crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-25 22:02:55

2113) Françoise Barré-Sinoussi

Gist:

Life

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi has always loved nature and spent her school vacations observing animals and plants in the parks of her home town of Paris, France. According to Barré-Sinoussi herself, it was by accident that she eventually ended up working at the prestigious Institut Pasteur. She comes from a humble background and was forced to choose the shortest and cheapest education available. Barré-Sinoussi began working at Paris' Institut Pasteur as a volunteer and received her PhD in 1975. Her work with HIV has often been carried out on site in developing countries.

Work

Retroviruses are viruses whose genomes consist of RNA and whose genes can be incorporated into host cells' DNA. In 1983, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montaigner discovered a retrovirus in patients with swollen lymph glands that attacked lymphocytes–a kind of blood cell that is very important to the body's immune system. The retrovirus, later named Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), proved to be the cause of the immunodeficiency disease AIDS. This discovery has been crucial in radically improving treatment methods for AIDS sufferers.

Summary

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (born July 30, 1947, Paris, France) is a French virologist who was a corecipient, with Luc Montagnier and Harald zur Hausen, of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. She and Montagnier shared half the prize for their work in identifying the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).

Barré-Sinoussi earned a Ph.D. (1975) at the Pasteur Institute in Garches, France, and did postdoctoral work in the United States at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1975 she joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and in 1996 she became head of the Retrovirus Biology Unit (later called Regulation of Retroviral Infections Unit) there. From 2012 to 2014 Barré-Sinoussi was president of the International AIDS Society.

When Montagnier led efforts at the Pasteur Institute in 1982 to determine a cause for AIDS, Barré-Sinoussi was a member of his team. Through dissection of an infected patient’s lymph node, they determined that AIDS was caused by a retrovirus, which came to be known as HIV. Their work led to the development of new antiviral drugs and diagnostic methods.

Details

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (born 30 July 1947) is a French virologist and Director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Division (French: Unité de Régulation des Infections Rétrovirales) and Professor at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Born in Paris, Barré-Sinoussi performed some of the fundamental work in the identification of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS. In 2008, Barré-Sinoussi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with her former mentor, Luc Montagnier, for their discovery of HIV. She mandatorily retired from active research on 31 August 2015, and fully retired by some time in 2017.

Early life

Barré-Sinoussi was interested in science from a very young age. During her vacations as a child, she would spend hours analyzing insects and animals, comparing their behaviors and trying to understand why some run faster than others for example. Soon after, Barré-Sinoussi realized she was very talented in the sciences compared to her humanity courses. She expressed interest to her parents that she would like to attend university to study science or become a researcher. Barré-Sinoussi admitted that she was more interested in becoming a doctor but at the time she was under the false impression that studying medicine was both more expensive and lengthier than a career in science. After two years studying at the university, Barré-Sinoussi attempted to find part-time work in a laboratory to ensure that she had made the right career choice. After nearly a year of searching for laboratory work, she was finally accepted by the Pasteur Institute. Her part-time work at the Pasteur Institute quickly became full-time. She began to only attend university to take the exams and had to rely on her friends' class notes because she was not regularly attending class. However, Barré-Sinoussi was actually scoring higher on her exams than before because she finally had the motivation because she had realized a career in science was what she wanted to do.

Academic career

Barré-Sinoussi joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris in the early 1970s. She received her PhD in 1974 and interned at the U.S. National Institutes of Health before returning to the Pasteur Institute in Montagnier's unit.

During the early AIDS epidemic in 1981-1984, the viral cause of the outbreak had not yet been identified. Working with Luc Montagnier, Jean-Claude Chermann and others at the institute, Barré-Sinoussi isolated and grew a retrovirus from a biopsied swollen lymph node of a patient at risk for AIDS. This virus would later be known as HIV-1, the causative agent behind the outbreak. This discovery allowed for the development of diagnostic tests to aid in controlling the spread of the virus, for informing policy on the treatment of people living with AIDS, and for many important advancements in the science of HIV/AIDS that ultimately saved countless lives.

Barré-Sinoussi started her own laboratory at the Pasteur Institute in 1988. Among Barré-Sinoussi's many recent research contributions are studies of various aspects of the adaptive immune response to viral infection, the role of innate immune defenses of the host in controlling HIV/AIDS, factors involved in mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and characteristics that allow a small percentage of HIV-positive individuals, known as elite suppressors or controllers, to limit HIV replication without antiretroviral drugs. She has co-authored over 240 scientific publications, has participated in over 250 international conferences, and has trained many young researchers.

Barré-Sinoussi has actively contributed to several scientific societies and committees at the Institut Pasteur as well as to other AIDS organizations, such as the National Agency for AIDS Research in France. She has also been implicated at an international level, notably as a consultant to the WHO and the UNAIDS-HIV.

Since the 1980s, Barré-Sinoussi has initiated collaborations with developing countries and has managed multidisciplinary networks with dedication. In 2016, she was interviewed by the Sunday Observer and reflected on how Jamaica is dealing with HIV. She constantly works on establishing permanent links between basic research and clinical research with the aim of achieving concrete improvements in the areas of prevention, clinical care, and treatment.

Professor Barré-Sinoussi believes that scientists have made steady progress given the development of antiretroviral treatment which UNAIDS states is being accessed by 17 million of the people globally who are living with AIDS, but finding a cure, or cures, will take time, and a continued investment in research. As the co-chair of the 21st International AIDS Society (IAS), she said the search for curative strategy of HIV is a goal of paramount importance and a priority for the future of HIV research. Moreover, even though research to achieve such cures is in a formative stage, significant advances are being made towards a HIV cure.

In 2009, she wrote an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI in protest over his statements that condoms are at best ineffective in the AIDS crisis.

In July 2012 Barré-Sinoussi became President of the International AIDS Society.

Path to HIV discovery

When Francoise Barré-Sinoussi began working on retroviruses at the Pasteur Institute there were large programs in the United States working on the association between cancer and retroviruses, so she decided to study the link between retroviruses and leukemia in mice. After the new disease emerged (not yet named AIDS), a group of French physicians came to the Pasteur Institute to ask the rather simple question: is this new disease caused by a retrovirus? After much discussion with other colleagues, including Luc Montagnier, they concluded the agent causing this new disease may be a retrovirus but it was not HTLV, the only known retrovirus at the time, because of differing defining characteristics. In the early 1980s, Barré-Sinoussi was already familiar with the technique of detecting reverse transcriptase activity. If reverse transcriptase activity is present, it confirms that the virus is a retrovirus. In December 1982, heavy research began and clinical observations suggested that the disease attacked immune cells because of the significant CD4 cell depletion. However, the depletion of the CD4 lymphocytes made it very difficult to isolate the virus in patients with the disease later known as AIDS. Because of the difficulty isolating an infected cell from a patient with late disease progression, Barré-Sinoussi and her colleagues decided to use a lymph node biopsy from a patient with generalized lymphadenopathy. Generalized lymphadenopathy was a common symptom of patients in the early stages of disease progression. In the second week of checking the biopsied cell cultures for reverse transcriptase activity, enzymatic activity was detected and increased for a short time until the reverse transcriptase activity decreased dramatically after the T-lymphocytes in the culture began to die. Barré-Sinoussi and her colleagues decided to add lymphocytes from a blood donor in order to save the culture and it proved successful after the virus transmitted to the newly added lymphocytes from the blood donor and significant reverse transcriptase activity was again detected. At this point, the virus was named LAV for Lymphadenopathy Associated Virus, which would later be renamed to HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus. 1983 marked the beginning of Barré-Sinoussi's career researching HIV that continued until her retirement.

Leadership

Francoise Barré-Sinoussi remained at the Pasteur Institute and was appointed head of the Biology of Retroviruses Unit in 1992. The Biology of Retroviruses Unit was reconfirmed in 2005 and renamed the Regulation of Retrovirial Infections Unit. Currently, the unit is working on vaccine research against HIV and the correlates of protection against AIDS for immunotherapy. Barré-Sinoussi's career has also included integration with resource-limited countries, such as Vietnam and Central African Republic. Her experiences working in developing nations with the World Health Organization were truly eye-opening experiences for her and motivated her to continue to collaborate scientifically with various countries through Africa and Asia. This collaboration has promoted many exchanges and workshops between young scientists from resource-limited countries and researches in Paris.
Francoise Barré-Sinoussi was elected to the International AIDS Society (IAS) Governing Council in 2006 and served as the president of the IAS from 2012 to 2016. Barré-Sinoussi worked on the Conference Advisory Committee for the 9th IAS Conference on HIV Science, which took place in July 2017 and is currently serving as co-chair of the IAS, working toward an HIV cure initiative.

Awards

Barré-Sinoussi shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Luc Montagnier for their co-discovery of HIV, and with Harald zur Hausen, who discovered the viral cause of cervical cancer that led to the development.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-26 16:34:55

2114) Luc Montagnier

Gist:

Work

Retroviruses are viruses whose genomes consist of RNA and whose genes can be incorporated into host cells' DNA. In 1983, Luc Montaigner and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi discovered a retrovirus in patients with swollen lymph glands that attacked lymphocytes–a kind of blood cell that is very important to the body's immune system. The retrovirus, later named Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), proved to be the cause of the immunodeficiency disease AIDS. This discovery has been crucial in radically improving treatment methods for AIDS sufferers.

Summary

Luc Montagnier (born August 18, 1932, Chabris, France—died February 8, 2022, Neuilly-sur-Seine) was a French research scientist who received, with Harald zur Hausen and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi shared half the prize for their work in identifying the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).

Montagnier was educated at the Universities of Poitiers and Paris, earning degrees in science (1953) and medicine (1960). He began his career as a research scientist in 1955 and joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1972. In 1993 he established the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, and he later accepted an endowed chair at Queens College, New York City, where he headed (1998–2001) the Center for Molecular and Cellular Biology. He returned to the Pasteur Institute in 2001 as professor emeritus. Montagnier also served as president of the Administrative Council of the European Federation for AIDS Research.

In the early 1980s Montagnier, working at the Pasteur Institute with a team that included Barré-Sinoussi, identified the retrovirus that eventually became known as HIV. In the ensuing years there was much controversy over who first isolated the virus, Montagnier or American scientist Robert Gallo, and in 1987 the U.S. and French governments agreed to share credit for the discovery. Subsequently, however, Montagnier’s team was generally acknowledged as having first identified the virus.

Details

Luc Montagnier (18 August 1932 – 8 February 2022) was a French virologist and joint recipient, with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Harald zur Hausen, of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). He worked as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and as a full-time professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

In 2017, Montagnier was criticised by other academics for using his Nobel prize status to "spread dangerous health messages outside of his field of knowledge". During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier promoted the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2, the causative virus, was deliberately created and escaped from a laboratory. Such a claim has been rejected by other virologists.

Early life and education

Montagnier was born in Chabris in central France. Montagnier became interested in science as a teenager. He studied science at the University of Poitiers, France, and then became an assistant in the Faculty of Sciences at Sorbonne University, where he obtained a PhD.

Career

In 1960, Montagnier moved to Carshalton, UK as a postdoctoral fellow at the now defunct Virus Research Unit of the Medical Research Council (United Kingdom). In 1963, he moved to the Glasgow Institute of Virology. He developed a soft agar culture medium to culture viruses.

From 1965 until 1972 he was Laboratory Chief at the Institut Curie, then moved to the Institut Pasteur working on the effects of interferon on viruses.

Discovery of HIV

In 1982, math Rozenbaum, a clinician at the Hôpital Bichat hospital in Paris, asked Montagnier for assistance in establishing the cause of a mysterious new syndrome, AIDS. Rozenbaum had suggested at scientific meetings that the cause of the disease might be a retrovirus. Montagnier and members of his group at the Pasteur Institute, notably including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann, had extensive experience with retroviruses. Montagnier and his team examined samples taken from Rozenbaum's AIDS patients in 1983 and found the virus that would later become known as HIV in a lymph node biopsy. They named it "lymphadenopathy-associated virus", or LAV, since it was not then clear that it was the cause of AIDS, and published their findings in the journal Science on 20 May 1983.

A team led by Robert Gallo of the United States published similar findings in the same issue of Science and later confirmed the discovery of the virus and presented evidence that it caused AIDS. Gallo called the virus "human T-lymphotropic virus type III" (HTLV-III) because of perceived similarities with HTLV-I and -II, which had previously been discovered in his lab. Because of the timing of the discoveries, whether Montagnier's or Gallo's group was first to isolate HIV was for many years the subject of an acrimonious dispute. HIV isolates usually have a high degree of variability because the virus mutates rapidly. In comparison, the first two-human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) isolates, Lai/LAV (formerly LAV, isolated at the Pasteur Institute) and Lai/IIIB (formerly HTLV-IIIB, isolated from a pooled culture at the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology (LTCB) of the National Cancer Institute) were strikingly similar in sequence, suggesting that the two isolates were in fact the same, and likely from the same source.

In November 1990, the Office of Scientific Integrity at the National Institutes of Health attempted to clear up the matter by commissioning a group at Roche to analyze archival samples established at the Pasteur Institute and the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology (LTCB) of the National Cancer Institute between 1983 and 1985. The group, led by American epidemiologist Sheng-Yung Chang, examined archival specimens and concluded in Nature in 1993 that the American sample in fact originated from the French lab.

Chang determined that the French group's LAV was a virus from one patient that had contaminated a culture from another. On request, Montagnier's group had sent a sample of this culture to Gallo, not knowing it contained two viruses. It then contaminated the pooled culture on which Gallo was working.

Before the 1993 publication of Chang's results, Gallo's lab was accused and initially found guilty of "minor misconduct" by the Office of Scientific Integrity in 1991, and then by the newly created Office of Research Integrity in 1992 for the misappropriation of a sample of HIV produced at the Pasteur Institute. The subsequent publication in 1993 of Chang's investigation cleared Gallo's lab of the charges, although his reputatihad already been tainted by the accusations.

