR effect is non-volatile, magnetic random access memory.

Apart from the Nobel Prize, work also has been rewarded with shared prizes in the APS International Prize for New Materials, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Magnetism Award, the Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize, the Wolf Prize in Physics and the 2007 Japan Prize. He won the German Future Prize for Technology and Innovation in 1998 and was named European Inventor of the Year in the category "Universities and research institutions" by the European Patent Office and European Commission in 2006.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-09 22:39:38

2101) Gerhard Ertl

Gist:

Work

Often, chemical reactions are speeded up by surfaces, as in the case when gaseous molecules come in contact with a metal surface. During the 1960s Gerhard Ertl developed a number of methods for studying surface chemical reactions. Among other things, he made use of techniques for producing a very pure vacuum, which had been developed within the semiconductor industry. Ertl was able to map out details of a process of great importance in the production of artificial fertilizer: the Haber-Bosch process in which nitrogen in the air is converted to ammonia via an iron catalyst.

Summary

Gerhard Ertl (born October 10, 1936, Bad Cannstatt, Germany) is a German chemist, who received the 2007 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his pioneering work in the discipline of surface chemistry.

Ertl studied at the Technical University of Stuttgart (now Stuttgart University; M.A., 1961), the University of Paris, and the Technical University of Munich (Ph.D., 1965). He served as director of the physical chemistry departments at the Technical University of Hannover (1968–73) and the University of Munich (1973–86). During this period he also toured the United States as a visiting professor. He became director of the department of physical chemistry at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin in 1986, and he served in that capacity until he was named professor emeritus in 2004.

Ertl’s prize-winning work focused on surface chemistry. His experimental methods added a level of precision that was previously unobtainable when studying the reactions between gases and solid surfaces. By using vacuum technology developed for the semiconductor industry, he was able to refine the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia. His methods had both experimental and commercial applications, ranging from the study of the mechanics of ozone depletion to the improvment of the performance of hydrogen fuel cells.

Details

Gerhard Ertl (born 10 October 1936) is a German physicist and a Professor emeritus at the Department of Physical Chemistry, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin, Germany. Ertl's research laid the foundation of modern surface chemistry, which has helped explain how fuel cells produce energy without pollution, how catalytic converters clean up car exhausts and even why iron rusts, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

His work has paved the way for development of cleaner energy sources and will guide the development of fuel cells, said Astrid Graslund, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces. The Nobel academy said Ertl provided a detailed description of how chemical reactions take place on surfaces. His findings applied in both academic studies and industrial development, the academy said. “Surface chemistry can even explain the destruction of the ozone layer, as vital steps in the reaction actually take place on the surfaces of small crystals of ice in the stratosphere,” the award citation reads.

In 2015, Ertl 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 COP21 climate summit in Paris.

Biography

Ertl was born in Stuttgart, Germany, where he studied physics from 1955 to 1957 at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart and then at the University of Paris (1957–1958) and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich (1958–1959). He completed his Diplom in Physics at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart in 1961, followed his thesis advisor Heinz Gerischer from the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart to Munich and received his PhD degree from the Technische Hochschule München in 1965.

Academic career

After completing his PhD, he became an assistant and lecturer at Technische Hochschule München (1965–1968). From 1968 to 1973, he was professor and director at Technische Hochschule Hannover; then, he became a professor at Institute for Physical Chemistry, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (1973–1986). During the 1970s and 80s, he was also a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology (1976–1977), the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (1979) and the University of California, Berkeley (1981–82).

He became the director at the Fritz Haber Institute of the MPG from 1986 till his retirement in 2004. In 1986, as honors, he was named "Honorary Professor" at the Free University of Berlin and at the Technische Universität Berlin, and in 1996 at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

From 2008 to 2016, Ertl served as a member of the university council of Technische Universität Darmstadt.

Research

Gerhard Ertl is known for determining the detailed molecular mechanisms of the catalytic synthesis of ammonia over iron (Haber Bosch process) and the catalytic oxidation of carbon monoxide over platinum (catalytic converter). During his research he discovered the important phenomenon of oscillatory reactions on platinum surfaces and, using photoelectron microscopy, was able to image for the first time, the oscillating changes in surface structure and coverage that occur during reaction.

He always used new observation techniques like low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) at the beginning of his career, later ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy (UPS) and scanning tunneling microscope (STM) yielding ground breaking results. He won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1998 along with Gabor A. Somorjai of the University of California, Berkeley for "their outstanding contributions to the field of the surface science in general and for their elucidation of fundamental mechanisms of heterogeneous catalytic reactions at single crystal surface in particular."

Gerhard Ertl was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces. The award, worth SEK 10 million (US$1.7 million, £1.15 million), was announced on Ertl's 71st birthday. "I am speechless", Ertl told Associated Press from his office in Berlin. "I was not counting on this."

As of November 2022, Ertl has an h-index of 124 according to Scopus.

Personal life

Ertl and his wife Barbara have two children and several grandchildren. His hobbies include playing the piano and also playing with his cats when he is not doing experiments. He identifies as Christian.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-10 22:00:13

2102) Mario Capecchi

Gist

Work

DNA carries organisms' genomes and also determines their vital processes. The ability to artificially alter DNA opens the way to both new scientific understanding and new treatment methods for various illnesses. In the early 1980s, Mario Capecchi discovered that sections of DNA that had been inserted into the cell nuclei of mammals could be incorporated into the cell's genome. In 1986, Capecchi and Oliver Smithies successfully achieved specific modifications in the genomes of mice. By inactivating specific genes, their functions could be determined.

Summary

Mario R. Capecchi (born Oct. 6, 1937, Verona, Italy) is an Italian-born American scientist who shared, with Sir Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies, the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work on targeted gene modification.

During World War II, Capecchi lived on the streets after his mother was imprisoned in Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp in Germany. He was reunited with her after the war, and in 1946 the family moved to the United States. After earning a bachelor’s degree at Antioch College (1961), he studied under James D. Watson at Harvard University (Ph.D., 1967). In 1969 Capecchi joined the faculty at Harvard’s medical school and four years later took a post at the University of Utah. In 1988 Capecchi became an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

In the 1980s Capecchi began his prize-winning research, which helped give rise to gene targeting. He developed a technique using recombinant DNA technology whereby DNA could be injected into the nucleus of mammalian cells, greatly enhancing the effectiveness of gene transfer. He further refined his procedure, incorporating the work of Evans and Smithies into his research, and the cooperative effort gave rise to the “knockout mouse”—a laboratory mouse in which one or more genes had been selectively inactivated or “knocked out.”

Details

Mario Ramberg Capecchi (born 6 October 1937) is an Italian-born molecular geneticist and a co-awardee of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering a method to create mice in which a specific gene is turned off, known as knockout mice. He shared the prize with Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah School of Medicine.

Life

Mario Capecchi was born in Verona, Italy, as the only child of Luciano Capecchi and Lucy Ramberg, an Italian-born daughter of American-born Impressionist painter Lucy Dodd Ramberg and German archaeologist Walter Ramberg. His parents weren't married, and due to the chaos in Europe caused by World War II, the story of his early life is remarkable, but the details are unclear. In 1941 he and his mother were living near Bolzano, about 160 miles north of his father in Reggio Emilia when his mother was arrested and deported for pamphleteering and belonging to an anti-Fascist group. Prior to her arrest she had made contingency plans by selling her belongings and giving the proceeds to a nearby peasant family to care for her child. However, it was not long before Mario ended up on the streets of Bolzano. In July 1942, a few months before his fifth birthday, Italian records suggest he was reunited with his father in Reggio Emilia, which Mario did confirm but stated that he stayed with his father for only for a few brief periods and that he mostly lived on the streets until he was placed in an orphanage towards the end of the war.

Mario almost died of malnutrition. His mother survived the war in Germany (part of the reason the details of his early life are unclear is that she would never talk about her experiences), and when it ended she began a year-long search for him. She finally found him on his ninth birthday in a hospital bed in Reggio Emilia ill with a fever and subsisting on a daily bowl of chicory coffee and bread crust. She took him to Rome, where he had his first bath since he had left her care and where, with money sent by his uncle, Edward Ramberg, an American physicist at RCA, they made arrangements to depart to the United States. He and his mother moved to Pennsylvania to live at an "intentionally cooperative community" called Bryn Gweled, which had been co-founded by his uncle. (Capecchi's other maternal uncle, Walter Ramberg, was also a prominent American physicist). He graduated from George School, a Quaker boarding school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1956.