Today it is agreed that Montagnier's group first isolated HIV, but Gallo's group is credited with discovering that the virus causes AIDS and with generating much of the science that made the discovery possible, including a technique previously developed by Gallo's lab for growing T cells in the laboratory. When Montagnier's group first published their discovery, they said HIV's role in causing AIDS "remains to be determined."

The question of whether the true discoverers of the virus were French or American was more than a matter of prestige. A US government patent for the AIDS test, filed by the United States Department of Health and Human Services and based on what was claimed to be Gallo's identification of the virus, was at stake. In 1987, both governments attempted to end the dispute by arranging to split the prestige of the discovery and the proceeds from the patent 50–50, naming Montagnier and Gallo co-discoverers. The two scientists continued to dispute each other's claims until 1987.

It was not until French President François Mitterrand and American President Ronald Reagan met in person that the major issues were ironed out. The scientists finally agreed to share credit for the discovery of HIV, and in 1986, both the French and the US names (LAV and HTLV-III) were dropped in favor of the new term human immunodeficiency virus (virus de l'immunodéficience humaine, abbreviated HIV or VIH) (Coffin, 1986). They concluded that the origin of the HIV-1 Lai/IIIB isolate discovered by Gallo was the same as that discovered by Montagnier (but not known by Montagnier to cause AIDS). This compromise allowed Montagnier and Gallo to end their feud and collaborate with each other again, writing a chronology that appeared in Nature that year.

On 29 November 2002 issue of Science, Gallo and Montagnier published a series of articles, one of which was co-written by both scientists, in which they acknowledged the pivotal roles that each had played in the discovery of HIV.

Personal life and death

In 1961, Montagnier married Dorothea Ackerman, and they had three children. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 8 February 2022, at the age of 89.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-27 16:35:14

2115) Charles K. Kao

Gist:

Work

The rapid transmission of signals over long distances is fundamental to the flow of information in our time. Since the 1930s thin filaments, or fibers, of glass have been used to see inside the body, but these long remained unusable for long-distance information transfer because too much light was lost along the way. In the 1960s Charles Kao presented a solution: fibers of very pure glass transported sufficient light. Together with laser technology, his solution has made telecommunication using optical fibers possible.

Summary

Charles Kao (born November 4, 1933, Shanghai, China—died September 23, 2018, Hong Kong) was a physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2009 for his discovery of how light can be transmitted through fibre-optic cables. He shared the prize with physicists Willard Boyle and George E. Smith, who won for their work in inventing the charge-coupled device (CCD). Kao held dual citizenship in Great Britain and the United States.

Kao received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of London in 1957. That same year he went to work for Standard Telephones and Cables, a British subsidiary of the American telecommunications company ITT. In 1960 he transferred to ITT’s Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, England. Kao received a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of London in 1965. In 1966 he and British engineer George Hockham proposed that fibres made of ultra-pure glass could transmit light for distances of kilometres without a total loss of signal. In 1970 the first practical fibre-optic cable was successfully produced, and by the end of the 20th century much of the world’s telecommunications was travelling through fibre-optic cable.

In 1970 Kao left ITT to spend four years at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 1974 he rejoined ITT as chief scientist of its electro-optical products division in Roanoke, Virginia. He later became ITT’s director of engineering in that division, and from 1983 to 1987 he was executive scientist and director of research at the ITT Advanced Tech Center in Shelton, Connecticut. From 1987 to 1996 he was vice-chancellor and president at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Kao then became chairman and chief executive officer (1996–2001) of Transtech, a Hong Kong fibre-optic company, and in 2000 he became chairman and chief executive officer of ITX Services, a technology transfer company.

Kao was diagnosed with Alzheimer disease, a degenerative brain disorder, in 2004. He and his wife, Gwen Kao, founded the Charles K. Kao Foundation for Alzheimer’s Disease Limited in 2010 to promote awareness about and care for those with the disease in Hong Kong.

Details

Sir Charles Kao Kuen (November 4, 1933 – September 23, 2018) was a Chinese physicist and Nobel laureate who contributed to the development and use of fibre optics in telecommunications. In the 1960s, Kao created various methods to combine glass fibres with lasers in order to transmit digital data, which laid the groundwork for the evolution of the Internet and the eventual creation of the World Wide Web.

Kao was born in Shanghai. His family settled in Hong Kong in 1949. He graduated from St. Joseph's College in Hong Kong in 1952 and went to London to study electrical engineering. In the 1960s, Kao worked at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, the research center of Standard Telephones and Cables (STC) in Harlow, and it was here in 1966 that he laid the groundwork for fibre optics in communication. Known as the "godfather of broadband", the "father of fibre optics", and the "father of fibre optic communications", he continued his work in Hong Kong at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and in the United States at ITT (the parent corporation for STC) and Yale University. Kao was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibres for optical communication". In 2010, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for "services to fibre optic communications".

Kao was a permanent resident of Hong Kong, and a citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States.

Early life and education

Charles Kao was born in Shanghai in 1933 and lived with his parents in the Shanghai French Concession. He studied Chinese classics at home with his brother, under a tutor. He also studied English and French at the Shanghai World School that was founded by a number of progressive Chinese educators, including Cai Yuanpei.

After the Communist revolution, Kao's family settled in Hong Kong in 1949. Much of his mother's siblings moved to Hong Kong in the late 1930s, among them, his mother's youngest brother took good care of him.

Kao's family lived in Lau Sin Street, at the edge of the North Point, a neighbourhood of Shanghai immigrants. During Kao's time in Hong Kong, he studied at St. Joseph's College for 5 years and graduated in 1952.

Kao obtained high score in the Hong Kong School Certificate Examination, which at the time was the territory's matriculation examination, qualifying him for admission to the University of Hong Kong. However, at the time electrical engineering wasn't a programme available at the University of Hong Kong, the territory's then only tertiary education institute.

Hence in 1953, Kao went to London to continue his studies in secondary school and obtained his A-Level in 1955. He was later admitted to Woolwich Polytechnic (now the University of Greenwich) and obtained his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree. He then pursued research and received his PhD in electrical engineering in 1965 from the University of London, under Professor Harold Barlow of University College London as an external student while working at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories (STL) in Harlow, England, the research center of Standard Telephones and Cables.

Ancestry and family

Kao's father Kao Chun-Hsiang [zh] ( originally from Jinshan City (now a district of Shanghai City), obtained his Juris Doctor from the University of Michigan Law School in 1925. He was a judge at the Shanghai Concession and later a professor at Soochow University (then in Shanghai) Comparative Law School of China.

His grandfather Kao Hsieh was a scholar, poet and artist, Several writers including Kao Hsü, Yao Kuang, and Kao Tseng were also Kao's close relatives.

His father's cousin was astronomer Kao Ping-tse (Kao crater is named after him). Kao's younger brother Timothy Wu Kao is a civil engineer and Professor Emeritus at the Catholic University of America. His research is in hydrodynamics.

Kao met his future wife Gwen May-Wan Kao (née Wong) in London after graduation, when they worked together as engineers at Standard Telephones and Cables. She was British Chinese. They were married in 1959 in London, and had a son and a daughter, both of whom reside and work in Silicon Valley, California. According to Kao's autobiography, Kao was a Catholic who attended Catholic Church while his wife attended the Anglican Communion.

Academic career:

Fibre optics and communications

In the 1960s at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories (STL) based in Harlow, Essex, England, Kao and his coworkers did their pioneering work in creating fibre optics as a telecommunications medium, by demonstrating that the high-loss of existing fibre optics arose from impurities in the glass, rather than from an underlying problem with the technology itself.

In 1963, when Kao first joined the optical communications research team he made notes summarising the background[38] situation and available technology at the time, and identifying the key individuals involved. Initially Kao worked in the team of Antoni E. Karbowiak (Toni Karbowiak), who was working under Alec Reeves to study optical waveguides for communications. Kao's task was to investigate fibre attenuation, for which he collected samples from different fibre manufacturers and also investigated the properties of bulk glasses carefully. Kao's study primarily convinced him that the impurities in material caused the high light losses of those fibres. Later that year, Kao was appointed head of the electro-optics research group at STL. He took over the optical communication program of STL in December 1964, because his supervisor, Karbowiak, left to take the chair in Communications in the School of Electrical Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia.

Although Kao succeeded Karbowiak as manager of optical communications research, he immediately decided to abandon Karbowiak's plan (thin-film waveguide) and overall change research direction with his colleague George Hockham. They not only considered optical physics but also the material properties. The results were first presented by Kao to the IEE in January 1966 in London, and further published in July with George Hockham (1964–1965 worked with Kao). This study proposed the use of glass fibres for optical communication. The concepts described, especially the electromagnetic theory and performance parameters, are the basis of today's optical fibre communications.

In 1965,Kao with Hockham concluded that the fundamental limitation for glass light attenuation is below 20 dB/km (decibels per kilometer, is a measure of the attenuation of a signal over a distance), which is a key threshold value for optical communications. However, at the time of this determination, optical fibres commonly exhibited light loss as high as 1,000 dB/km and even more. This conclusion opened the intense race to find low-loss materials and suitable fibres for reaching such criteria.

Kao, together with his new team (members including T. W. Davies, M. W. Jones and C. R. Wright), pursued this goal by testing various materials. They precisely measured the attenuation of light with different wavelengths in glasses and other materials. During this period, Kao pointed out that the high purity of fused silica (SiO2) made it an ideal candidate for optical communication. Kao also stated that the impurity of glass material is the main cause for the dramatic decay of light transmission inside glass fibre, rather than fundamental physical effects such as scattering as many physicists thought at that time, and such impurity could be removed. This led to a worldwide study and production of high-purity glass fibres. When Kao first proposed that such glass fibre could be used for long-distance information transfer and could replace copper wires which were used for telecommunication during that era, his ideas were widely disbelieved; later people realized that Kao's ideas revolutionized the whole communication technology and industry.

He also played a leading role in the early stage of engineering and commercial realization of optical communication. In spring 1966, Kao traveled to the U.S. but failed to interest Bell Labs, which was a competitor of STL in communication technology at that time. He subsequently traveled to Japan and gained support. Kao visited many glass and polymer factories, discussed with various people including engineers, scientists, businessmen about the techniques and improvement of glass fibre manufacture. In 1969, Kao with M. W. Jones measured the intrinsic loss of bulk-fused silica at 4 dB/km, which is the first evidence of ultra-transparent glass. Bell Labs started considering fibre optics seriously. As of 2017, fibre optic losses (from both bulk and intrinsic sources) are as low as 0.1419 dB/km at the 1.56 μm wavelength.

Kao developed important techniques and configurations for glass fibre waveguides, and contributed to the development of different fibre types and system devices which met both civil and military[ application reuqirements, and peripheral supporting systems for optical fibre communication. In mid-1970s, he did seminal work on glass fibre fatigue strength. When named the first ITT Executive Scientist, Kao launched the "Terabit Technology" program in addressing the high frequency limits of signal processing, so Kao is also known as the "father of the terabit technology concept". Kao has published more than 100 papers and was granted over 30 patents, including the water-resistant high-strength fibres (with M. S. Maklad).

At an early stage of developing optic fibres, Kao already strongly preferred single-mode for long-distance optical communication, instead of using multi-mode systems. His vision later was followed and now is applied almost exclusively. Kao was also a visionary of modern submarine communications cables and largely promoted this idea. He predicted in 1983 that world's seas would be littered with fibre optics, five years ahead of the time that such a trans-oceanic fibre-optic cable first became serviceable.

Ali Javan's introduction of a steady helium–neon laser and Kao's discovery of fibre light-loss properties now are recognized as the two essential milestones for the development of fibre-optic communications.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-28 16:25:27

2116) Willard Boyle

Gist:

Work

The ability to store images in a digital format is an important prerequisite for information technology. In 1969 Willard Boyle and George Smith sketched an electronic memory design, but their concept instead became the basis for a light sensitive charge coupled device, or CCD. In the sensor there is a grid of light sensitive cells that emit electrons when exposed to light, causing the cells to become electrically charged. When a voltage is applied to the cells, electrical signals are generated, which are used to build up a digital image. CCD was a breakthrough for digital camera technology.

Summary

Willard Boyle (born Aug. 19, 1924, Amherst, N.S., Can.—died May 7, 2011, Truro, N.S.) was a physicist who was awarded, with American physicist George E. Smith, the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2009 for their invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD). They shared the prize with physicist Charles Kao, who discovered how light could be transmitted through fibre-optic cables. Boyle held dual citizenship in Canada and the United States.

Boyle served in the Canadian navy during World War II. He received a bachelor’s (1947), master’s (1948), and doctorate (1950) in physics from McGill University in Montreal, Que. He was an assistant professor at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont., from 1951 to 1953, after which he joined Bell Laboratories, the research-and-development arm of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), in the United States. There he worked on semiconductors. In 1962, with American physicist Donald Nelson, he invented the first laser capable of being operated continuously—unlike previous lasers, which had been capable of operating only in short bursts. From 1962 to 1964 he was director of space science at Bellcomm, a subsidiary of AT&T, where he helped select lunar landing sites for the Apollo spaceflight program. In 1964 he rejoined Bell Laboratories.

In 1969 Boyle and Smith, who also worked for Bell, were asked to originate a new concept for computer memory. After an hour of discussion, they came up with the CCD. Because of the CCD’s sensitivity to light, its chief application has been in photography, in which it replaced film as the recording medium. The digital camera has a CCD at its heart. Because the CCD is a linear detector in that the number of electrons generated is exactly proportional to the light coming in, it is now extensively used in astronomy as well.

In 1974 Boyle became executive director of research on light wave communication, quantum electronics, and digital electronics at Bell Laboratories. He retired in 1979.

Details

Willard Sterling Boyle, (August 19, 1924 – May 7, 2011) was a Canadian physicist. He was a pioneer in the field of laser technology and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device. As director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at Bellcomm he helped select lunar landing sites and provided support for the Apollo space program.

On October 6, 2009, it was announced that he would share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor, which has become an electronic eye in almost all areas of photography".

He was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada – the award's highest level – on June 30, 2010.

Early life

Born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, on August 19, 1924, Boyle was the son of a medical doctor and moved to Quebec with his father and mother Bernice when he was less than two. He was home schooled by his mother until age fourteen, when he attended Montreal's Lower Canada College to complete his secondary education.

Education

Boyle attended McGill University, but his education was interrupted in 1943, when he joined the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II. He was loaned to the Royal Navy, where he was learning how to land Spitfires on aircraft carriers as the war ended. He gained a BSc in 1947, an MSc in 1948, and a PhD in 1950, all from McGill.

Career

After receiving his doctorate, Boyle spent one year at Canada's Radiation Lab and two years teaching physics at the Royal Military College of Canada.

Bell Labs

In 1953 Boyle joined Bell Labs where he invented the first continuously operating ruby laser with Don Nelson in 1962, and was named on the first patent for a semiconductor injection laser. He was made director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at the Bell Labs subsidiary Bellcomm in 1962, providing support for the Apollo space program and helping to select lunar landing sites. He returned to Bell Labs in 1964, working on the development of integrated circuits.

Invention of charge-coupled device

In 1969, Boyle and George E. Smith invented the charge-coupled device (CCD), for which they have jointly received the Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1973, the 1974 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award, the 2006 Charles Stark Draper Prize, and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. The CCD allowed NASA to send clear pictures to Earth back from space. It is also the technology that powers many digital cameras today. Smith said of their invention: "After making the first couple of imaging devices, we knew for certain that chemistry photography was dead." Eugene Gordon and Mike Tompsett, two now-retired colleagues from Bell labs, claim that its application to photography was not invented by Boyle.Boyle was Executive Director of Research for Bell Labs from 1975 until his retirement in 1979.

Personal life

In retirement he split his time between Halifax and Wallace, Nova Scotia. In Wallace, he helped launch an art gallery with his wife, Betty, a landscape artist. He was married to Betty since 1946 and had four children, 10 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren.

In his later years, Boyle suffered from kidney disease, and due to complications from this disease, died in a hospital in Nova Scotia on May 7, 2011.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-29 15:04:54

2117) George E. Smith

Gist:

Work

The ability to store images in a digital format is an important prerequisite for information technology. In 1969 George Smith and Willard Boyle sketched an electronic memory design, but their concept instead became the basis for a light sensitive charge coupled device, or CCD. In the sensor there is a grid of light sensitive cells that emit electrons when exposed to light, causing the cells to become electrically charged. When a voltage is applied to the cells, electrical signals are generated, which are used to build up a digital image. CCD was a breakthrough for digital camera technology.

Summary

George E. Smith (born May 10, 1930, White Plains, N.Y., U.S.) is an American physicist who was awarded, with physicist Willard Boyle, the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2009 for their invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD). They shared the prize with physicist Charles Kao, who discovered how light could be transmitted through fibre-optic cables.

In 1955 Smith received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1959 he received a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago and then went to work for Bell Laboratories, the research-and-development arm of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). In 1964 he became head of the device concepts department. At his retirement from Bell Laboratories in 1986, he was head of the VLSI (Very Large-Scale Integration) Device department.

In 1969 Smith and Boyle, who also worked for Bell, were asked to originate a new concept for computer memory. After an hour of discussion, they came up with the CCD. Because of the CCD’s sensitivity to light, its chief application has been in photography, in which it replaced film as the recording medium. The digital camera has a CCD at its heart. Because the CCD is a linear detector in that the number of electrons generated is exactly proportional to the light coming in, it is now extensively used in astronomy as well.

Details

George Elwood Smith (born May 10, 1930) is an American scientist, applied physicist, and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device (CCD). He was awarded a one-quarter share in the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit—the CCD sensor, which has become an electronic eye in almost all areas of photography".

Early life

Smith was born in White Plains, New York. Smith served in the US Navy, and subsequently obtained his B.Sc. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago in 1959 with a dissertation of only eight pages.

Career

He worked at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey from 1959 to his retirement in 1986, where he led research into novel lasers and semiconductor devices. During his tenure, Smith was awarded dozens of patents and eventually headed the VLSI device (Very-large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip) department.

In 1969, Smith and Willard Boyle invented the charge-coupled device (CCD), for which they have jointly received the Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1973, the 1974 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award, the 2006 Charles Stark Draper Prize, and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Both Boyle and Smith were avid sailors who took many trips together. After retirement Smith sailed around the world with his life partner, Janet, for seventeen years, eventually giving up his hobby in 2003 to "spare his 'creaky bones' from further storms". He currently resides in the Waretown section of Ocean Township, Ocean County, New Jersey.

In 2015, Smith was awarded the Progress Medal and Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. He is a member of Pi Mu Epsilon, Phi Beta Kappa, and Sigma Xi and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

In 2017, Smith was announced as one of four winners of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, for his contribution to the creation of digital imaging sensors.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-30 15:54:29

2118) Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Gist:

Work

An organism's vital functions are managed by large, complex protein molecules produced in cells' ribosomes. There, genetic information from messenger RNA is translated into chains of amino acids that then build proteins. Using a method known as x-ray crystallography, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and other researchers were able to collaborate to map the structure of ribosomes, made up of hundreds of thousands of atoms, in 2000. Among other applications, this has been important in the production of antibiotics.

Summary

Venki Ramakrishnan (born 1952, Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India) is an Indian-born physicist and molecular biologist who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with American biophysicist and biochemist Thomas Steitz and Israeli protein crystallographer Ada Yonath, for his research into the atomic structure and function of cellular particles called ribosomes. (Ribosomes are tiny particles made up of RNA and proteins that specialize in protein synthesis and are found free or bound to the endoplasmic reticulum within cells.) Ramakrishnan holds dual citizenship in the United States and Great Britain.

In 1971 Ramakrishnan earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Baroda University in Gujarat, India, and in 1976 he received a doctoral degree in physics from Ohio University in the United States. From 1976 to 1978 he took classes as a graduate student in biology at the University of California, San Diego, and worked with Mexican American biochemist Mauricio Montal, studying a molecule called rhodopsin, which forms channels in cell membranes. Thus, although Ramakrishnan’s initial academic background prepared him for a career in theoretical physics, his interests later shifted toward molecular biology. He conducted his postdoctoral research from 1978 to 1982 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. At Yale he worked in the laboratory of American molecular biophysicist and biochemist Peter Moore and learned to use a technique known as neutron scattering to investigate the structure of the small subunit of ribosomes in the bacterium Escherichia coli (ribosomes are composed of two distinct subunits, one large and one small).

From 1983 to 1995 Ramakrishnan was a biophysicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. There he continued to utilize neutron scattering, as well as another technique called X-ray crystallography, to elucidate the structure of ribosomes and other molecules, including chromatin and proteins known as histones. In 1999 Ramakrishnan took a position in the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge in England. The following year he published a series of groundbreaking scientific papers in which he presented data on the RNA structure and organization of the small ribosomal subunit of Thermus thermophilus (a bacterium that is commonly used in genetics research) and revealed the structures of antibiotics bound to small subunits of ribosomes at a resolution of just 3 angstroms (Å; 1 Å is equivalent to {10}^{-10} metre, or 0.1 nanometre). Ramakrishnan later wrote Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome (2018).

Ramakrishnan was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2004 and a foreign member of the Indian National Science Academy in 2008. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2003 and later became the society’s first Indian-born president (2015–20). Ramakrishnan received the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2007 and the Heatley Medal, awarded by the British Biochemical Society, in 2008. He was included in the United Kingdom’s New Year Honours List for 2012 as a knight bachelor.

Details

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (born 1952) is a British-American structural biologist. He shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath for research on the structure and function of ribosomes.

Since 1999, he has worked as a group leader at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, UK and is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He served as President of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020.

Education and early life

Ramakrishnan was born in 1952 in Chidambaram in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, India.

His parents, Prof. C. V. Ramakrishnan and Prof. Rajalakshmi Ramakrishnan were both scientists, and his father was head of the department of biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. At the time of his birth, Ramakrishnan's father was away from India doing postdoctoral research with David E. Green at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US. Ramakrishnan's mother obtained a PhD in psychology from McGill University in 1959, completing it in only 18 months, and was mentored, among others, by Donald O. Hebb.

Ramakrishnan has one sibling, his younger sister Lalita Ramakrishnan, who is professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the department of medicine, University of Cambridge, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ramakrishnan moved to Vadodara (previously also known as Baroda) in Gujarat at the age of three, where he had his entire schooling at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, except for a year and a half (1960–61) which he and his family spent in Adelaide, Australia. Following his pre-science at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, he did his undergraduate studies in the same university on a National Science Talent Scholarship, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1971. At the time, the physics course at Baroda was new, and based in part on the Berkeley Physics Course and The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Immediately after graduation he moved to the US, where he obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics from Ohio University in 1976 for research into the ferroelectric phase transition of potassium dihydrogen phosphate (KDP) supervised by Tomoyasu Tanaka. Then he spent two years studying biology as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego while making a transition from theoretical physics to biology.

Career and research

Ramakrishnan began work on ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow with Peter Moore at Yale University. After his postdoctoral fellowship, he initially could not find a faculty position even though he had applied to about 50 universities in the United States.

He continued to work on ribosomes from 1983 to 1995 as a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

In 1995, he moved to the University of Utah as a professor of biochemistry, and in 1999, he moved to his current position at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where he had also been a sabbatical visitor during 1991–92 on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 1999, Ramakrishnan's laboratory published a 5.5 angstrom resolution structure of the 30S subunit. The following year, his laboratory determined the complete molecular structure of the 30S subunit of the ribosome and its complexes with several antibiotics. This was followed by studies that provided structural insights into the mechanism that ensures the fidelity of protein biosynthesis. In 2007, his laboratory determined the atomic structure of the whole ribosome in complex with its tRNA and mRNA ligands. Since 2013, he has used Cryogenic electron microscopy to work primarily on eukaryotic and mitochondrial translation. Ramakrishnan is also known for his past work on histone and chromatin structure.

As of 2019 his most cited papers (according to Google Scholar) have been published in Nature, Science, and Cell.

Presidency of the Royal Society

Ramakrishnan's term as president of the Royal Society from 2015-2020 was dominated by Brexit and, in his final year, the COVID-19 pandemic and its response. In an interview in July 2018, he said that Britain's decision to leave the European Union was hurting Britain's reputation as a good place to work in science, commenting "It's very hard for the science community to see any advantages in Brexit. They are pretty blunt about that." He saw advantages to both the UK and the EU for Britain to continue to be engaged in Galileo and Euratom, which, unlike the European Medicines Agency, are not EU agencies.

Ramakrishnan argued that a no-deal Brexit would harm science. Ramakrishnan wrote, "A deal on science is in the best interests of Europe as a whole and should not be sacrificed as collateral damage over disagreements on other issues. If we are going to successfully tackle global problems like climate change, human disease and food security, we can't do so in isolation. There is no scenario where trashing our relationships with our closest scientific collaborators in the EU gets us closer to these goals."

Awards and honours

Ramakrishnan at the Nobel Prize Press conference in 2009

Ramakrishnan was elected a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2002, a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2003, and a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2004.

In 2007, Ramakrishnan was awarded the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine and the Datta Lectureship and Medal of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS).

Ramakrishnan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath.[46] He received India's second highest civilian honor, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2010.

In 2008, Ramakrishnan won the Heatley Medal of the British Biochemical Society, and became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and a foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy. He has been a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and an Honorary Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (Hon FMedSci) since 2010.

He has received honorary degrees from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, University of Utah, Ohio University and University of Cambridge. He is also an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,[49] Somerville College, Oxford,[50] and The Queen's College, Oxford.

Ramakrishnan was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to molecular biology, but does not generally use the title "Sir". That same year, he was awarded the Sir Hans Krebs Medal by the FEBS. In 2014, he was awarded the XLVI Jiménez-Díaz Prize by the Fundación Conchita Rábago (Spain).

In 2017, Ramakrishnan received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Ramakrishnan was included as one of 25 Greatest Global Living Indians by NDTV Channel, India on 14 December 2013.

In 2020, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society and became a board member of The British Library.

Ramakrishnan was made a Member of the Order of Merit (OM) in 2022.

Personal life

In 1975, Ramakrishnan married Vera Rosenberry, an author and illustrator of children's books. He has a step-daughter, Tanya Kapka, a physician specializing in public health and health-care delivery to under-served communities; and a son, Raman Ramakrishnan, a cellist specializing in chamber music and professor at Bard College in New York State.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-12-31 16:26:33

2120) Thomas A. Steitz

Gist:

Life

Thomas Steitz was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. He studied at Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin and coninued at Harvard University where he earned his doctorate in 1966. The future Nobel Laureate William Lipscomb was his supervisor. Steitz did his postdoctoral research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge and thereafter became a professor at Yale University where he conducted his Nobel Prize awarded work. Steitz is married to molecular biologist Joan Steitz and they have one son together.

Summary

Thomas Steitz (born August 23, 1940, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.—died October 9, 2018, Branford, Connecticut) was an American biophysicist and biochemist who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with Indian-born American physicist and molecular biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Israeli protein crystallographer Ada Yonath, for his research into the atomic structure and function of cellular particles called ribosomes. (Ribosomes are tiny particles made up of RNA and proteins that specialize in protein synthesis and are found free or bound to the endoplasmic reticulum within cells.)