Capecchi received his Bachelor of Science in chemistry and physics in 1961 from Antioch College in Ohio. Capecchi came to MIT as a graduate student intending to study physics and mathematics, but during the course of his studies, he became interested in molecular biology. His change of interest was driven by the preference of working with few scientists and conducting experiments that did not require the use of big machines. He subsequently transferred to Harvard to join the lab of James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. Capecchi received his PhD in biophysics in 1967 from Harvard University, with his doctoral thesis completed under the tutelage of Watson.

Capecchi was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University from 1967 to 1969. In 1969 he became an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Harvard Medical School. He was promoted to associate professor in 1971. In 1973 he joined the faculty at the University of Utah. Since 1988 Capecchi has also been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has given a talk for Duke University's Program in Genetics and Genomics as part of their Distinguished Lecturer Series. He was the speaker for the 2010 Racker Lectures in Biology & Medicine and Cornell Distinguished Lecture in Cell and Molecular Biology at Cornell University. He is a member of the Italy-USA Foundation.

After the Nobel committee publicly announced that Capecchi was awarded the Nobel prize, an Austrian woman named Marlene Bonelli claimed that Capecchi was her long-lost half-brother. In May 2008, Capecchi met with Bonelli, then 69, in northern Italy, and confirmed that she was his sister.

Knockout mice

Capecchi was awarded the Nobel prize for creating a knockout mouse. This is a mouse, created by genetic engineering and in vitro fertilization, in which a particular gene has been turned off. For this work, Capecchi was awarded the 2007 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology, along with Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies, who also contributed.

Capecchi has also pursued a systematic analysis of the mouse Hox gene family. This gene family plays a key role in the control of embryonic development in all multicellular animals. They determine the placement of cellular development in the proper order along the axis of the body from head to toe.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-11 18:19:06

2103) Martin Evans

Gist:

Work

DNA carries organisms' genomes and also determines their vital processes. The ability to artificially alter DNA opens the way to both new scientific understanding and new treatment methods for various illnesses. In 1981 Evans managed to cultivate what are referred to as embryonic stem cells from mice. This achievement opened the way to producing living mice with modified genomes. This advancement allowed Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies to breed live mice with specific genes inactivated, making it possible to elucidate these genes' functions.

Summary

Martin Evans (born January 1, 1941, Stroud, Gloucestershire, England) is a British scientist who, with Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for developing gene targeting, a technology used to create animal models of human diseases in mice.

Evans studied at the University of Cambridge, earning a B.A. (1963) and an M.A. (1966) in biochemistry before completing a Ph.D. at University College, London, in 1969. In 1978 he joined the faculty at Cambridge, and in 1999 he accepted a post at Cardiff University, where he later became president (2009–12) and served as the school’s chancellor (2012–17). Evans was knighted in 2004.

In 1981 Evans and a colleague discovered embryonic stem cells (often referred to as ES cells) in mice. These stem cells are derived from the inner cell mass of a mammalian embryo at a very early stage of development. After determining that ES cells could serve as vehicles for the transmission of altered genetic material, Evans sought to introduce specific changes into the mouse genome. Using mutated ES cells, he was able to produce a generation of mice that exhibited Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a hereditary gender-linked metabolic disorder. This initial success gave rise to “knockout mice,” laboratory mice that had been altered by deactivating or “knocking out” a specific gene for the purpose of modeling a human disease. Because of the relative similarity between the mouse and human genome, knockout mice provided a valuable framework for the development of treatments and therapies for the diseases and disorders that they modeled.

Details

Sir Martin John Evans (born 1 January 1941) is an English biologist who, with Matthew Kaufman, was the first to culture mice embryonic stem cells and cultivate them in a laboratory in 1981. He is also known, along with Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, for his work in the development of the knockout mouse and the related technology of gene targeting, a method of using embryonic stem cells to create specific gene modifications in mice. In 2007, the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in recognition of their discovery and contribution to the efforts to develop new treatments for illnesses in humans.

He won a major scholarship to Christ's College, Cambridge at a time when advances in genetics were occurring there and became interested in biology and biochemistry. He then went to University College London where he learned laboratory skills supervised by Elizabeth Deuchar. In 1978, he moved to the Department of Genetics, at the University of Cambridge, and in 1980 began his collaboration with Matthew Kaufman. They explored the method of using blastocysts for the isolation of embryonic stem cells. After Kaufman left, Evans continued his work, upgrading his laboratory skills to the newest technologies, isolated the embryonic stem cell of the early mouse embryo and established it in a cell culture. He genetically modified and implanted it into adult female mice with the intent of creating genetically modified offspring, work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2007. In 2015, he was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. Today, genetically modified mice are considered vital for medical research.

Early life and education

Evans was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, on 1 January 1941. His mother was a teacher. His father maintained a mechanical workshop and taught Evans to use tools and machines including a lathe. Evans was close to his grandfather who was a choir master at a Baptist Church for over 40 years, and whose main interests were music, poetry, and the Baptist Church. His mother's brother was a professor of astronomy at the University of Cambridge. As a boy Evans was quiet, shy and inquisitive. He liked science, and his parents encouraged his education. He remembers loving old science books and receiving an electric experimental set which he wanted for Christmas. He attributes to a chemistry set, from which he learned basic chemistry, for the development of one of his "greatest amateur passions". He went to middle school at St Dunstan's College, an independent school for boys in South East London, where he started chemistry and physics classes, and studied biology. He worked hard studying for the University of Cambridge entrance exams. At school he was one of the best pupils, although not at the top of the class.

Evans won a major scholarship to Christ's College, Cambridge, at a time when there were many advances in genetics being made. He studied zoology, botany and chemistry, but soon dropped zoology and added biochemistry, finding himself drawn to plant physiology and function. He went to seminars by Sydney Brenner and attended lectures by Jacques Monod. He graduated from Christ's College with a BA in 1963; although, he did not take his final examinations, because he was ill with glandular fever. He decided on a career examining genetic control of vertebrate development. He moved to University College London where he had a fortunate position as a research assistant, learning laboratory skills under Dr Elizabeth Deuchar. His goal at the time was "to isolate developmentally controlled m-RNA". He was awarded a PhD in 1969.

Career and research

He became a lecturer in the Anatomy and Embryology department at University College London, where he did research and taught PhD students and undergraduates. In 1978, he moved to the Department of Genetics, at the University of Cambridge, where his work in association with Matthew Kaufman began in 1980. They developed the idea of using blastocysts for the isolation of embryonic stem cells.

After Kaufman left to take up a professorship in Anatomy in Edinburgh, Evans continued his work, branching out eclectically, "drawn into a number of fascinating fields of biology and medicine." In October 1985, he visited the Whitehead Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, for one month of practical work to learn the most recent laboratory techniques.

In the 1990s, he was a fellow at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. In 1999, he became Professor of Mammalian Genetics and Director of the School of Biosciences at Cardiff University, where he worked until he retired at the end of 2007. He became a Knight Bachelor in the 2004 New Year Honours in recognition of his work in stem cell research. He received the accolade from Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace on 25 June 2004. In 2007, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies for their work in discovering a method for introducing homologous recombination in mice employing embryonic stem cells. Evans was appointed president of Cardiff University and was inaugurated into that position on 23 November 2009. Subsequently, Evans became Chancellor of Cardiff University in 2012. He is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge.

Stem cell research

Evans and Kaufman isolated the embryonic stem cells from early embryos (embryoblasts) of mice and established them in cell cultures. These early embryonic cells have the potential to differentiate into any of the cells of the adult organism. They modified these stem cells genetically and placed them in the wombs of female mice so they would give birth to genetically modified offspring.

In 1981, Evans and Kaufman published results for experiments in which they described how they isolated embryonic stem cells from mouse blastocysts and grew them in cell cultures. This was also achieved by Gail R. Martin, independently, in the same year. Eventually, Evans was able to isolate the embryonic stem cell of the early mouse embryo and establish it in a cell culture. He then genetically modified it and implanted it into adult female mice with the intent of creating genetically modified offspring, the forebears of the laboratory mice that are considered so vital to medical research today. The availability of these cultured stem cells eventually made possible the introduction of specific gene alterations into the germ line of mice and the creation of transgenic mice to use as experimental models for human illnesses.