Steitz received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1962 from Lawrence College in Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry in 1966 from Harvard University in Massachusetts. Following a year of postdoctoral research in chemistry at Harvard, Steitz joined the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge in England. He remained at Cambridge until 1970, when he became a professor of chemistry at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Steitz investigated the structures of various cellular macromolecules, including nucleic acids and proteins, using a technique called X-ray crystallography. He focused in particular on elucidating the structures that underlie the activity and function of ribosomes.

Among Steitz’s major accomplishments was the determination of the structure of the large ribosomal subunit (50S) of the archaean Haloarcula marismortui (a primitive single-celled organism) to a resolution of 9 angstroms (Å; 1 Å is equivalent to 10−10 metre, or 0.1 nanometre). In addition, he created a map of the 50S ribosomal subunit of H. marismortui at a resolution of 5 Å, revealing the locations of protein and RNA components within the subunit, and later provided a complete structure of the 50S subunit at a resolution of just 2.4 Å. Steitz also used X-ray crystallography to investigate the atomic characteristics of the processes of gene expression, DNA replication, genetic recombination, transcription, and translation.

In 2000 Steitz cofounded Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, a company that specialized in the discovery and development of new classes of antibiotics. He also served as chair of the scientific advisory board for the company.

Steitz became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 1986 and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1990. He received the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Science in 2001, the Keio Medical Science Prize in 2006, and the Gairdner International Award in 2007.

Details

Thomas Arthur Steitz (August 23, 1940 – October 9, 2018) was an American biochemist, a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, best known for his pioneering work on the ribosome.

Steitz was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Ada Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". Steitz also won the Gairdner International Award in 2007 "for his studies on the structure and function of the ribosome which showed that the peptidyl transferase (EC 2.3.2.12) was an RNA catalyzed reaction, and for revealing the mechanism of inhibition of this function by antibiotics".

(The Enzyme Commission number (EC number), as implemented by the Nomenclature Committee of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB), is a numerical classification scheme for enzymes, based on the chemical reactions they catalyze.)

Education and career

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Steitz studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, graduating in 1962. In June 2010, the University renamed its chemistry building Thomas A. Steitz Hall of Science.

He received a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University in 1966 where he worked under the direction of subsequent 1976 chemistry Nobel Prize winner William N. Lipscomb, Jr. While at Harvard, after the training task of determining the structure of the small molecule methyl ethylene phosphate, Steitz made contributions to determining the atomic structures of carboxypeptidase A (EC 3.4.17.1) and aspartate carbamoyltransferase (EC 2.1.3.2), each the largest atomic structure determined in its time.

Steitz did postdoctoral research as a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology during 1967–1970.

Steitz briefly held an assistant professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, but he resigned on the grounds that the institution would not accept his wife Joan into a faculty position because she was a woman.

Both Tom and Joan Steitz instead joined the Yale faculty in 1970, where he continued to work on cellular and structural biology. Steitz and Peter Moore determined the atomic structure of the large 50S ribosomal subunit using X-ray crystallography, and published their findings in Science in 2000. In 2009, Steitz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his ribosome research.

He was also a Macy Fellow at the University of Göttingen during 1976–1977 and a Fairchild Scholar at the California Institute of Technology during 1984–1985.

Steitz was also one of the founders of a company, Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, now Melinta Therapeutics for the development of new antibiotics based on the ribosome.

Private life

He enjoyed skiing, hiking, and gardening.

It should also be noted that Tom valued a good time. He always looked forward to department happy hours, wine tastings and any other excuse for a party. He hosted many wonderful Halloween parties at his home, always appropriately attire in costume.

Steitz was married to Joan A. Steitz, a distinguished molecular biologist who is also a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale. He lived with her in Branford, Connecticut and had one son, Jon, and two grandchildren, Adam and Maddy. He died on October 9, 2018, of complications during treatment of pancreatic cancer.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-01 16:19:47

2121) Ada Yonath

Gist:

Life

Ada Yonath was born in Jerusalem, Israel. Her parents had emigrated from Poland. Although her father was a rabbi, her family tried to make a living by running a grocery store. After her father's death, Yonath's family moved to Tel Aviv. After studying chemistry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Yonath earned her PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science, to which she has maintained her ties as a researcher. Alongside her work there, Yonath has also worked for several European and US universities. Yonath has one daughter.

Work

An organism's vital functions are managed by large, complex protein molecules produced in cells' ribosomes. There, genetic information from messenger RNA is translated into chains of amino acids that then build proteins. In the 1970s, Ada Yonath began a project that culminated in 2000 in her successful mapping (together with other researchers) of the structure of ribosomes, which consist of hundreds of thousands of atoms, using x-ray crystallography. Among other applications, this has been important in the production of antibiotics.

Summary

Ada Yonath (born June 22, 1939, Jerusalem) is an Israeli protein crystallographer who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with Indian-born American physicist and molecular biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and American biophysicist and biochemist Thomas Steitz, for her research into the atomic structure and function of cellular particles called ribosomes. (Ribosomes are tiny particles made up of RNA and proteins that specialize in protein synthesis and are found free or bound to the endoplasmic reticulum within cells.)

Yonath received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1962 and a master’s degree in biochemistry in 1964 from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She then attended the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel as a graduate student, studying X-ray crystallography and receiving a Ph.D. in 1968. After a brief stint as a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., Yonath joined the department of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a postdoctoral fellow. There she began investigating the structure of ribosomes using X-ray crystallography and pioneered the development of new approaches to the study of structural characteristics of large, complex molecules.

From 1970 to 1974 Yonath worked as a scientist in the department of chemistry at the Weizmann Institute. She later became senior scientist (1974–83), associate professor (1984–88), and director of the Mazer Center for Structural Biology (1988–2004). She also was director of the Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly at the Weizmann Institute (1989– ) and served as head of the Max Planck Research Unit for Ribosomal Structure in Germany (1986–2004). In 1980 Yonath became the first person to determine the three-dimensional atomic arrangement of a large ribosomal subunit (ribosomes consist of two distinct subunits, one large and one small). She conducted these early studies using ribosomes from the bacterium Bacillus stearothermophilus. Her subsequent research revealed the complex architecture of ribosomes, and she identified structures resembling tunnels, through which newly synthesized polypeptide chains were passed during protein synthesis.

Yonath’s other achievements include the development of a technique known as cryocrystallography, in which protein crystals are rapidly cooled, thereby overcoming the limitation of radiation damage to protein crystals that is associated with traditional X-ray crystallography techniques. She also successfully determined the atomic structure of the small ribosomal subunit of Thermus thermophilus (a bacterium widely used in genetics research), obtaining a structural resolution of 3.3 angstroms (Å; 1 Å is equivalent to {10}^{-10} metre, or 0.1 nanometre). Her later research was concerned with determining the atomic structures of antibiotics, focusing especially on how the atomic structures of these agents influence their activities and interactions with cellular machinery.

Yonath was elected a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2000 and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2003. In addition to the 2009 Nobel Prize, she received numerous other honours and awards throughout her career, including the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry in 2005, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize in 2007, and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in 2008.

Details

Ada E. Yonath (born 22 June 1939) is an Israeli crystallographer and Nobel laureate in Chemistry, best known for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosomes. She is the current director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

In 2009, Yonath received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz for her studies on the structure and function of the ribosome, becoming the first Israeli woman to win the Nobel Prize out of ten Israeli Nobel laureates, the first woman from the Middle East to win a Nobel prize in the sciences, and the first woman in 45 years to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Biography

Ada math (later Yonath) was born in the Geula quarter of Jerusalem. Her parents, Hillel and Esther math, were Zionist Jews who immigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel) from Zduńska Wola, Poland in 1933 before the establishment of Israel. Her father was a rabbi and came from a rabbinical family. They settled in Jerusalem and ran a grocery, but found it difficult to make ends meet. They lived in cramped quarters with several other families, and Yonath remembers "books" being the only thing she had to keep her occupied. Despite their poverty, her parents sent her to school in the upscale Beit HaKerem neighborhood to assure her a good education. When her father died at the age of 42, the family moved to Tel Aviv.

Yonath was accepted to Tichon Hadash high school although her mother could not pay the tuition. She gave math lessons to students in return. As a youngster, she says she was inspired by the Polish and naturalized-French scientist Marie Curie. However, she stresses that Curie, whom she as a child was fascinated by after reading her biography, was not her "role model". She returned to Jerusalem for college, graduating from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1962, and a master's degree in biochemistry in 1964. In 1968, she obtained her PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science for X-ray crystallographic studies on the structure of collagen, with Wolfie Traub as her PhD advisor.

She has one daughter, Hagit Yonath, a doctor at Sheba Medical Center, and a granddaughter, Noa. She is the cousin of anti-occupation activist Ruchama Marton.

Scientific career

Yonath accepted postdoctoral positions at Carnegie Mellon University (1969) and MIT (1970). While a postdoc at MIT she spent some time in the lab of subsequent 1976 chemistry Nobel Prize winner William N. Lipscomb, Jr. of Harvard University where she was inspired to pursue very large structures.

In 1970, she established what was for nearly a decade the only protein crystallography laboratory in Israel. Then, from 1979 to 1984 she was a group leader with Heinz-Günter Wittmann at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. She was visiting professor at the University of Chicago in 1977–78. She headed a Max-Planck Institute Research Unit at DESY in Hamburg, Germany (1986–2004) in parallel to her research activities at the Weizmann Institute.

Yonath focuses on the mechanisms underlying protein biosynthesis, by ribosomal crystallography, a research line she pioneered over twenty years ago despite considerable skepticism of the international scientific community. Ribosomes translate RNA into protein and because they have slightly different structures in microbes, when compared to eukaryotes, such as human cells, they are often a target for antibiotics. In 2000 and 2001, she determined the complete high-resolution structures of both ribosomal subunits and discovered within the otherwise asymmetric ribosome, the universal symmetrical region that provides the framework and navigates the process of polypeptide polymerization. Consequently, she showed that the ribosome is a ribozyme that places its substrates in stereochemistry suitable for peptide bond formation and for substrate-mediated catalysis. In 1993 she visualized the path taken by the nascent proteins, namely the ribosomal tunnel, and recently revealed the dynamics elements enabling its involvement in elongation arrest, gating, intra-cellular regulation and nascent chain trafficking into their folding space.

Additionally, Yonath elucidated the modes of action of over twenty different antibiotics targeting the ribosome, illuminated mechanisms of drug resistance and synergism, deciphered the structural basis for antibiotic selectivity and showed how it plays a key role in clinical usefulness and therapeutic effectiveness, thus paving the way for structure-based drug design.

For enabling ribosomal crystallography Yonath introduced a novel technique, cryo bio-crystallography, which became routine in structural biology and allowed intricate projects otherwise considered formidable.

At the Weizmann Institute, Yonath is the incumbent of the Martin S. and Helen Kimmel Professorial Chair.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-02 16:10:48

2122) Elizabeth Blackburn

Gist:

Life

Elizabeth Blackburn was born in Hobart on the island of Tasmania, Australia. Both of her parents were doctors. Blackburn took an early interest in animals and nature and went on to study biochemistry at the university in Melbourne. She later received her PhD from Cambridge University, England, where she also met her future husband. The couple eventually moved to Yale University in New Haven, USA, and later to the University of California in San Francisco. They have one son. Blackburn has taken an interest in the ethical implications of research and has contributed to the creation of a code regulating the field.

Work

An organism's genes are stored within DNA molecules, which are found in chromosomes inside its cells' nuclei. When a cell divides, it is important that its chromosomes are copied in full, and that they are not damaged. At each end of a chromosome lies a cap or telomere, as it is known, which protects it. In 1980, Elizabeth Blackburn discovered that telomeres have a particular DNA. In 1982, together with Jack Szostak, she further proved that this DNA prevents chromosomes from being broken down. Blackburn and Carol Greider discovered the enzyme telomerase, which produces the telomeres' DNA, in 1984.

Summary

Elizabeth Blackburn (born November 26, 1948, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia) is an Australian-born American molecular biologist and biochemist who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with American molecular biologist Carol W. Greider and American biochemist and geneticist Jack W. Szostak, for her discoveries elucidating the genetic composition and function of telomeres (segments of DNA occurring at the ends of chromosomes) and for her contribution to the discovery of an enzyme called telomerase.

In the early 1970s Blackburn earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Melbourne. She then enrolled as a graduate student in molecular biology at the University of Cambridge in England, where she worked in the laboratory of British biochemist Frederick Sanger. At Cambridge Blackburn studied the nucleic acid composition of bacteriophage ϕX174 and became familiar with techniques of DNA sequencing. She received a Ph.D. in molecular biology in 1975, and that same year she began her postdoctoral research in the laboratory of American cell biologist and geneticist Joseph Gall, at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Gall’s research was concerned primarily with the structure and replication of chromosomes, and Blackburn followed his lead, investigating the chromosomes of a protozoan called Tetrahymena. She sequenced the DNA of the organism’s telomeres and thereby discovered that telomeres are composed of short repeating segments of DNA.

In 1978 Blackburn became an assistant professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and continued her investigations of the telomeres of Tetrahymena. She became increasingly interested in the function and maintenance of the repeated segments of DNA that make up the ends of chromosomes. In 1980 Blackburn met Szostak, who was also studying telomeres and who was intrigued by Blackburn’s research. The two began a collaborative effort to understand telomere function, using both yeast and Tetrahymena as model organisms for their investigations. In 1984 Blackburn and Greider, who was then a graduate student in Blackburn’s laboratory, discovered telomerase. Their subsequent studies revealed that telomerase plays a fundamental role in maintaining chromosomes because it can add DNA to telomeres, which shorten following cell division and are the primary determinants of cell life span. Blackburn’s later research involved further investigation of the genetic composition and cellular functions of telomeres and telomerase, as well as studies on the interactions of these cellular components and their roles in cancer and aging.

Blackburn remained at Berkeley until 1990, when she became a professor in the department of biochemistry and biophysics and in the department of microbiology and immunology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). From 1993 to 1999 she also was chair of the department of microbiology and immunology at UCSF. Blackburn later served as the first female president of the Salk Institute (2016–18).

Throughout her career Blackburn published a number of scientific papers and received a variety of honorary degrees and awards, including the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1998; shared with Greider), the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Science (1999; shared with Greider), and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (2006; shared with Greider and Szostak). Blackburn also was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London (1992) and a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (1993).

Details

Elizabeth Helen Blackburn (born 26 November 1948) is an Australian-American Nobel laureate who is the former president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.[2] In 1984, Blackburn co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere, with Carol W. Greider. For this work, she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak, becoming the first Australian woman Nobel laureate.

She also worked in medical ethics, and was controversially dismissed from the Bush administration's President's Council on Bioethics. 170 scientists signed an open letter to the president in her support, maintaining that she was fired because of political opposition to her advice.

Early life and education

Elizabeth Helen Blackburn, the second of seven children, was born in Hobart, Tasmania, on 26 November 1948, with both her parents being family physicians. Her family moved to the city of Launceston when she was four, where she attended the Broadland House Church of England Girls' Grammar School (later amalgamated with Launceston Church Grammar School) until the age of sixteen.

Upon her family's relocation to Melbourne, she attended University High School, and ultimately gained very high marks in the end-of-year final statewide matriculation exams.[6] She went on to earn a Bachelor of Science in 1970 and Master of Science in 1972, both from the University of Melbourne in the field of biochemistry. Blackburn then went to receive her PhD in 1975 from Darwin College at the University of Cambridge, for work she did with Frederick Sanger at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology developing methods to sequence DNA using RNA, as well as studying the bacteriophage Phi X 174.

Career and research

During her postdoctoral work at Yale, Blackburn was doing research on the protozoan Tetrahymena thermophila and noticed a repeating codon at the end of the linear rDNA which varied in size. Blackburn then noticed that this hexanucleotide at the end of the chromosome contained a TTAGGG sequence that was tandemly repeated, and the terminal end of the chromosomes were palindromic. These characteristics allowed Blackburn and colleagues to conduct further research on the protozoan. Using the telomeric repeated end of Tetrahymena, Blackburn and colleague Jack Szostak showed the unstable replicating plasmids of yeast were protected from degradation, proving that these sequences contained characteristics of telomeres. This research also proved the telomeric repeats of Tetrahymena were conserved evolutionarily between the species. Through this research, Blackburn and collaborators noticed the replication system for chromosomes was not likely to add to the lengthening of the telomere, and that the addition of these hexanucleotides to the chromosomes was likely due to the activity of an enzyme that is able to transfer specific functional groups. The proposition of a possible transferase-like enzyme led Blackburn and PhD student Carol W. Greider to the discovery of an enzyme with reverse transcriptase activity that was able to fill in the terminal ends of telomeres without leaving the chromosome incomplete and unable to divide without loss of the end of the chromosome. This 1985 discovery led to the purification of this enzyme in lab, showing the transferase-like enzyme contained both RNA and protein components. The RNA portion of the enzyme served as a template for adding the telomeric repeats to the incomplete telomere, and the protein added enzymatic function for the addition of these repeats.Through this breakthrough, the term "telomerase" was given to the enzyme, solving the end-replication process that had troubled scientists at the time.

Telomerase

In 1984, Blackburn was a biological researcher and professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, studying the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the chromosome.

Telomerase works by adding base pairs to the overhang of DNA on the 3' end, extending the strand until DNA polymerase and an RNA primer can complete the complementary strand and successfully synthesize the double-stranded DNA. Since DNA polymerase only synthesizes DNA in the leading strand direction, the shortening of the telomere results. Through their research, Blackburn and collaborators were able to show that the telomere is effectively replenished by the enzyme telomerase, which conserves cellular division by preventing the rapid loss of genetic information internal to the telomere, leading to cellular aging.

On 1 January 2016, Blackburn was interviewed about her studies, discovering telomerase, and her current research. When she was asked to recall the moment of telomerase discovery she stated:

Carol had done this experiment, and we stood, just in the lab, and I remember sort of standing there, and she had this – we call it a gel. It's an autoradiogram because there were trace amounts of radioactivity that were used to develop an image of the separated DNA products of what turned out to be the telomerase enzyme reaction. I remember looking at it and just thinking, 'Ah! This could be very big. This looks just right.' It had a pattern to it. There was a regularity to it. There was something that was not just sort of garbage there, and that was really kind of coming through, even though we look back at it now, we'd say, technically, there was this, that, and the other, but it was a pattern shining through, and it just had this sort of sense, 'Ah! There's something real here.' But then, of course, the good scientist has to be very skeptical and immediately say, 'Okay, we're going to test this every way around here, and really nail this one way or the other.' If it's going to be true, you have to make sure that it's true, because you can get a lot of false leads, especially if you're wanting something to work.

In 1978, Blackburn joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Molecular Biology. In 1990, she moved across the San Francisco Bay to the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she served as the Department Chair from 1993 to 1999 and was the Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Physiology at UCSF. Blackburn became a Professor Emeritus at UCSF at the end of 2015.

Blackburn co-founded the company Telomere Health which offers telomere length testing to the public, but later severed ties with the company.

In 2015, Blackburn was announced as the new President of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. "Few scientists garner the kind of admiration and respect that Dr. Blackburn receives from her peers for her scientific accomplishments and her leadership, service and integrity", says Irwin M. Jacobs, chairman of Salk's Board of Trustees, on Blackburn's appointment as President of the institute. "Her deep insight as a scientist, her vision as a leader, and her warm personality will prove invaluable as she guides the Salk Institute on its continuing journey of discovery". In 2017, she announced her plans to retire from the Salk Institute the following year.

Nobel Prize

For their research and contributions to the understanding of telomeres and the enzyme telomerase, Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The substantial research on the effects of chromosomal protection from telomerase, and the impact this has on cellular division has been a revolutionary catalyst in the field of molecular biology. For example, the addition of telomerase to cells that do not possess this enzyme has shown to bypass the limit of cellular ageing in those cells, thereby linking this enzyme to reduced cellular aging. The addition of telomerase, and the presence of the enzyme in cancer cells has been shown to provide an immunity mechanism for the cell in proliferating, linking the transferase activity to increased cellular growth and reduced sensitivity for cellular signaling. Telomeres are also believed to play an important role in certain types of cancers, including pancreatic, bone, prostate, bladder, lung, kidney, and head and neck cancer. The importance of discovering this enzyme has since led her continued research at the University of California San Francisco, where she studies the effect of telomeres and telomerase activity on cellular aging.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-03 15:37:10

2123) Carol W. Greider

Gist:

Life

Carol Greider was born in San Diego, California in the United States. Both of her parents were academics. Greider's mother died when Carol was only seven years old, which gave her an independent nature at an early age. Initially, Greider had a difficult time at school, however. An enthusiastic teacher later aroused her interest in biology. Greider received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987. Her supervisor at Berkeley was Elizabeth Blackburn, whom she later shared a Nobel Prize with. Greider later transferred to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in the United States. She is married with two children.

Work

An organism's genes are stored within DNA molecules, which are found in chromosomes inside its cells' nuclei. When a cell divides, it is important that its chromosomes are copied in full, and that they are not damaged. At each end of a chromosome lies a kind of cap or telomere, as it is known, which protects it. After Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak discovered that telomeres have a particular DNA that prevents chromosomes from being broken down, Carol Greider, together with Blackburn, also discovered telomerase in 1984, which produces the telomeres' DNA.

Summary

Carol W. Greider (born April 15, 1961, San Diego, California, U.S.) is an American molecular biologist who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with American molecular biologist and biochemist Elizabeth H. Blackburn and American biochemist and geneticist Jack W. Szostak, for her research into telomeres (segments of DNA occurring at the ends of chromosomes) and for her discovery of an enzyme called telomerase.

Greider received a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1983. The following year she enrolled as a graduate student in molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she joined Blackburn’s lab. Together, Greider and Blackburn investigated mechanisms of chromosome maintenance in cells. The research led to their joint discovery of telomerase, which they initially isolated from Tetrahymena, a protozoan that, relative to other organisms, contains an abundance of telomeres. Greider and Blackburn found that telomerase adds DNA to telomeres and thereby helps maintain the functionality of chromosomes. In 1987 Greider received a Ph.D. in molecular biology and subsequently was awarded a fellowship to conduct research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. There she continued her investigations into telomerase, characterizing genetic elements of the enzyme and further elucidating its cellular functions. In 1990 Greider was made assistant investigator at Cold Spring Harbor and later became associate investigator (1992) and investigator (1994).

In the mid-1990s Greider’s research became increasingly focused on telomere length. Telomeres are composed of repeated segments of DNA, and multiple repeat segments are lost each time a cell divides. When telomeres have been reduced to a certain length, cell death occurs; thus, telomeres play an important role in determining cell life span. However, in certain types of cancer, telomere regulation of cell life span is rendered dysfunctional. Greider suspected that abnormal regulation of telomerase contributed to the development of certain cancers. She discovered that inhibiting telomerase activity in cancer cells with dysfunctional telomeres prevents cell survival and thereby slows tumour growth. This research led to the subsequent emergence of telomerase as a potential target for the development of anticancer drugs. In the early 2000s Greider continued to investigate the role of telomeres and telomerase in the development of cancer. She also studied the influence of telomere shortening on aging and age-related diseases.

In 1997 Greider took a position as associate professor of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, where she became a full professor in 1999 and professor of oncology in 2001. In 2003 she earned the title of Daniel Nathans Professor and director of the department of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins. Greider moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2020, and there she served as distinguished professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology.

In addition to the 2009 Nobel Prize, Greider received numerous other awards throughout her career for her telomere research, including the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Science (1999; shared with Blackburn), the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (2006; shared with Blackburn and Szostak), and the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences (2006; shared with Blackburn). Greider also was elected a member of multiple science organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences (2003).

Details

Carolyn Widney Greider (born April 15, 1961) is an American molecular biologist and Nobel laureate. She is a Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Greider discovered the enzyme telomerase in 1984, while she was a graduate student of Elizabeth Blackburn at the University of California, Berkeley. Greider pioneered research on the structure of telomeres, the ends of the chromosomes. She was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak, for their discovery that telomeres are protected from progressive shortening by the enzyme telomerase.

Early life and education

Greider was born in San Diego, California. Her father, Kenneth Greider, was a physics professor. Her family moved from San Diego to Davis, California, where she spent many of her early years and graduated from Davis Senior High School in 1979. She graduated from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a B.A. in biology in 1983. During this time she also studied at the University of Göttingen and made significant discoveries there.

Greider is dyslexic and states that her "compensatory skills also played a role in my success as a scientist because one has to intuit many different things that are going on at the same time and apply those to a particular problem". Greider initially suspected her dyslexia after seeing patterns of common mistakes such as backward words when she received back graded work in the first grade. Greider started to memorize words and their spellings rather than attempting to sound out the spelling of words. Greider has worked significantly to overcome her dyslexia to become successful in her professional life and credits her dyslexia as helping her appreciate differences and making unusual decisions such as the one to work with Tetrahymena, an unusual organism.

Greider initially had difficulty getting into graduate school because of her low GRE scores due to her dyslexia. Greider applied to thirteen grad schools and was accepted to only two, California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley. She chose to study at Berkeley.

Discovery of telomerase

Greider completed her Ph.D. in molecular biology in 1987 at Berkeley under Elizabeth Blackburn. While at Berkeley, Greider and Blackburn discovered how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase. Greider joined Blackburn's laboratory in April 1984 looking for the enzyme that was hypothesized to add extra DNA bases to the ends of chromosomes. Without the extra bases, which are added as repeats of a six-base pair motif, chromosomes are shortened during DNA replication, eventually resulting in chromosome deterioration and senescence or cancer-causing chromosome fusion. Blackburn and Greider looked for the enzyme in the model organism Tetrahymena thermophila, a fresh-water protozoan with a large number of telomeres.

On December 25, 1984, Greider obtained results indicating that a particular enzyme was likely responsible. After six months of additional research, Greider and Blackburn concluded that it was the enzyme responsible for telomere addition. They published their findings in the journal Cell in December 1985. The enzyme, originally called "telomere terminal transferase," is now known as telomerase. Telomerase rebuilds the tips of chromosomes and determines the life span of cells.

Greider's additional research to confirm her discovery was largely focused on identifying the mechanism that telomerase uses for elongation. Greider chose to use RNA degrading enzymes and saw that the telomeres stopped extending, which was an indication that RNA was involved in the enzyme.

Subsequent career

Greider then started her laboratory as a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Fellow, and also held a faculty position, at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Greider continued to study Tetrahymena telomerase, cloning the gene encoding the RNA component and demonstrating that it provided the template for the TTGGGG telomere repeats (1989) as well as establishing that telomerase is processive (1991). She was also able to reconstitute Tetrahymena telomerase in vitro (1994) and define the mechanisms of template utilization (1995). Greider also worked with Calvin Harley to show that telomere shortening underlies cellular senescence (1990). To further test this idea mouse and human telomerase were characterized (1993) (1995) and the mouse telomerase RNA component was cloned (1995).

During this time, Greider, in collaboration with Ronald A. DePinho, produced the first telomerase knockout mouse, showing that although telomerase is dispensable for life, increasingly short telomeres result in various deleterious phenotypes, colloquially referred to as premature aging. In the mid-1990s, Greider was recruited by Michael D. West, founder of biotechnology company Geron (now CEO of AgeX Therapeutics) to join the company's Scientific Advisory Board and remained on the Board until 1997.