Evans and his collaborators showed that they could introduce a new gene into cultured embryonic stem cells and then use such genetically transformed cells to make chimeric embryos. In some chimeric embryos, the genetically altered stem cells produced gametes, thus allowing transmission of the artificially induced mutation into future generations of mice. In this way, transgenic mice with induced mutations in the enzyme Hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase (HPRT) were created. The HPRT mutations were produced by retroviral insertion; it was proposed that by taking advantage of genetic recombination between the normal HPRT gene and an artificial gene sequenced added to the cultured embryonic stem cells, "it may also eventually be possible to produce specific alterations in endogenous genes through homologous recombination with cloned copies modified in vitro". The production of transgenic mice using this proposed approach was accomplished in the laboratories of Oliver Smithies, and of Mario Capecchi.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-12 17:14:16

2104) Oliver Smithies

Gist:

Work

DNA carries organisms' genomes and also determines their vital processes. The ability to artificially alter DNA opens the way to both new scientific understanding and new treatment methods for various illnesses. In conjunction with attempts to find treatment methods for hereditary blood diseases, Smithies discovered that a disease-causing gene could be modified. In 1986, Smithies and Mario Capecchi were able to achieve specific modifications in the genomes of mice. By inactivating specific genes, their functions could be determined.

Summary

Oliver Smithies (born June 23, 1925, Halifax, Yorkshire [now in West Yorkshire], England—died January 10, 2017, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S.) was a British-born American scientist who, with Mario R. Capecchi and Sir Martin J. Evans, won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for developing gene targeting, a technology used to create animal models of human diseases in mice.

In 1951 Smithies earned both a master’s degree and a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Oxford and later moved to the United States, where he studied at the University of Wisconsin. The following year he joined the Connaught Medical Research Laboratory at the University of Toronto, where he developed the starch gel electrophoresis technique, an advanced method of separating and identifying blood proteins. In 1960 he returned to Wisconsin to teach, and in 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

While researching gene therapy as a method for treating hereditary diseases in the 1980s, Smithies uncovered the work that Evans had been doing on the embryonic stem cells of mice. Using a sample obtained from Evans, he demonstrated that targeted removal or alteration of genes within the stem cells allowed for the controlled manipulation of the mouse genome. He and Capecchi used that breakthrough to breed mice with specific disease conditions. In 1991 Smithies and his laboratory created a “knockout mouse”—so named because one of its genes had been experimentally replaced or “knocked out”—that accurately modeled human cystic fibrosis.

Smithies was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1971. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Smithies, Capecchi, and Evans won the 2001 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, and Smithies and Capecchi shared (with Ralph L. Brinster) the 2003 Wolf Prize for Medicine.

Details

Oliver Smithies (23 June 1925 – 10 January 2017) was a British-American geneticist and physical biochemist. He is known for introducing starch as a medium for gel electrophoresis in 1955, and for the discovery, simultaneously with Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans, of the technique of homologous recombination of transgenic DNA with genomic DNA, a much more reliable method of altering animal genomes than previously used, and the technique behind gene targeting and knockout mice. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007 for his genetics work.

Early life and education

Smithies was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, England, to William Smithies and his wife Doris, née Sykes. His father sold life insurance policies and his mother taught English at Halifax Technical College. He had a twin brother and a younger sister. He attended a primary school in the nearby village of Copley and then went to Heath Grammar School in Halifax. He said that his love of science came from an early fascination with radios and telescopes.

He attended Balliol College, Oxford on a Brackenbury Scholarship, initially reading medicine. He studied anatomy and physiology, winning a prize in anatomy, and graduated with a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in animal physiology, including biochemistry, in 1946. Inspired by tutorials from Alexander G. Ogston on applying physical chemistry to biological systems, Smithies then switched away from medicine to earn a second bachelor's degree in chemistry. He published his first research paper, co-written with Ogston, in 1948. In 1951, he received a Master of Arts degree and a Doctor of Philosophy in biochemistry under Ogston's supervision; his thesis was entitled "Physico-chemical properties of solutions of proteins".

Career

Smithies was awarded a Commonwealth Fund fellowship to take up a post-doctoral position in the United States, in the laboratory of J. W. Williams at the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Department of Chemistry. A problem with acquiring a U.S. visa, due to a condition of the Commonwealth Fund fellowship, then forced him to leave the U.S. From 1953 to 1960, he worked as an associate research faculty member, under insulin researcher David A. Scott, in the Connaught Medical Research Laboratory at the University of Toronto in Canada. He learned medical genetics from Norma Ford Walker at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

In 1960, Smithies returned to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he worked in the Department of Genetics until 1988 as, successively, assistant, associate and Leon J. Cole and Hilldale Professor of Genetics and Medical Genetics. Subsequently, he was the Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He continued to work in his lab there daily into his eighties. He co-authored a total of more than 350 research papers and reviews, dating from 1948 to 2016.

Research

Smithies developed the technique of gel electrophoresis using a starch matrix, as a sideline of (unproductive) research into an insulin precursor molecule, at the University of Toronto. This improved the ability to resolve proteins by electrophoresis. He was assisted technically in his later electrophoresis work by Otto Hiller. He used starch electrophoresis to reveal differences between normal human plasma proteins, and in collaboration with Norma Ford Walker, showed that the variation was inherited, which stimulated his interest in genetics.

While at the University of Wisconsin in the 1980s, Smithies developed gene targeting in mice, a method of replacing single mouse genes using homologous recombination. Mario Capecchi also developed the technique independently. This research is the basis of methods used worldwide to investigate the role of particular genes in a wide range of human diseases including cancer, cystic fibrosis and diabetes. In 2002, Smithies worked with his wife, Nobuyo Maeda, studying high blood pressure using genetically altered mice.

Awards and honors

Smithies won the 2001 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, jointly with Martin Evans (Cardiff University) and Mario Capecchi (University of Utah), for their work on homologous recombination. He received the Wolf Prize in Medicine, with Capecchi and Ralph L. Brinster, in 2002/3. He won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, jointly with Capecchi and Evans, "for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells."

His other awards include two Gairdner Foundation International Awards (1990 and 1993), the North Carolina Award for Science (1993), the Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Prize from the General Motors Foundation, jointly with Capecchi (1994), the Ciba Award from the American Heart Foundation (1996), the Bristol Myers Squibb Award (1997), the Association of American Medical Colleges' Award for Distinguished Research, jointly with Capecchi (1998), the International Okamoto Award from the Japan Vascular Disease Research Foundation (2000), the O. Max Gardner Award, the highest award for faculty in the University of North Carolina system (2002), the Massry Prize of the Meira and Shaul G. Massry Foundation (2002), shared with Capecchi, the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology, jointly with Capecchi (2005), and the American Institute of Chemists Gold Medal (2009).

Smithies was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences (1971), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1978), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1986), the Institute of Medicine (2003), and as a foreign member of the Royal Society. He received honorary degrees from the University of Chicago (1991), the University of São Paulo (2008) and the University of Oxford (2011).

A blue plaque to him was erected by the Halifax Civic Trust.

Personal life

Smithies married Lois Kitze, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, in the 1950s; they separated in 1978. His second wife, Nobuyo Maeda, is a pathology professor at the University of North Carolina. Smithies was a naturalized American citizen, and, despite being color-blind, was a licensed private airplane pilot who enjoyed gliding. He described himself as an atheist.

Smithies died on 10 January 2017 at the age of 91.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-12 22:40:42

2105) Gukesh Dommaraju

Gukesh Dommaraju (born 29 May 2006), also known as Gukesh D, is an Indian chess grandmaster and the reigning World Chess Champion. He is the youngest undisputed World Chess Champion. A chess prodigy, Gukesh is the youngest player to have surpassed a FIDE rating of 2750, doing so at the age of 17, and previously the third-youngest to have surpassed 2700 at the age of 16. He earned his grandmaster title at the age of 12 and remains the third-youngest grandmaster in the history of chess.

He won a team gold and an individual gold medal at the 45th Chess Olympiad in 2024, as well as a team bronze and an individual gold medal at the 44th Chess Olympiad in 2022. At the age of 18, he became the youngest Candidates Tournament winner and, subsequently, the youngest undisputed World Chess Champion, having defeated Ding Liren 7½ to 6½ at the World Chess Championship 2024. At the junior level, he is a multiple-gold medalist at the World Youth Championship and the Asian Youth Chess Championship. Gukesh is also a silver medalist at the Asian Games.

Early life

Gukesh was born on 29 May 2006 into a Telugu family in Chennai. His father, Rajinikanth, is an ENT surgeon, and his mother, Padma, is a microbiologist. He learned to play chess at the age of seven. He studied at the Velammal Vidyalaya school, Mel Ayanambakkam, Chennai.

Gukesh began practicing and playing chess in 2013 for one hour, three days a week. After his good performance was acknowledged by his chess teachers, he began to participate more often and play tournaments on weekends.

Career:

Youth Championships and rise in chess (2015–2019)

Gukesh won the Under-9 section of the Asian School Chess Championships in 2015 and the World Youth Chess Championships in 2018 in the Under 12 category. He also won five gold medals at the 2018 Asian Youth Chess Championships in the U-12 individual rapid and blitz, U-12 team rapid and blitz and U-12 individual classical formats. He completed the requirements for the title of International Master in March 2017 at the 34th Cappelle-la-Grande Open.

On 15 January 2019, at the age of 12 years, 7 months, and 17 days, Gukesh became the then second-youngest grandmaster in history, only surpassed by Sergey Karjakin by 17 days. The record has since been beaten by Abhimanyu Mishra, making Gukesh the third-youngest.

In June 2021, he won the Julius Baer Challengers Chess Tour, Gelfand Challenge, scoring 14 out of 19 points.

Olympiad individual gold (2022)

In August 2022, he played the 44th Chess Olympiad and initially had a perfect score of 8/8, notably defeating US No. 1 Fabiano Caruana in the eighth match. He finished with a score of 9 out of 11, earning the gold medal on the 1st board and his team India-2 finished third in the tournament.

In September 2022, Gukesh reached a rating of over 2700 for the first time, with a rating of 2726. This made him the third-youngest player to pass 2700, after Wei Yi and Alireza Firouzja. In October 2022 during the Aimchess Rapid tournament, Gukesh became the youngest player to beat Magnus Carlsen since the latter became World Champion.

Candidates qualification (2023)

In the August 2023 rating list, Gukesh became the youngest player ever to reach a rating of 2750. Gukesh participated in the Chess World Cup 2023. He defeated Misratdin Iskandarov, S. L. Narayanan, Andrey Esipenko, and Wang Hao to qualify for the quarterfinals, where he was defeated by world No. 1 Magnus Carlsen.

In the September 2023 rating list, Gukesh officially surpassed Viswanathan Anand as the top-ranked Indian player, marking the first time in 37 years that Anand was not the top-ranked Indian player. In December 2023, with the end of the FIDE Circuit, Gukesh qualified for the 2024 Candidates Tournament. Gukesh had placed second in the Circuit, but Fabiano Caruana, the winner, had already qualified through the World Cup. He became the third youngest player to qualify for a Candidates tournament, behind Bobby Fischer and Magnus Carlsen.

Olympiad gold and world champion (2024–present)

In January 2024, Gukesh participated in the Tata Steel Chess Tournament 2024. He scored 8.5/13 to finish in a 4-way tie for first place. In the twelfth round, he had a winning position against R Praggnanandhaa but blundered into a threefold repetition. In tiebreaks, he defeated Anish Giri in the semifinals but lost to Wei Yi in the finals.

In April 2024, Gukesh participated in the 2024 Candidates Tournament. Gukesh won games against R Praggnanandhaa and Vidit Gujrathi playing as black, Alireza Firouzja playing as white, and Nijat Abasov playing as both black and white. His only loss was his game with black against Firouzja. This gave him five wins, one loss and eight draws, for a score of 9/14, winning the tournament and qualifying for the 2024 World Championship match against Ding Liren. He is the youngest-ever winner of the Candidates.

In September 2024, Gukesh took part in the Chess Olympiad in Budapest as part of the Indian team. He showcased a dominant performance on board one, scoring an unbeaten 9 points in the 10 games he played. In the tournament, he defeated grandmasters Vignir Vatnar Stefansson, Ádám Kozák, Alexandr Predke, Aydin Suleymanli, Wei Yi, Parham Maghsoodloo, Fabiano Caruana, and Vladimir Fedoseev. He had a performance rating of 3056, which was the highest among all players in the tournament. His performance earned him an individual gold medal on board one, and helped India to their first ever team gold medal at the Olympiad.

Gukesh entered the FIDE world top-five for the first time on 1 October 2024.

Gukesh became the 18th World Chess Champion on 12 December 2024 after defeating Ding Liren in the last game and winning the World Chess Championship by 7.5–6.5. The win made him the youngest undisputed World Chess Champion, with only Ruslan Ponomariov, the winner of the 2002 World Chess Championship, a knock-out style tournament during the period where there was a title split in the chess world, being younger.

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Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-14 00:05:37

2106) Yoichiro Nambu

Gist:

Work

For a long time, physicists assumed that various symmetries characterized nature. In a kind of “mirror world” where right and left were reversed and matter was replaced by antimatter, the same physical laws would apply, they posited. However, symmetries had been proven to be violated at times. In 1960, Yoichiro Nambu formulated a mathematical theory for understanding spontaneous symmetry violations, providing a basis for better understanding elementary particles and their interactions.

Summary

Yoichiro Nambu (born January 18, 1921, Tokyo, Japan—died July 5, 2015, Ōsaka) was a Japanese-born American physicist who was awarded, with Kobayashi Makoto and Maskawa Toshihide, the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics. Nambu received half of the prize for his discovery of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, which explained why matter is much more common in the cosmos than antimatter. That theoretical research, which was mostly carried out in the 1950s, also helped earn him a share of Israel’s Wolf Prize in physics (1994/95).

After receiving an M.S. in 1942 from the University of Tokyo, Nambu worked as a professor at Ōsaka City University (1949–52). He received a doctorate in physics from the University of Tokyo in 1952, and that same year he went to the United States on the invitation of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1954 he became a research associate at the University of Chicago, where he spent the remainder of his career, becoming associate professor (1956), professor (1958), and professor emeritus (1991).

Nambu was one of the founders of string theory, which models subatomic particles as tiny one-dimensional “stringlike” entities. He also was a pioneer in quantum chromodynamics, a field in which he first suggested that the gluon (in three “colours”: red, green, and blue) is the intermediary in carrying the strong force between quarks in nucleons.

Nambu became a U.S. citizen in 1970. He received many awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Science (1982) and the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (1986). He was a member of both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an honorary member of the Japan Academy.

Details

Yoichiro Nambu (18 January 1921 – 5 July 2015) was a Japanese-American physicist and professor at the University of Chicago.

Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery in 1960 of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, related at first to the strong interaction's chiral symmetry and later to the electroweak interaction and Higgs mechanism.

The other half was split equally between Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."

Early life and education

Nambu was born on 18 January 1921 in Tokyo, Empire of Japan (Now Japan). After graduating from the then-Fukui Secondary High School in Fukui City, he enrolled in the Imperial University of Tokyo (Now University of Tokyo) and studied physics. He was a lieutenant (technical lieutenant) in the Imperial Japanese Army.

He received his Bachelor of Science in 1942 and Doctorate of Science in 1952. In 1949, he was appointed to associate professor at Osaka City University and promoted to professorship the next year at the age of 29.

In 1952, Nambu was invited by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, to study. He moved to the University of Chicago in 1954 and was promoted to professor in 1958. From 1974 to 1977, Nambu was also served as the Chairman of the Department of Physics, and then he became as an American citizen from 1970 until his death in 2015.

Career in physics

Nambu proposed the "color charge" of quantum chromodynamics, having done early work on spontaneous symmetry breaking in particle physics, and having discovered that the dual resonance model could be explained as a quantum mechanical theory of strings. He was accounted as one of the founders of string theory.

After more than fifty years as a professor, he was Henry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor emeritus at the University of Chicago's Department of Physics and Enrico Fermi Institute.

The Nambu–Goto action in string theory is named after Nambu and Tetsuo Goto. Also, massless bosons arising in field theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking are sometimes referred to as Nambu–Goldstone bosons.

Death

Nambu died of heart failure at the hospital in Osaka on 5 July 2015, at the age of 94. The announcement of his death was delayed until 17 July, just 12 days after his death. His funeral and memorial services were held among close relatives.

Nambu was survived by his wife, Chieko, and his son, John.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-16 00:03:52

2107) Makoto Kobayashi

Gist:

Work

Physicists long assumed that nature is characterized by symmetry. In a kind of mirrored world where right and left changed places and matter was exchanged for antimatter, natural laws would stand. After it was discovered that the decay of certain particles (kaons) was asymmetrical, a mathematics-based explanation for this was presented by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa in 1972. The explanation meant that there must be at least three families of quarks that form matter. This theory was later verified.