Greider accepted a faculty position at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1997. Greider continued to study telomerase deficient mice and saw that her sixth generation of mice had become entirely sterile, but when mated with control mice the telomerase deficient mice were able to regenerate their telomeres. Greider continued to work on telomerase biochemistry, defining the secondary structure (2000) and template boundary (2003) of vertebrate telomerase RNA as well as analyzing the pseudoknot structure in human telomerase RNA (2005). In addition to working in Tetrahymena and mammalian systems, Greider also studied telomeres and telomerase in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, further characterizing the recombination-based gene conversion mechanism that yeast cells null for telomerase use to maintain telomeres (1999) (2001). Greider also showed that short telomeres elicit a DNA damage response in yeast (2003).

Greider, Blackburn, and Szostak shared the 2006 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research for their work on telomeres, before jointly receiving the Nobel Prize in 2009.

In February 2014, Greider was named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Greider served as director of and professor at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Greider was first promoted to Daniel Nathans Professor at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics in 2004.

As of 2021, she is Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at UC Santa Cruz.

Greider's lab employs both student and post-doctoral trainees to further examine the relationships between the biology of telomeres and their connection to disease. Greider's lab uses a variety of tools including yeast, mice, and biochemistry to look at progressive telomere shortening. Greider's lab is also researching how tumor reformation can be controlled by the presence of short telomeres. The lab's future work will focus more on identifying the processing and regulation of telomeres and telomere elongation.

Personal life

Greider married Nathaniel C. Comfort, a fellow academic, in 1992. They divorced in 2011. She has two children.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-04 15:31:14

2124) Jack W. Szostak

Gist:

Work

An organism's genes are stored within DNA molecules, which are found in chromosomes inside its cells' nuclei. When a cell divides, it is important that its chromosomes are copied in full, and that they are not damaged. At each end of a chromosome lies a cap or telomere, as it is known, which protects it. After Elizabeth Blackburn discovered that telomeres have a particular DNA, through experiments conducted on ciliates and yeast, she and Jack Szostak proved in 1982 that the telomeres' DNA prevents chromosomes from being broken down.

Summary

Jack W. Szostak (born Nov. 9, 1952, London, Eng.) is an English-born American biochemist and geneticist who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with American molecular biologists Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider, for his discoveries concerning the function of telomeres (segments of DNA occurring at the ends of chromosomes), which play a vital role in determining cell life span. Szostak also investigated the process of chromosomal recombination during cell division and conducted studies into the role of RNA in the evolution of life on early Earth.

Szostak received a bachelor’s degree in cell biology from McGill University in Montreal in 1972 and received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1977. After working as a research associate at Cornell from 1977 to 1979, Szostak took a position as assistant professor in the department of biological chemistry of the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute (now the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute) at Harvard Medical School. His early research was concerned with the process of genetic recombination during a form of cell division called meiosis. During each round of division, cells lose some genetic material, but they do not lose functional genes. Szostak suspected that there exists some protective mechanism that prevents the loss of vital genetic information during division, and he centred his investigations on telomeres.

In 1980 Szostak met Blackburn, who had elucidated the genetic sequence of telomeres in the protozoan Tetrahymena. Szostak was researching telomeres in yeast, and he and Blackburn decided to conduct an experiment in which Tetrahymena telomeres were attached to the ends of yeast chromosomes. The researchers discovered that the yeast utilized the foreign telomeres as though they were the yeast’s own. The yeast also added its own telomere DNA to the Tetrahymena DNA, indicating that a cellular mechanism exists for telomere maintenance. Blackburn and Greider, then a graduate student in Blackburn’s laboratory, later discovered that this maintenance process is regulated by an enzyme called telomerase. Szostak’s later work in yeast demonstrated that the loss of telomerase activity leads to premature cell aging and cell death, providing the initial link between telomeres and the aging process.

Szostak remained at Harvard Medical School, becoming associate professor in the department of biological chemistry (1983–84), associate professor in the department of genetics (1984–87), and finally professor in the department of genetics (1988– ). He also held a position in the department of molecular biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. In addition to Szostak’s investigations into telomeres, he was the first to create a yeast artificial chromosome (1983), which can be used to clone DNA and consists of a vector (or carrier) molecule that contains yeast genes necessary for replication and a DNA segment of interest.

By 1991 Szostak had shifted the focus of his research to RNA and its role in evolution. Using only simple molecules, he developed techniques to generate functional RNAs in a test tube. The goal of this research was to synthesize a self-replicating protocell susceptible to Darwinian evolution, which could then serve as a model to investigate the transition from chemical to biological life on early Earth.

Szostak later obtained U.S. citizenship, and in 1998 he became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was also elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. In addition to the 2009 Nobel Prize, he received a variety of other awards during his career, including the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 2006 (shared with Blackburn and Greider).

Details

Jack William Szostak (born November 9, 1952) is a Canadian American biologist of Polish British descent, Nobel Prize laureate, university professor at the University of Chicago, former professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. Szostak has made significant contributions to the field of genetics. His achievement helped scientists to map the location of genes in mammals and to develop techniques for manipulating genes. His research findings in this area are also instrumental to the Human Genome Project. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W. Greider, for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres.

Early life and education

Szostak grew up in Montreal and Ottawa. Although Szostak does not speak Polish, he stated in an interview with Wprost weekly that he remembers his Polish roots. He attended Riverdale High School (Quebec) and graduated at the age of 15 with the scholars prize. He graduated with a B.Sc in cell biology from McGill University at the age of 19. In 1970, as an undergraduate, he participated in The Jackson Laboratory's Summer Student Program under the mentorship of Dr. Chen K. Chai. He completed his PhD in biochemistry at Cornell University (advisor Prof. Ray Wu) before moving to Harvard Medical School to start his own lab at the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute. He credits Ruth Sager for giving him his job there when he had little yet to show. In 1984 Howard Goodman recruited him to Massachusetts General Hospital and the Department of Molecular Biology. He was granted tenure and a full professorship at Harvard Medical School in 1988. In 2022, he moved to the University of Chicago as a university professor in the Department of Chemistry and the college.

Research and career

Szostak has made contributions to the field of genetics. He is credited with the construction of the world's first yeast artificial chromosome. That achievement helped scientists to map the location of genes in mammals and to develop techniques for manipulating genes. His achievements in this area are also instrumental to the Human Genome Project.

His discoveries have helped to clarify the events that lead to chromosomal recombination—the reshuffling of genes that occurs during meiosis—and the function of telomeres, the specialized DNA sequences at the tips of chromosomes.

In the early 90s his laboratory shifted its research direction and focused on studying RNA enzymes, which had been recently discovered by Cech and Altman. He developed the technique of in vitro evolution of RNA (also developed independently by Gerald Joyce) which enables the discovery of RNAs with desired functions through successive cycles of selection, amplification and mutation. He isolated the first aptamer (term he used for the first time). He isolated RNA enzymes with RNA ligase activity directly from random sequence (project of David Bartel).

Currently, his lab focuses on the challenges of understanding the origin of life on Earth, and the construction of artificial cellular life in the laboratory. They have conducted detailed studies of mechanisms by which RNA templates may have replicated on early Earth before the emergence of enzyme catalysts. In particular, they have focused on imidazole-activated ribonucleotides (phosphorimidazolides) as monomers capable of elongating a new RNA strand. Significantly, the Szostak group discovered that phosphorimidazolide-mediated template elongation occurs via 5'-5'-imidazolium bridged dinucleotide intermediates which accelerate polymerization. Phosphorimidazolides were first proposed to be critical for early-Earth nucleotide polymerization by Leslie E. Orgel and colleagues.

Szostak and Katarzyna Adamala demonstrated that the issues of a degrading effect of magnesium ions on RNA and the disruption of a fatty acid membrane by magnesium ions can be simultaneously solved by the presence of weak cation chelator like citric acid in primitive protocells.

Beyond his research, he has delivered talks about the origin of life on Earth, as he did at the first Starmus Festival in the Canary Islands, in 2011. He subsequently joined the Starmus board of directors, and his 2011 lecture was published in the book Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space.

In September 2022, Szostak joined the faculty of the University of Chicago as university professor, leading a new interdisciplinary program called the Origins of Life Initiative.

Awards and honors

Szostak has received several awards and honors for his contributions. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and New York Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and is a member of the Kosciuszko Foundation Collegium of Eminent Scientists of Polish Origin and Ancestry.

Personal life

Szostak was married to Terri-Lynn McCormick and has two sons. He has two sisters, Carolyn Szostak and Kathy Hysen.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-05 15:49:34

2125) Andre Geim

Gist:

Life

Andre Geim was born in Sotji, Russia, to a family with German heritage. He spent the first seven years of his life living with his maternal grandparents. It was not until later that Geim discovered that both his paternal grandfather and his father, who were physicists, had spent several years imprisoned in labor camps. Since receiving his PhD in physics from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Chernogolovka, Geim has worked at several European universities, including in Nijmegen, Netherlands. Geim has held a position at the University of Manchester in the UK since 2001. He is married with children.

Work

Carbon exists in several different natural forms. A material consisting of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice and only one atom thick was long considered a purely theoretical construction. In 2004 Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov successfully produced this material, graphene, and mapped its properties: incredibly thin but still incredibly strong, good heat and electrical conductivity, almost entirely transparent yet very dense. Graphene creates new possibilities within materials technology and electronics.

Summary

Sir Andre Geim (born October 21, 1958, Sochi, Russia, U.S.S.R.) is a physicist who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics for his experiments with graphene. He shared the prize with his colleague and former student Konstantin Novoselov. Geim holds dual citizenship in the Netherlands and Great Britain.

Geim received a master’s degree from the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute (now the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology) in 1982 and a doctoral degree from the Institute of Solid State Physics at Chernogolovka, near Moscow, in 1987. He was a research scientist at the Institute for Microelectronics Technology and High Purity Materials at Chernogolovka from 1987 to 1990, and between 1990 and 1994 he held postdoctoral positions at the University of Bath, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Copenhagen. He was an associate professor of physics at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands from 1994 to 2000. In 2001 he became a professor of physics at the University of Manchester.

In 2004 Geim, Novoselov, and colleagues succeeded in isolating graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon found in a hexagonal lattice. Graphene is an extremely good conductor of electricity and may surpass silicon to form the next generation of computer chips. Graphene is also almost totally transparent, so it could be an ideal material for touch screens and solar cells.

Geim was included in the United Kingdom’s New Year Honours List for 2012 and was thereafter made a knight bachelor.

Details

Sir Andre Konstantin Geim (born 21 October 1958) is a Russian-born Dutch–British physicist working in England in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.

Geim was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Konstantin Novoselov for his work on graphene. He is Regius Professor of Physics and Royal Society Research Professor at the National Graphene Institute. Geim was previously awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 for levitating a frog using its intrinsic magnetism. He is the first and only individual, as of 2025, to have received both Nobel and Ig Nobel prizes, for which he holds a Guinness World Record.

Education

Andre Geim was born to Konstantin Alekseyevich Geim and Nina Nikolayevna Bayer in Sochi, Russia, on 21 October 1958. Both his parents were engineers of German origin; Geim says his maternal great-grandmother was Jewish. His grandfather Nikolay N. Bayer (Mykola Baier in Ukrainian) was a notable public figure in Ukraine of the early 20th century, one of its first nature conservationists and the founder/first rector of Kaminiets-Podilskyi University.

In 1965, the family moved to Nalchik, where he studied at a high school. After graduation, he applied to the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. He took the entrance exams twice, but attributes his failure to qualify to discrimination on account of his German ethnicity. He then applied to the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), where he was accepted.

He said that at the time he would not have chosen to study solid-state physics, preferring particle physics or astrophysics, but is now happy with his choice. He received a diplom (MSc degree equivalent) from MIPT in 1982 and a Candidate of Sciences (PhD equivalent) degree in metal physics in 1987 from the Institute of Solid State Physics (ISSP) at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) in Chernogolovka.

Academic career

After earning his PhD with Victor Petrashov, Geim worked as a research scientist at the Institute for Microelectronics Technology (IMT) at RAS, and from 1990 as a post-doctoral fellow at the universities of Nottingham (twice), Bath, and Copenhagen. He said that while at Nottingham he could spend his time on research rather than "swimming through Soviet treacle," and determined to leave the Soviet Union.

He obtained his first tenured position in 1994, when he was appointed associate professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, where he worked on mesoscopic superconductivity. He later gained Dutch citizenship. One of his doctoral students at Nijmegen was Konstantin Novoselov, who went on to become his main research partner. However, Geim has said that he had an unpleasant time during his academic career in the Netherlands.

He was offered professorships at Nijmegen and Eindhoven, but turned them down as he found the Dutch academic system too hierarchical and full of petty politicking. "This can be pretty unpleasant at times," he says. "It's not like the British system where every staff member is an equal quantity." On the other hand, Geim writes in his Nobel lecture that "the situation was a bit surreal because outside the university walls I received a warm-hearted welcome from everyone around, including Jan Kees and other academics." (Prof. Jan Kees Maan was the research boss of Geim during his time at Radboud University Nijmegen.)

In 2001 he became a professor of physics at the University of Manchester, and was appointed director of the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology in 2002. Geim's wife and long-standing co-author, Irina Grigorieva, also moved to Manchester as a lecturer in 2001. The same year, they were joined by Novoselov who moved to Manchester from Nijmegen, which awarded him a PhD in 2004. Geim served as Langworthy Professor between 2007 and 2013, leaving this endowed professorship to Novoselov in 2012. Also, between 2007 and 2010 Geim was an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow before becoming one of Royal Society Research Professors.

Geim holds many honorary professorships including those from Tsinghua University (China), Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (Russia), and Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands).

Research

Geim's achievements include the discovery of a simple method for isolating single atomic layers of graphite, known as graphene, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Manchester and IMT. The team published their findings in October 2004 in Science.