Summary

Kobayashi Makoto (born April 7, 1944, Nagoya, Japan) is a Japanese scientist who was a corecipient, with Yoichiro Nambu and Maskawa Toshihide, of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics. Kobayashi and Maskawa shared half the prize for their discovery of the origin of broken symmetry, which created at least six quarks moments after the big bang.

Kobayashi received a Ph.D. from Nagoya University in 1972. That same year he and Maskawa proposed that CP violation (the violation of the combined conservation laws associated with charge conjugation [C] and parity [P] by the weak force) is an inherent property of the standard model of subatomic particles if there exist at least two additional quarks beyond the four “flavours” (up, down, charm, and strange) known at that time. These two new quark flavours were experimentally confirmed in 1977 (bottom quark) and 1995 (top quark).

In 1979 Kobayashi became an assistant professor at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba Science City, and in 1989 he was appointed professor and designated as the head of Physics Division II. He became the director of the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies at KEK in 2003, and he was named professor emeritus in 2006. In addition to his Nobel honour, Kobayashi won the J.J. Sakurai Prize (1985) for theoretical particle physics (shared with Maskawa), the Japan Academy Prize (1985), and the Japanese Person of Cultural Merit Award (2001).

Details

Makoto Kobayashi (Kobayashi Makoto, born April 7, 1944, in Nagoya, Japan) is a Japanese physicist known for his work on CP-violation who was awarded one-fourth of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."

Early life and education

Makoto Kobayashi was born in Nagoya, Japan in 1944. When he was two years old, Kobayashi's father Hisashi died. The Kobayashi family home was destroyed by the Bombing of Nagoya, so they stayed at his mother's (surnamed Kaifu) family house. One of Makoto's cousins, Toshiki Kaifu, the 51st Prime Minister of Japan, was living in the same place. His other cousin was an astronomer, Norio Kaifu. Many years later, Toshiki Kaifu recalled Kobayashi: "when he was a child, he was a quiet and lovely boy, always reading some difficult books in my room. I think this is the beginning of his sudden change into a genius."

After graduating from the School of Science of Nagoya University in 1967, he obtained a DSc degree from the Graduate School of Science of Nagoya University in 1972. During college years, he received guidance from Shoichi Sakata and others.

Career

After completing his doctoral research at Nagoya University in 1972, Kobayashi worked as a research associate on particle physics at Kyoto University. Together, with his colleague Toshihide Maskawa, he worked on explaining CP-violation within the Standard Model of particle physics. Kobayashi and Maskawa's theory required that there were at least three generations of quarks, a prediction that was confirmed experimentally four years later by the discovery of the bottom quark.

Kobayashi and Maskawa's article, "CP Violation in the Renormalizable Theory of Weak Interaction", published in 1973, is the fourth most cited high energy physics paper of all time as of 2010. The Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa matrix, which defines the mixing parameters between quarks was the result of this work. Kobayashi and Maskawa were jointly awarded half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, with the other half going to Yoichiro Nambu.

In recognition of three Nobel laureates' contributions, the bronze statues of Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, Leo Esaki, and Makoto Kobayashi was set up in the Central Park of Azuma 2 in Tsukuba City in 2015.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-18 00:27:49

2108) Toshihide Maskawa

Gist:

Life

Toshihide Maskawa was born in Nagoya, Japan. His parents made a living as traders, selling mainly sugar. Maskawa chose a different path in life and was accepted to Nagoya University. He earned his PhD in particle physics in 1967 from the same university. Maskawa carried out his Nobel Prize-awarded work at Kyoto University. Since that time, he has been affiliated with both Nagoya and Kyoto universities. Toshihide Maskawa was married with two sons.

Work

Physicists long assumed that nature is characterized by symmetry. In a kind of mirrored world where right and left changed places and matter was exchanged for antimatter, natural laws would stand. After it was discovered that the decay of certain particles (kaons) was asymmetrical, a mathematics-based explanation for this was presented by Toshihide Maskawa and Makoto Kobayashi in 1972. The explanation meant that there must be at least three families of quarks that form matter. This theory was later verified.

Summary

Maskawa Toshihide (born February 7, 1940, Nagoya, Japan—died July 23, 2021, Kyōto) was a Japanese physicist who was a corecipient, with Yoichiro Nambu and Kobayashi Makoto, of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics. Maskawa and Kobayashi shared half the prize for their discovery of the origin of broken symmetry, which created at least six quarks moments after the big bang.

Maskawa received a Ph.D. in 1967 from Nagoya University in Japan. In 1972 Kobayashi and Maskawa proposed that CP violation (the violation of the combined conservation laws associated with charge conjugation [C] and parity [P] by the weak force) is an inherent property of the standard model of subatomic particles if there exist at least two additional quarks beyond the four “flavours” (up, down, charm, and strange) known at that time. These two new quark flavours were experimentally confirmed in 1977 (bottom quark) and 1995 (top quark).

Maskawa taught at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Nuclear Study and Kyōto Sangyō University. From 1997 to 2003 he was director of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University, from which he retired as professor emeritus. In 1985 Maskawa and Kobayashi were the first recipients of the J.J. Sakurai Prize.

Details

Toshihide Maskawa (or Masukawa) (Masukawa Toshihide, 7 February 1940 – 23 July 2021) was a Japanese theoretical physicist known for his work on CP-violation who was awarded one quarter of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."

Early life and education

Maskawa was born in Nagoya, Japan. After World War II ended, the Maskawa family operated as a sugar wholesaler. A native of Aichi Prefecture, Toshihide Maskawa graduated from Nagoya University in 1962 and received a Ph.D. degree in particle physics from the same university in 1967. His doctoral advisor was the physicist Shoichi Sakata.

From early life Maskawa liked trivia, also studied mathematics, chemistry, linguistics and various books. In high school, he loved novels, especially detective and mystery stories and novels by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

Career

At Kyoto University in the early 1970s, he collaborated with Makoto Kobayashi on explaining broken symmetry (the CP violation) within the Standard Model of particle physics. Maskawa and Kobayashi's theory required that there be at least three generations of quarks, a prediction that was confirmed experimentally four years later by the discovery of the bottom quark.

Maskawa and Kobayashi's 1973 article, "CP Violation in the Renormalizable Theory of Weak Interaction", is the fourth most cited high energy physics paper of all time as of 2010. The Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa matrix, which defines the mixing parameters between quarks was the result of this work. Kobayashi and Maskawa were jointly awarded half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, with the other half going to Yoichiro Nambu.

Maskawa was director of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics from 1997 to 2003. He was special professor and director general of Kobayashi-Maskawa Institute for the Origin of Particles and the Universe at Nagoya University, director of Maskawa Institute for Science and Culture at Kyoto Sangyo University and professor emeritus at Kyoto University.

Nobel lecture

On 8 December 2008, after Maskawa told the audience "Sorry, I cannot speak English", he delivered his Nobel lecture on “What Did CP Violation Tell Us?” in Japanese language, at Stockholm University. The audience followed the subtitles on the screen behind him.

Personal life

Maskawa married Akiko Takahashi in 1967. The couple have two children, Kazuki and Tokifuji.

Death

On 23 July 2021 at the same day as the opening ceremony of Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, Maskawa died of oral cancer at his home in Kyoto at the age of 81. Although his death was unrelated to triple disaster and COVID-19 infection. He was cremated in October 2021 after the private funeral.

CP violation

In particle physics, CP violation is a violation of CP-symmetry (or charge conjugation parity symmetry): the combination of C-symmetry (charge conjugation symmetry) and P-symmetry (parity symmetry). CP-symmetry states that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle is interchanged with its antiparticle (C-symmetry) while its spatial coordinates are inverted ("mirror" or P-symmetry). The discovery of CP violation in 1964 in the decays of neutral kaons resulted in the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980 for its discoverers James Cronin and Val Fitch.

It plays an important role both in the attempts of cosmology to explain the dominance of matter over antimatter in the present universe, and in the study of weak interactions in particle physics.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-19 19:55:04

2109) Osamu Shimomura

Gist:

Work

Some organisms produce what has been named Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), which emits a shimmering light. The formation of GFP is regulated by a gene that can be incorporated into the genomes of other organisms. Because GFP can be linked to other proteins thanks to genetic engineering, it has become an important tool for studying biological processes in cells. The first steps in achieving this were taken by Osamu Shimamura, who isolated GFP from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria in the 1960s and found that the protein glowed green when illuminated with ultraviolet light.