Graphene consists of one-atom-thick layers of carbon atoms arranged in two-dimensional hexagons, and is the thinnest material in the world, as well as one of the strongest and hardest. The material has many potential applications.

Geim said one of the first applications of graphene could be in the development of flexible touchscreens, and that he has not patented the material because he would need a specific application and an industrial partner.

Geim also developed a biomimetic adhesive which became known as gecko tape—so called because it works on the same principle as adhesion of gecko feet—research of which is still in the early stages. It is hoped that the development will eventually allow humans to scale ceilings, like Spider-Man.

Geim's research in 1997 into the possible effects of magnetism on water scaling led to the famous discovery of direct diamagnetic levitation of water, and led to a frog being levitated.[46] For this experiment, he and Michael Berry received the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize. "We were asked first whether we dared to accept this prize, and I take pride in our sense of humor and self-deprecation that we did".

Geim has also carried out research on mesoscopic physics and superconductivity.

He said of the range of subjects he has studied: "Many people choose a subject for their PhD and then continue the same subject until they retire. I despise this approach. I have changed my subject five times before I got my first tenured position and that helped me to learn different subjects." "When one dares to try, rewards are not guaranteed but at least it is an adventure."

Expanding the scope of his research adventures, Geim started studying low-dimensional water in 2012, after his Nobel-prize achievements. A part of this work was acknowledged by the 2018 Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Creativity Prize for Water.

He named his favourite hamster, H.A.M.S. ter Tisha, co-author in a 2001 research paper.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-06 16:24:01

2126) Konstantin Novoselov

Gist:

Life

Konstantin Novoselov was born in Nizhny Tagil, Russia. After first studying in Moscow, Novoselov studied for his PhD under supervisor Andre Geim, first at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and then at the University of Manchester, UK. Novoselov is married with two daughters.

Work

Carbon exists in several different natural forms. A material consisting of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice and only one atom thick was long considered a purely theoretical construction. In 2004 Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim successfully produced this material, graphene, and mapped its properties: incredibly thin but still incredibly strong, good heat and electrical conductivity, almost entirely transparent yet very dense. Graphene creates new possibilities within materials technology and electronics.

Summary

Konstantin Novoselov (born August 23, 1974, Nizhny Tagil, Russia, U.S.S.R.) is a Russian-British physicist who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics for his experiments with graphene. He shared the prize with his colleague and former teacher Andre Geim. Novoselov holds dual citizenship in Russia and Great Britain.

Novoselov received a master’s degree from the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute (now the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology) in 1997. He was a researcher at the Institute for Microelectronics Technology and High Purity Materials at Chernogolovka, Russia, from 1997 to 1999 and at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands from 1999 to 2001. In 2001 he became a researcher in physics at the University of Manchester. He received a doctoral degree in physics from Radboud University Nijmegen, where Geim was his adviser, in 2004.

In 2004 Novoselov, Geim, and colleagues succeeded in isolating graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon found in a hexagonal lattice. Graphene is an extremely good conductor of electricity and may surpass silicon to form the next generation of computer chips. Graphene is also almost totally transparent, so it could be an ideal material for touch screens and solar cells.

Novoselov was knighted in 2012.

Details

Sir Konstantin Sergeevich Novoselov (born 23 August 1974) is a Russian–British physicist. His work on graphene with Andre Geim earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. Novoselov is a professor at the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials, National University of Singapore[8] and is also the Langworthy Professor of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.

Education

Konstantin Novoselov was born in Nizhny Tagil, Soviet Union, in 1974. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology with a MSc degree in 1997, and was awarded a PhD from the Radboud University of Nijmegen in 2004 for work supervised by Andre Geim.

Konstantin Novoselov uses the nickname "Kostya" (diminutive of the name Konstantin).

Career

Novoselov has published 475 peer-reviewed research papers on several topics including mesoscopic superconductivity (Hall magnetometry) as of January 2024 subatomic movements of magnetic domain walls, the discovery of gecko tape and graphene.

Kostya Novoselov participated in the Graphene Flagship project – a €1 billion initiative of the European Commission – and was featured in the official promotion movie of the project.

Novoselov was the first Director of the National Graphene Institute and sits on the International Scientific Advisory Committee of Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies.

Novoselov was also a recipient of a starting grant from the European Research Council.

Kostya Novoselov made it into a shortlist of scientists with multiple hot papers for the years 2007–2008 (shared second place with 13 hot papers) and 2009 (5th place with 12 hot papers).

In 2014 Kostya Novoselov was included in the list of the most highly cited researchers. He was also named among the 17 hottest researchers worldwide—"individuals who have published the greatest number of hot papers during 2012–2013".

Novoselov joined the National University of Singapore's Centre for Advanced 2D Materials in 2019, making him the first Nobel laureate to join a Singaporean university. In 2021, he pioneered with Antonio H. Castro Neto a new research centre at the National University of Singapore called IFIM. With $200 million in funding over 10 years provided by the Ministry of Education and NUS, the centre will work on making ground-breaking discoveries into what are called functional intelligent materials.

National Graphene Institute

Novoselov led the academic team which overviewed the design, construction and launching of the National Graphene Institute. He contributed with a number of unique architectural and technical solutions. The veil of the National Graphene Institute depicts formulae from his and Prof. A. Geim early works on graphene. Also, Novoselov confirms that among the formulae several scientific jokes are hidden, though he has never revealed them.

He co-authored a book on the architecture of the National Graphene Institute.

Other projects

In 2018, in a project of exploration of the archives of the Jodrell Bank Observatory, Prof. Novoselov helped Prof. Tim O'Brian to transcribe radio transmission (most possibly simulated instrument reading) from the Soviet Zond 6 received by radio telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory in November 1968.

Personal life

Novoselov holds both Russian and British citizenship. He is married and has two daughters. He is an agnostic.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-07 15:40:57

2127) Richard F. Heck

Gist:

Work

Nature is full of organic substances—a multitude of chemical compounds that contain the element carbon. Using chemical methods to combine or synthesize organic substances is important in both scientific and industrial contexts. At the end of the 1960s, Richard Heck began developing chemical reactions in which carbon atoms are bound together so that new compounds are created. The reactions create cross couplings between carbon atoms, with the metal palladium as a catalyst. Palladium facilitates the reaction without becoming incorporated in the final product.

Summary

Richard F. Heck (born August 15, 1931, Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 9, 2015, Manila, Philippines) was an American chemist who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in using palladium as a catalyst in producing organic molecules. He shared the prize with Japanese chemists Negishi Ei-ichi and Suzuki Akira.

Heck received a bachelor’s degree (1952) and a doctoral degree (1954) from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). From 1954 to 1957 he did postdoctoral work at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich and at UCLA. In 1956 he joined the American chemical company Hercules Powder in Wilmington, Delaware.

In 1968 Heck used palladium as a catalyst in the synthesis of organic molecules. A carbon atom in an organic molecule binds to a palladium atom. When a carbon atom from another organic molecule binds to the palladium atom, the carbon atoms then bind to each other, ejecting the palladium and forming a new molecule. This reaction became known as the Heck reaction (or the Mizoroki-Heck reaction after Japanese chemist Mizoroki Tsutomu, who developed a more practical version of Heck’s original reaction). The technique of palladium catalysis found extensive use in the pharmaceutical, agricultural, and electronics industries.

In 1971 Heck became a professor of chemistry at the University of Delaware in Newark. He retired in 1989.

Details

Richard Frederick Heck (August 15, 1931 – October 9, 2015) was an American chemist noted for the discovery and development of the Heck reaction, which uses palladium to catalyze organic chemical reactions that couple aryl halides with alkenes. The analgesic naproxen is an example of a compound that is prepared industrially using the Heck reaction.

For his work in palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions and organic synthesis, Heck was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with the Japanese chemists Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki.

Early life and education

Heck was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1931. He moved to Los Angeles when eight years old and later attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), gaining a bachelor's degree in 1952 and then a Ph.D. in 1954 working under the supervision of Saul Winstein on the chemistry of aryl sulfonates. After postdoctoral research at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland with Vladimir Prelog, and then back at UCLA, Heck took a position with the Hercules Corporation in Wilmington, Delaware in 1956, working initially on polymer chemistry.

Career

At Hercules, Heck soon became interested in organometallic chemistry, including work with David S. Breslow on organocobalt reactions. This led to the development of the Heck reaction, which began with his investigation during the late 1960s of the coupling of arylmercury compounds with olefins using palladium as a catalyst. This work was published in a series of seven consecutive articles in the Journal of the American Chemical Society for which Heck was the sole author.

During the early 1970s, Tsutomu Mizoroki independently reported the use of the less toxic aryl halides as the coupling partner in the reaction. Heck became a professor of chemistry at the University of Delaware's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 1971, where he continued to improve the transformation, developing it into a powerful synthetic method for organic synthesis.

The importance of this reaction grew as it was taken up by others in the organic synthesis community. In 1982, Heck was able to write an Organic Reactions chapter that covered all the known instances in just 45 pages. By 2002, applications had grown to the extent that the Organic Reactions chapter published that year, limited to intramolecular Heck reactions, covered 377 pages. These reactions, a small part of the total, couple two parts of the same molecule. The reaction is now one of the most widely used methods for the creation of carbon-carbon bonds in the synthesis of organic chemicals. It has been subject to numerous scientific review articles, including a monograph dedicated to this subject published in 2009.

Heck's contributions were not limited to the activation of halides by the oxidative addition of palladium. He was the first to fully characterize a π-allyl metal complex, and the first to elucidate the mechanism of alkene hydroformylation.

Palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions

Heck's work set the stage for a variety of other palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions, including those of aryl halides with derivatives of boronic acid (Suzuki–Miyaura coupling), organotin reagents (Stille coupling), organomagnesium compounds (Kumada-Corriu coupling), silanes (Hiyama coupling), and organozincs (Negishi coupling), as well as with amines (Buchwald–Hartwig amination) and alcohols. These palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions are now widely practiced in organic synthesis, including for the manufacture of pharmaceutical drugs such as naproxen.

Of the several reactions developed by Heck, the greatest societal impact has been from the palladium-catalyzed coupling of an alkyne with an aryl halide. This is the reaction that was used to couple fluorescent dyes to DNA bases, allowing the automation of DNA sequencing and the examination of the human genome; the reaction also allows biologically important proteins to be tracked. In Sonogashira's original report of what is now known as the Sonogashira coupling, his group modified an alkyne coupling procedure previously reported by Heck, by adding a copper(I) salt.

Later life and death

Heck retired from the University of Delaware in 1989, where he became the Willis F. Harrington Professor Emeritus in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Its annual lectureship was named in his honor in 2004. In 2005, he was awarded the Wallace H. Carothers Award, which recognizes creative applications of chemistry that have had substantial commercial impact. He was awarded the 2006 Herbert C. Brown Award for creative research in synthetic methods. On October 6, 2010, the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences awarded Heck the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he shared with Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki "for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis". In 2011, Heck was awarded the Glenn T. Seaborg Medal for this work. In 2012, he was appointed by De La Salle University in Manila as an adjunct professor in its chemistry department. He had moved to Quezon City, Philippines after retirement, with his wife, Socorro Nardo-Heck. The couple had no children.

Heck died on October 9, 2015, in Manila in a public hospital. His wife predeceased him by 2 years.

Honorary degrees

Heck received honorary doctorates from the Faculty of Pharmacy at Uppsala University in 2011[27] and De La Salle University in 2012.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-08 15:39:12

2128) Ei-ichi Negishi

Gist:

Work

Nature is full of organic substances—a multitude of chemical compounds that contain the element carbon. Using chemical methods to combine or synthesize organic substances is important in both scientific and industrial contexts. At the mid 1970s, Ei-ichi Negishi began developing chemical reactions in which carbon atoms are bound together so that new compounds are created. The reactions create cross couplings between carbon atoms, with the metal palladium as a catalyst. Palladium facilitates the reaction without becoming incorporated in the final product.

Summary

Negishi Ei-ichi (born July 14, 1935, Xinjing, Manchukuo [now Changchun, China]—died June 6, 2021, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.) was a Japanese chemist who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in using palladium as a catalyst in producing organic molecules. He shared the prize with fellow Japanese chemist Suzuki Akira and American chemist Richard F. Heck.

Negishi received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tokyo in 1958. He was a research chemist at the Japanese chemical company Teijin from 1958 to 1960. From 1960 to 1963 he studied at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he received a doctorate. He returned to Teijin as a research chemist from 1963 to 1966. In 1966 he became a postdoctoral associate at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, where he was an assistant to American chemist Herbert C. Brown. Negishi was an assistant professor and later an associate professor at Syracuse University from 1972 to 1979.

In 1977 Negishi further developed Heck’s technique of palladium catalysis by using a zinc atom to transfer a carbon atom to the palladium atom. The carbon atom then joins to another carbon atom to form a new molecule. This became known as the Negishi reaction. He returned to Purdue as a professor in 1979.

Details

Ei-ichi Negishi (Negishi Eiichi, July 14, 1935 – June 6, 2021) was a Japanese chemist who was best known for his discovery of the Negishi coupling. He spent most of his career at Purdue University in the United States, where he was the Herbert C. Brown Distinguished Professor and the director of the Negishi-Brown Institute. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for palladium catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis" jointly with Richard F. Heck and Akira Suzuki.

Early life and education

Negishi was born in Xinjing (today known as Changchun), the capital of Manchukuo, in July 1935. Following the transfer of his father who worked at the South Manchuria Railway in 1936, he moved to Harbin, and lived eight years there. In 1943, when he was nine, the Negishi family moved to Incheon, and a year later to Kyongsong Prefecture (now Seoul), both in Japanese-occupied Korea. In November 1945, three months after World War II ended, they moved to Japan. Since he excelled as a student, a year ahead of what would have been his graduation from grammar school, he was admitted to an elite secondary school, Shonan High School. At the age of 17, he gained admission to the University of Tokyo. After graduation from the University of Tokyo in 1958, Negishi did his internship at Teijin, where he conducted research on polymer chemistry. Later, he continued his studies in the United States after having won a Fulbright Scholarship and obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963, under the supervision of professor Allan R. Day.