Summary

Osamu Shimomura (born August 27, 1928, Fukuchiyama, Japan—died October 19, 2018, Nagasaki) was a Japanese-born chemist who was a corecipient, with Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien, of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

In 1955 Shimomura became a research assistant at Nagoya University, where he earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1960. That same year, he traveled to the United States on the invitation of Princeton University. It was as a researcher there that he made the discovery that would lead to his Nobel Prize honour. In 1982 he moved his studies to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, from which he later retired as professor emeritus. He also worked at Boston University Medical School.

Shimomura received one-third of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his identification of the green fluorescent protein (GFP), a naturally occurring substance in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria that is used as a tool to make visible the actions of certain cells. The visual signal that GFP provides allows scientists to probe protein activity, such as when and where proteins are produced and how different proteins or parts of proteins move and approach each other within a cell. In the 1960s Shimomura showed that Aequorea victoria’s green fluorescence, which had been discovered in 1955, is produced by the protein that was later named GFP. Subsequent discoveries by his corecipients opened a vast set of opportunities for the utilization of GFP in studying biological processes at the molecular level.

Details

Osamu Shimomura (Shimomura Osamu, August 27, 1928 – October 19, 2018) was a Japanese organic chemist and marine biologist, and professor emeritus at Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Boston University School of Medicine. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein (GFP) with two American scientists: Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Tsien of the University of California-San Diego.

Biography

Born in Fukuchiyama, Kyoto in 1928, Shimomura was brought up in Manchukuo (Manchuria, China) and Osaka, Japan while his father served as an officer in the Imperial Japanese Army. Later, his family moved to Isahaya, Nagasaki, 25 km from the epicenter of the August 1945 atomic bombing of the city. He recalled hearing, as a 16-year-old boy, the bomber plane Bockscar before the atom bomb exploded. The explosion flash blinded Shimomura for about thirty seconds, and he was later drenched by the "black rain" bomb fallout. He overcame great odds in the following 11 years to earn an education and achieve academic success.

Shimomura's education opportunities were starkly limited in devastated, post-war Japan. Although he later recalled having no interest in the subject, he enrolled in the College of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Nagasaki Medical College (now Nagasaki University School of Pharmaceutical Sciences). The Medical College campus had been entirely destroyed by the atomic bomb blast, forcing the pharmacy school to relocate to a temporary campus near Shimomura's home. This proximity was the fortuitous reason he embarked upon the studies and career which would ultimately lead to unanticipated rewards. Shimomura was awarded a BS degree in pharmacy in 1951, and he stayed on as a lab assistant through 1955.

Shimomura's mentor at Nagasaki helped him find employment as an assistant to Professor Yoshimasa Hirata at Nagoya University in 1956. While working for Professor Hirata, he received a MS degree in organic chemistry in 1958 and, before leaving Japan for an appointment at Princeton University, a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1960 at Nagoya University. At Nagoya, Hirata assigned Shimomura the challenging task of determining what made the crushed remains of a type of crustacean (Jp. umi-hotaru, lit. "sea-firefly", Vargula hilgendorfii) glow when moistened with water. This assignment led Shimomura to the successful identification of the protein causing the phenomenon, and he published the preliminary findings in the Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan in a paper titled "Crystalline Cypridina luciferin." The article caught the attention of Professor Frank Johnson at Princeton University, and Johnson successfully recruited Shimomura to work with him in 1960.

Studies

Shimomura worked in the department of biology at Princeton for Professor Johnson to study the bioluminescent jellyfish Aequorea victoria, which they collected during many summers at the Friday Harbor Laboratories of the University of Washington. In 1962, their work culminated in the discovery of the proteins aequorin and green fluorescent protein (GFP) in A. victoria; for this work, he was awarded a third of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008.

Family

His wife, Akemi, whom Shimomura met at Nagasaki University, is also an organic chemist and was a partner in his research activities. Their son, Tsutomu Shimomura, is a computer security expert who was involved in the arrest of Kevin Mitnick. Their daughter, Sachi Shimomura, is director of Undergraduate Studies for the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature.

Death

Shimomura died on October 19, 2018, of cancer in Nagasaki.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-22 15:46:16

2110) Martin Chalfie

Gist:

Life

Martin Chalfie was born in Chicago. His parents worked in the garment industry, but they encouraged their three sons to pursue academic careers. Chalfie took an interest in the natural sciences, especially chemistry, and received a doctorate in biochemistry at Harvard. He did various short-term jobs before continuing studies for his doctorate. Later he conducted research in Cambridge, England, where he did his Nobel Prize-winning work. Since 1982 he has served at Columbia University. He married Tulle Hazelrigg, and they have one daughter, Sarah.

Work

Some organisms produce what has been named Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), which emits a shimmering light. The formation of GFP is regulated by a gene that can be incorporated into the genomes of other organisms. Because GFP can be linked to other proteins thanks to genetic engineering, it has become an important tool for studying biological processes in cells. Martin Chalfie began to use GFP for this purpose in 1988. He inserted the GFP gene into the ringworm C. elegans and succeeded in coloring six individual cells that could then be tracked.

Summary

Martin Chalfie (born January 15, 1947, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American chemist who was a corecipient, with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien, of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Chalfie received a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University in 1977. In 1982 he became a professor of biological sciences at Columbia University in New York, where he did the research that led to his Nobel honour. He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. Chalfie and his corecipients were awarded a Nobel Prize in 2008 for their work in the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP), a naturally occurring substance in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria that is used as a tool to make visible the actions of certain cells. Their work with GFP opened a vast set of opportunities for studying biological processes at the molecular level.

GFP provides a visual signal that scientists use to probe protein activity, such as when and where proteins are produced and how different proteins or parts of proteins move and approach each other within a cell. In the 1960s Shimomura showed that Aequorea victoria’s green fluorescence, which had been discovered in 1955, is produced by the protein that was later named GFP. American biochemist Douglas Prasher analyzed the chromophore in GFP in the 1980s and subsequently found and cloned the gene responsible for making GFP. In 1993 Chalfie showed that the gene that instructs the cell to make GFP could be embedded in the nucleic acids of other organisms, first in the bacterium Escherichia coli and then in the transparent nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, so that they would make their own GFP. This discovery opened the possibility of using GFP in virtually any organism. Tsien then showed, beginning in 1994, that oxygen is required for GFP fluorescence and that point mutations in the gene could shift the wavelength and intensity of the fluorescence. Tsien also helped to determine the structure of GFP and described how to use GFP and its variants to study the role and behaviour of calcium ions in living systems. Chalfie was given one-third of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for being the first to illuminate cells by inserting GFP into them.

Details

Martin Lee Chalfie (born January 15, 1947) is an American scientist. He is University Professor at Columbia University. He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP". He holds a PhD in neurobiology from Harvard University.

Education and early life

Chalfie grew up in Chicago, Illinois, son of the guitarist Eli Chalfie (1910–1996) and owner of an apparel store Vivian Chalfie (née Friedlen, 1913–2005). His maternal grandfather, Meyer L. Friedlen, immigrated to Chicago from Moscow at an early age; his paternal grandparents, Benjamin and Esther Chalfie, came to Cincinnati from Brest-Litovsk and are Jewish.

He matriculated at Harvard University in 1965, intending to be a math major, but he switched to biochemistry because it combined his interests in chemistry, math, and biology. He spent the summer after his junior year working in the laboratory of Klaus Weber at Harvard, but "It was so disheartening to completely fail that I decided I shouldn't be in biology." As a result, in his senior year, he completed his major and took courses in law, theater, and Russian literature.

He also competed on the swim team at Harvard and was named captain in his senior year. At the time, swimming coach Bill Brooks said, "Marty will make an excellent captain because he has the admiration of the entire team." As captain, he won the Harold S. Ulen trophy, awarded "to a senior on the Harvard team who best demonstrates those qualities of leadership, sportsmanship, and team cooperation as exemplified by Harold S. Ulen." Following the announcement of Chalfie's Nobel award, his freshman-year roommate observed of Chalfie, "He would always identify himself as a swimmer."

After graduating in 1969, he worked at a variety of temporary jobs, such as selling dresses for his parents' dress manufacturing business in Chicago and teaching at Hamden Hall Country Day School in Hamden, Connecticut. In the summer of 1971, his research at the laboratory of Jose Zadunaisky at Yale University resulted in his first publication. With revived confidence, he returned to Harvard for graduate studies under Robert Perlman, and received his PhD in 1977.

Career and research

Chalfie conducted his postdoctoral research at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) with Sydney Brenner and John Sulston, and the three published a paper in 1985 on "The Neural Circuit for Touch Sensitivity in C. elegans". Chalfie then left the LMB in 1982 to join the faculty of Columbia University in the department of biological sciences and continued to study C. elegans touch mutants.

He married Tulle Hazelrigg. She later joined him on the faculty of Columbia University. She gave him permission to cite her unpublished research in his seminal Science paper "Green Fluorescent Protein as a Marker for Gene Expression" on condition that he made coffee, cooked, and emptied the garbage nightly for a month.

Chalfie and his wife had a daughter, Sarah, in July 1992.

Chalfie was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.

He slept through the phone call from the Nobel Prize Committee. When he woke up, he knew the prize would have been announced already, so he said "Okay, who's the schnook that got the Prize this time?" And so he opened up his laptop, got to the Nobel Prize site and found out that he was the schnook!

In 2015, Chalfie 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.

Chalfie's lab uses the nematode C. elegans to investigate aspects of nerve cell development and function. The wealth of developmental, anatomical, genetic, and molecular information available for C. elegans provides a powerful and multifaceted approach to these studies.

He has published over 100 papers of which at least 25 have over 100 citations.

He traces his work on green fluorescent protein to a 1988 seminar from Paul Brehm about bioluminescent organisms, which led to some crucial experiments in 1992, detailed in his paper "Green fluorescent protein as a marker for gene expression", which is among the 20 most-cited papers in the field of Molecular Biology & Genetics. Chalfie won a Golden Goose Award for this work in 2012.

He received an honorary degree in physics from the University of Parma on July 4, 2023.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-23 16:43:33

2111) Roger Y. Tsien

Gist:

Work

Some organisms produce what has been named Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), which emits a shimmering light. The formation of GFP is regulated by a gene that can be incorporated into the genomes of other organisms. Because GFP can be linked to other proteins thanks to genetic engineering, it has become an important tool for studying biological processes in cells. During the 1990s, Roger Y. Tsien elucidated how GFP produces its shimmering light and succeeded in varying the color of the light so that different proteins and multiple, simultaneous biological processes could be tracked.

Summary

Roger Y. Tsien (born February 1, 1952, New York, New York, U.S.—died August 24, 2016, Eugene, Oregon) was an American chemist who was a corecipient, with Osamu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie, of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Tsien attended Harvard University before receiving a Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Cambridge in 1977. He remained at Cambridge as a researcher until 1981, when he left for the University of California, Berkeley, and an eventual professorship there. In 1989 he became a professor at the University of California in San Diego, where he also headed a research laboratory. In 1994 he began the research that led to his Nobel honour. Tsien and his corecipients were honoured for their work in the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP), a naturally occurring substance in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria that is used as a tool to make visible the actions of certain cells. Their work with GFP opened a vast set of opportunities for studying biological processes at the molecular level.

GFP provides a visual signal that scientists use to probe protein activity, such as when and where proteins are produced and how different proteins or parts of proteins move and approach each other within a cell. In the 1960s Shimomura showed that Aequorea victoria’s green fluorescence, which had been discovered in 1955, is produced by the protein that was later named GFP. American biochemist Douglas Prasher analyzed the chromophore in GFP in the 1980s and subsequently found and cloned the gene responsible for making GFP. In 1993 Chalfie showed that the gene that instructs the cell to make GFP could be embedded in the nucleic acids of other organisms, first in the bacterium Escherichia coli and then in the transparent nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, so that they would make their own GFP. This discovery opened the possibility of using GFP in virtually any organism. Tsien then showed, beginning in 1994, that oxygen is required for GFP fluorescence and that point mutations in the gene could shift the wavelength and intensity of the fluorescence—in other words, he discovered how to make the proteins glow more brightly and in different colours. That find made it possible to study different processes in the same cell simultaneously.Tsien also helped to determine the structure of GFP and described how to use GFP and its variants to study the role and behaviour of calcium ions in living systems. He received one-third of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his expansion of the GFP’s available colour palette.

Tsien’s later research involved developing ways to use fluorescence to distinguish cancer cells from surrounding tissue and also to mark nerve cells; it was hoped that both advances would prove useful in surgery.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Tsien received numerous honours, and in 1998 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Details

Roger Yonchien Tsien (February 1, 1952 – August 24, 2016) was an American biochemist. He was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for his discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, in collaboration with organic chemist Osamu Shimomura and neurobiologist Martin Chalfie. Tsien was also a pioneer of calcium imaging.

Early life

Tsien was born to a Chinese American family in New York, in 1952. He grew up in Livingston, New Jersey and attended Livingston High School. Tsien traces his family ancestry to Hangzhou, China. His father Hsue-Chu Tsien, an MIT and Shanghai Chiao Tung University alumnus, was a mechanical engineer and had excelled academically, graduating at the top of his university class.

Tsien suffered from asthma as a child, and as a result, he was often indoors. He spent hours conducting chemistry experiments in his basement laboratory. When he was 16, he won first prize in the nationwide Westinghouse Talent Search with a project investigating how metals bind to thiocyanate.

Education

Tsien attended Harvard College on a National Merit Scholarship, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior. He graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry and physics in 1972. According to his freshman-year roommate, economist and Iowa politician Herman Quirmbach, "It's probably not an exaggeration to say he's the smartest person I ever met ... [a]nd I have met a lot of brilliant people."

After completing his bachelor's degree, Tsien joined the Physiological Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England with the aid of a Marshall Scholarship, and resided at Churchill College, Cambridge. He received his Ph.D. in physiology in 1977 for research on The Design and Use of Organic Chemical Tools in Cellular Physiology formally supervised by Richard Adrian in the department of physiology and assisted by Andy Holmes, Gerry Smith and Jeremy Sanders in the department of chemistry.

Research and career

Following his Ph.D., Tsien was a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, from 1977 to 1981. He was appointed to the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1982 to 1989. Beginning in 1989, he worked at the University of California, San Diego, as professor of pharmacology and professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Tsien contributed to the fields of cell biology and neurobiology by discovering genetically programmable fluorescent tags, thereby allowing scientists to watch the behavior of molecules in living cells in real time. He also developed fluorescent indicators of calcium ions and other ions important in biological processes.

In 2004, Tsien was awarded the Wolf Prize in Medicine "for his seminal contribution to the design and biological application of novel fluorescent and photolabile molecules to analyze and perturb cell signal transduction."

In 2008, Tsien shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie for "the green fluorescent protein: discovery, expression and development."

Fluorescent proteins

The multicolored fluorescent proteins developed in Tsien's lab are used by scientists to track where and when certain genes are expressed in cells or in whole organisms. Typically, the gene coding for a protein of interest is fused with the gene for a fluorescent protein, which causes the protein of interest to glow inside the cell when the cell is irradiated with a suitable wavelength of light and allows microscopists to track its location in real time. This is such a popular technique that it has added a new dimension to the fields of molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry.

Since the discovery of the wild type GFP (Green fluorescent protein), numerous different mutants of GFP have been engineered and tested. The first significant leap forward was a single point mutation (S65T) reported by Tsien in 1995 in Nature. This mutation dramatically improved the fluorescent (both intensity and photostability) and spectral characteristics of GFP. A shift of the major excitation peak to 488 nm with the emission peak staying at 509 nm thus can be clearly observed, which matched very well the spectral characteristics of commonly available FITC facilities. All these then largely amplified the practicality of using GFP by scientists in their research. Tsien mainly contributed to much of our understanding of how GFP works and for developing new techniques and mutants of GFP.

Timelines of GFP-development involved by Tsien:

* 1994: Tsien showed the mechanism that GFP chromophore is formed in a chemical reaction which requires oxygen but without help from the other proteins.
* 1994–1998: Tsien and collaborators made various GFP mutants by genetic modification and structural tweaking. Newly created variants of GFP can shine more brightly and show different colours, such as yellow, cyan, and blue.
* 2000–2002: Tsien produced monomeric variants of DsRED, which can glow in shades of red, pink, and orange. Remarkably, since then complicated marcromolecular networks of living organisms can be labelled or marked by using "all the colours of the rainbow".

Other detailed highlights involved by Tsien:

* 2002: The critical structural difference between GFP and DsRed was revealed. One extra double-bond in the chromophore of DsRed extends its conjugation thus causes the red-shift.
* 2002: Monomeric DsRed (mRFP) was first developed.
* 2004: New "fruit" FPs were generated (by in vitro and in vivo directed evolutions).

In 2009, a new kind of Infrared Fluorescent Protein (IFP) was developed by Tsien's group, and further reported and described by Science. The new IFPs are developed from bacterial phytochromes instead of from multicellular organism like jellyfish. Under normal conditions, bacterial phytochromes absorb light for signaling instead of fluorescence, but they can be turned fluorescent after deleting some of the signaling parts by genetic means such as site-directed mutagenesis. In order to fluoresce, IFPs require an exogenous chromophore, biliverdin.

In 2016, a new class of fluorescent protein was evolved from a cyanobacterial (Trichodesmium erythraeum) phycobiliprotein, α-allophycocyanin, and named small ultra red fluorescent protein (smURFP). smURFP autocatalytically self-incorporates the chromophore biliverdin without the need of an external protein, known as a lyase. Jellyfish- and coral-derived fluorescent proteins require oxygen and produce a stoichiometric amount of hydrogen peroxide upon chromophore formation. smURFP does not require oxygen or produce hydrogen peroxide and uses the chromophore, biliverdin. smURFP has a large extinction coefficient (180,000 {M}^{-1} {cm}^{-1}) and has a modest quantum yield (0.20), which makes it comparable biophysical brightness to eGFP and ~2-fold brighter than most red or far-red fluorescent proteins derived from coral. smURFP spectral properties are similar to the organic dye Cy5.

Next generation sequencing

Roger Tsien built the foundation of next generation sequencing technology that became widely used. On 26 October 1990, Roger Tsien et al. filed a patent of stepwise ("base-by-base") sequencing with removable 3' blockers on DNA arrays. Illumina integrated this concept with DNA cloning for their next generation sequencer.

Calcium imaging

Tsien was a pioneer of calcium imaging and known for developing various dyes which become fluorescent in the presence of particular ions such as calcium. One such dye, fura-2, is widely used to track changes of calcium concentration within cells. indo-1 and fluo-3, other popular calcium indicators, were also developed by Tsien's group in 1985 and 1989 respectively. He has also developed fluorescent indicators for other ions such as magnesium, zinc, copper, iron, lead, cadmium, aluminum, nickel, cobalt, and mercury.

Aequorin is also a useful tool to indicate calcium level inside cells; however, it has some limitations, primarily is that its prosthetic group coelenterazine is consumed irreversibly when emits light, thus requires continuous addition of coelenterazine into the media. To overcome such issues, Tsien's group also developed the calmodulin-based sensor, named Cameleon.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-24 15:36:55

2112) Harald zur Hausen

Gist:

Work

The growth, division, and death of living cells are regulated by their genes. If these functions are out of balance, tumors can form. One reason for this may be the incorporation of virus genes into the genes of host cells. Harald zur Hausen demonstrated in 1983 that cervical cancer in humans is caused by certain types of papilloma viruses (wart viruses), the genes from which are incorporated into the host cells' DNA. This discovery made it possible to develop a vaccine against cervical cancer, which had been the second most common tumor disease in women.

Summary

Harald zur Hausen (born March 11, 1936, Gelsenkirchen, Germany—died May 28, 2023, Heidelberg, Germany) was a German virologist who was a corecipient, with Franƈoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Zur Hausen was given half the award in recognition of his discovery of the human papilloma virus (HPV) and its link to cervical cancer.

Zur Hausen received an M.D. in 1960 from the University of Düsseldorf, where he was a research fellow from 1962 to 1965; he continued in that capacity at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (1966–69). In the following years he worked in the virology departments of several German universities. In 1983 he was made scientific director and chairman of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg; zur Hausen became emeritus professor there in 2003.

The discovery leading to zur Hausen’s Nobel honour was made in the early 1980s. Though his findings were ill-supported at the time, they were later fully vindicated. His work led to the creation of the HPV vaccine, which significantly cuts the risk of developing cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women.

Details

Harald zur Hausen (11 March 1936 – 29 May 2023) was a German virologist. He carried out research on cervical cancer and discovered the role of papilloma viruses in cervical cancer, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008. He was chairman of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) in Heidelberg.

Early life and education

Zur Hausen was born in Gelsenkirchen in a Catholic family. He completed his Abitur at Antonianum Grammar School in Vechta, then studied medicine at the universities of Bonn from 1955, Hamburg from 1957, and Düsseldorf from 1958, and received a Doctor of Medicine degree there in 1960. He pursued internships in Wimbern, Isny, Gelsenkirchen, and Düsseldorf, qualifying as a physician in 1962.

Career

He joined the Institute for Microbiology at the University of Düsseldorf as a laboratory assistant in 1962. After three and a half years there, he moved to Philadelphia to work at the Virus Laboratories of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia together with eminent virologists Werner and Gertrude Henle, who had escaped from Nazi Germany. In 1967, he contributed to a ground-breaking study that for the first time proved a virus (Epstein–Barr virus) can turn healthy cells (lymphocytes) into cancer cells. He became an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. In 1969, he returned to Germany to become a regular teaching and researching professor at the University of Würzburg's Institute for Virology. In 1972, he moved to the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg. In 1977, he moved on to the University of Freiburg (Breisgau), where he headed the Department of Virology and Hygiene.

Working with Lutz Gissmann, zur Hausen first isolated human papillomavirus 6 by simple centrifugation from genital warts. He isolated HPV 6 DNA from genital warts, suggesting a possible new way of identifying viruses in human tumours. This discovery paid off several years later, in 1983, when zur Hausen identified HPV 16 DNA in cervical cancer tumours by means of Southern blot hybridization. This was followed by the discovery of HPV18 a year later, thus identifying the causes of approximately 75% of human cervical cancer. The announcement of his breakthrough sparked a major scientific controversy.

From 1983 until 2003, zur Hausen served as chairman of the board and scientific advisory board member of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) in Heidelberg and as professor of medicine at Heidelberg University.

From 2007 to 2011, zur Hausen was a member of the scientific advisory board of Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz. He was editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Cancer until the end of 2010. On 1 January 2010, zur Hausen became the vice president of German Cancer Aid, the largest cancer charity in Europe.

Scientific merits

Zur Hausen's field of research was the study of oncoviruses. In 1976, he hypothesised that human papillomavirus plays an important role in causing cervical cancer. Together with his collaborators, he then identified HPV16 and HPV18 in cervical cancers in 1983–84. This research made possible the development of the HPV vaccine, the first formulation of which was commercialised in 2006. He is also credited with discovery of the virus causing genital warts (HPV 6) and a monkey lymphotropic polyomavirus that is a close relative to a recently discovered human Merkel cell polyomavirus, as well as of techniques to immortalise cells with Epstein–Barr virus and to induce replication of the virus using phorbol esters. His work on papillomaviruses and cervical cancer received a great deal of scientific criticism when first published but subsequently was confirmed and was used as the basis for research on other high-risk papillomaviruses.

Nobel Prize

Zur Hausen shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, for his discovery of human papilloma virus (HPV) causing cervical cancer

The award of the 2008 Nobel Prize to zur Hausen became controversial following the revelation that Bo Angelin, a member of the Nobel Assembly that year, also sat on the board of AstraZeneca, a company that earns patent royalties for HPV vaccines. The controversy was exacerbated by the fact that AstraZeneca had also entered into a partnership with Nobel Web and Nobel Media to sponsor documentaries and lectures to increase awareness of the prize. However, colleagues widely felt that the award was deserved, and the secretary of the Nobel Committee and Assembly issued a statement affirming that Bo Angelin was unaware of AstraZeneca's HPV vaccine patents at the time of the vote.

Personal life

Zur Hausen had three sons from his first marriage, Jan Dirk, Axel and Gerrit. In 1993, he married Ethel-Michele de Villiers, who at the time was a fellow researcher at the German Cancer Research Center, and who in prior years had co-authored many research journal articles with zur Hausen on papilloma virus and genital cancer, dating as far back as 1981. He acknowledged her research contributions and support in his Nobel Prize biography.

Zur Hausen died on 29 May 2023, at age 87.

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