Career

After obtaining his Ph.D., Negishi decided to become an academic researcher. Although he was hoping to work at a Japanese university, he could not find a position. In 1966 he resigned from Teijin, and became a postdoctoral associate at Purdue University, working under future Nobel laureate Herbert C. Brown. From 1968 to 1972 he was an instructor at Purdue.

In 1972, he became an assistant professor at Syracuse University, where began his lifelong study of transition metal–catalyzed reactions, and was promoted to associate professor in 1979. He returned to Purdue University as a full professor in the same year.

He discovered Negishi coupling, a process which condenses organic zinc compounds and organic halides under a palladium or nickel catalyst to obtain a C-C bonded product. For this achievement, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2010. Negishi also reported that organoaluminum compounds and organic zirconium compounds can be used for cross-coupling. He did not seek a patent for this coupling technology and explained his reasoning as follows: "If we did not obtain a patent, we thought that everyone could use our results easily." In addition, Zr(C5H5)2 obtained by reducing zirconocene dichloride is also called Negishi reagent, which can be used in oxidative cyclisation reactions. The technique he developed is estimated to be used in a quarter of all reactions in the pharmaceutical industry.

By the time Negishi retired in 2019, he had published more than 400 academic papers. He was committed to instilling rigorous practices in his lab, emphasizing the need of keeping organized and comprehensive records. Before any separations, he asked his student to evaluate crude reaction mixtures in order to minimize loss of any useful scientific information.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-09 16:19:28

2129) Akira Suzuki

Gist:

Work

Nature is full of organic substances—a multitude of chemical compounds that contain the element carbon. Using chemical methods to combine or synthesize organic substances is important in both scientific and industrial contexts. At the end of the 1970s, Akira Suzuki began developing chemical reactions in which carbon atoms are bound together so that new compounds are created. The reactions create cross couplings between carbon atoms, with the metal palladium as a catalyst. Palladium facilitates the reaction without becoming incorporated in the final product.

Summary

Suzuki Akira (born September 12, 1930, Mukawa-chō, Japan) is a Japanese chemist who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in using palladium as a catalyst in producing organic molecules. He shared the prize with fellow Japanese chemist Negishi Ei-ichi and American chemist Richard F. Heck.

Suzuki received both a bachelor’s degree (1954) and a doctorate (1959) from Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. He became an assistant professor in the department of chemical process engineering there in 1961. He joined the applied chemistry department as a professor in 1973.

In 1979 Suzuki modified the technique of palladium catalysis of organic molecules by using a boron atom to transfer a carbon atom to the palladium atom. The carbon atom then joins to another carbon atom to form a new molecule. This became known as the Suzuki reaction.

He retired from Hokkaido University in 1994 and was a professor at the Okayama University of Science in Okayama prefecture until 1995. From 1995 to 2002 he was a professor at Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts, in nearby Kurashiki.

Details

Akira Suzuki (Suzuki Akira, born September 12, 1930) is a Japanese chemist and Nobel Prize Laureate (2010), who first published the Suzuki reaction, the organic reaction of an aryl- or vinyl-boronic acid with an aryl- or vinyl-halide catalyzed by a palladium(0) complex, in 1979.

Early life and education

Suzuki was born on September 12, 1930, in Mukawa, Hokkaidō, his father died when he was in high school. He studied chemistry at Hokkaido University (Hokudai) and after receiving his PhD while he worked there as assistant professor. He initially wanted to major in mathematics, as his favorite subject in childhood was arithmetic. It was an encounter with two books that became an opportunity to advance to the path of organic synthesis, one is Textbook of Organic Chemistry written by Louis Fieser of Harvard University, and another is Hydroboration written by Herbert C. Brown of Purdue University.

Career

From 1963 until 1965, Suzuki worked as a postdoctoral student with Herbert C. Brown at Purdue University and after returning to the Hokudai he became a full professor there. The postdoctoral experience was utilized in the study of the coupling reaction with his assistant Norio Miyaura and led to the discovery of Suzuki reaction announced in 1979. Its organic boronic acids with aryl and vinyl group are stable to water and air, easy to handle, and because the conditions required for use are also relatively mild, even among the several cross-coupling techniques, it is said to be easy to use.

With his retirement from Hokudai in 1994 he took several positions in other universities: 1994–1995 Okayama University of Science and 1995–2002 Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts. In addition, he was an invited professor at Purdue University (2001), Academic Sinica and the National Taiwan University (2002).

In 2010, Suzuki was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry together with Richard F. Heck and Ei-ichi Negishi.

To celebrate International Year of Chemistry (IYC 2011), Suzuki was interviewed by the UNESCO Courier magazine, he said：

Today some people see chemistry just as a polluting industry, but that is a mistake ... Without it, productivity would drop and we could not enjoy the life we know today. If there is pollution, it is because we are releasing harmful substances. Obviously, we have to adapt treatment and management regimes and work to develop chemical substances and manufacturing processes that respect the environment.

In 2014, a Canadian-Chinese student asked for Suzuki's advice: "how can I become a great chemist like you?", Suzuki answered him: "... above all else, you must learn to see through the appearance to perceive the essence."

Invention without patent

Suzuki has not obtained a patent on Suzuki reaction technology because he thinks that the research was supported by government funds, therefore coupling technology has become widespread, and many products using this technology have been put into practical use. To date, there are more than 6,000 papers and patents related to Suzuki reaction.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-10 16:43:32

2130) Robert Edwards (physiologist)

Gist:

Life

Robert Edwards was born outside of Manchester in England to a working-class family. After serving in the army and studies at the University of Bangor, Edwards continued his studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he completed his doctorate in 1955. After serving at various institutions, in 1963 he moved to the University of Cambridge. In 1980 Edwards and Patrick Steptoe established the Bourn Hall fertility clinic. Edwards was married to Ruth Fowler, who was also a scientific colleague. They had five children.

Work

For many people, having children occupies a central place in their lives, but not everyone can have children in a natural way. A woman’s Fallopian tubes may be blocked or there can be too few eggs or sperm cells. Robert Edwards saw a solution to this: removing an egg from the woman, allowing it to be fertilized in a test tube and then replacing it in the woman. He explained how eggs mature and how sperm is activated, and in cooperation with Patrick Steptoe, he found a method for removing eggs from the ovaries. In 1978 the first child was born as a result of in vitro fertilization.

Summary

Robert Edwards (born September 27, 1925, Batley, West Riding of Yorkshire, England—died April 10, 2013, near Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England) was a British medical researcher who developed the technique of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Edwards, together with British gynecologist Patrick Steptoe, refined IVF for the human egg. Their work made possible the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first “test-tube baby,” on July 25, 1978. Edwards was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries.

Edwards grew up in Manchester and served in the British army (1943–48). In 1949 he started to pursue a degree in agriculture at the University of Wales, but he soon switched his major to zoology. After receiving a B.Sc. (1951), he studied mouse embryos, artificial insemination, and infertility at the University of Edinburgh (Ph.D., 1955). Edwards continued his research at the California Institute of Technology (1957–58) in the United States, the National Institute for Medical Research, London (1958–62), and the University of Glasgow (1962–63) before joining the faculty at the University of Cambridge in 1963; he retired and became professor emeritus in 1989.

In 1968, the same year Edwards’s partnership with Steptoe began, he succeeded in fertilizing a human ovum outside the womb. Four years later they made their first attempt at implanting human embryos in women but were unsuccessful because of the hormone regimens they employed, which encouraged the release of multiple eggs (to improve the chances of fertilization) but also resulted in menstruation at the time of implantation. They ultimately abandoned that approach and instead chose to time the isolation, fertilization, and implantation of single eggs with the natural ovulation and menstrual cycle. In 1976 they met Lesley Brown, in whom their natural-cycle approach proved successful. Their work at the Centre for Human Reproduction in Oldham, England, resulted in the birth of more than 1,000 babies, including Louise Brown’s younger sister. In 1980 Edwards and Steptoe founded Bourn Hall Clinic in Cambridge.

Edwards and Steptoe chronicled their research on IVF in A Matter of Life: The Story of a Medical Breakthrough (1980). In 2001 Edwards received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, and in 2006 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Karolinska Institute.

Details

Sir Robert Geoffrey Edwards (27 September 1925 – 10 April 2013) was a British physiologist and pioneer in reproductive medicine, and in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) in particular. Along with obstetrician and gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe and nurse and embryologist Jean Purdy, Edwards successfully pioneered conception through IVF, which led to the birth of Louise Brown on 25 July 1978. They founded the first IVF programme for infertile patients and trained other scientists in their techniques. Edwards was the founding editor-in-chief of Human Reproduction in 1986. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the development of in vitro fertilization".

Education and early career

Edwards was born in Batley, Yorkshire, and attended Manchester Central High School on Whitworth Street in central Manchester, after which he served in the British Army, and then completed his undergraduate studies in biology, graduating with an ordinary degree from Bangor University. He studied at the Institute of Animal Genetics and Embryology at the University of Edinburgh, where he was awarded a PhD in 1955 under the supervision of R.A. Beatty and C. H. Waddington.

Career and research

After a year as a postdoctoral research fellow at the California Institute of Technology he joined the scientific staff of the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill. After a further year at the University of Glasgow, in 1963 he moved to the University of Cambridge as Ford Foundation Research Fellow at the Department of Physiology, and a member of Churchill College, Cambridge. He was appointed Reader in physiology in 1969.

Human fertilisation

Circa 1960 Edwards started to study human fertilisation, and he continued his work at Cambridge, laying the groundwork for his later success. In 1968 he was able to achieve fertilisation of a human egg in the laboratory and started to collaborate with Patrick Steptoe, a gynaecological surgeon from Oldham. Edwards developed human culture media to allow the fertilisation and early embryo culture, while Steptoe used laparoscopy to recover ovocytes from patients with tubal infertility. Their attempts met significant hostility and opposition, including a refusal of the Medical Research Council to fund their research and several lawsuits. Roger Gosden was one of his first graduate students.

The birth of Louise Brown, the world's first 'test-tube baby', at 11:47 pm on 25 July 1978 at the Oldham General Hospital made medical history: in vitro fertilisation meant a new way to help infertile couples who formerly had no possibility of having a baby. Nurse Jean Purdy was the first to see Brown's embryo dividing.

Refinements in technology have increased pregnancy rates and it is estimated that in 2010 about 4 million children have been born by IVF, with approximately 170,000 coming from donated oocyte and embryos. Their breakthrough laid the groundwork for further innovations such as intracytoplasmatic sperm injection ICSI, embryo biopsy (PGD), and stem cell research.

Edwards, Purdy, and Steptoe founded the Bourn Hall Clinic as a place to advance their work and train new specialists. Purdy died in 1985 and Steptoe in 1988. Edwards continued in his career as a scientist and an editor of medical journals.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-11 16:51:48

2131) Saul Perlmutter

Gist:

Life

Saul Perlmutter grew up outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents were professors of chemical and biomolecular engineering and social work administration, respectively. After studying at Harvard University, Perlmutter received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. He conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Perlmutter is a co-founder of the Supernova Cosmology Project and a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married with one daughter.

Work

The universe’s stars and galaxies are moving away from one another; the universe is expanding. Up until recently, the majority of astrophysicists believed that this expansion would eventually wane, due to the effect of opposing gravitational forces. Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess studied exploding stars, called supernovae. Because the light emitted by stars appears weaker from a larger distance and takes on a reddish hue as it moves further from the observer, the researchers were able to determine how the supernovae moved. In 1998 they reached a surprising result: the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.

Summary

Saul Perlmutter (born 1959, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, U.S.) is an American physicist who was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of dark energy, a repulsive force that is the dominant component (73 percent) of the universe. He shared the prize with astronomers Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess.

Perlmutter graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University in 1981, and he received a doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. He remained at Berkeley in various positions, finally becoming a professor of physics in 2004.

Perlmutter’s work concentrated on using supernovae to measure the expansion rate of the universe. During his time in graduate school, he became involved in a project that used a robotic telescope to search for Type II supernovae. However, in the late 1980s it became apparent that Type Ia supernovae would be better objects for determining distances to faraway galaxies. Beginning in 1988, Perlmutter began the Supernova Cosmology Project, which used large telescopes to search for supernovae. Perlmutter’s team found in 1998 that Type Ia supernovae that had exploded when the universe was younger were fainter than expected. Thus, the supernovae were farther away than expected. This finding implied that the expansion rate of the universe is faster now than it was in the past, a result of the current dominance of the repulsive action of dark energy. Schmidt and Riess’s team independently reached the same conclusion. The acceleration of the universe was a startling result that completely changed cosmology; the majority of the universe’s mass-energy was of a completely unknown nature.

Details

Saul Perlmutter (born September 22, 1959) is a U.S. astrophysicist, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and head of the International Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Perlmutter shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

Education

Saul Perlmutter was born one of three children in the Ashkenazi Jewish family of Daniel D. Perlmutter, professor emeritus of chemical and biomolecular engineering at University of Pennsylvania, and Felice (Feige) D. Perlmutter (née Davidson), professor emerita of Temple University’s School of Social Administration. His maternal grandfather, the Yiddish teacher Samuel Davidson (1903–1989), emigrated to Canada (and then with his wife Chaika Newman to New York) from the Bessarabian town of Floreşti in 1919.

Perlmutter spent his childhood in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. He went to school in nearby Germantown; first Greene Street Friends School for the elementary grades, followed by Germantown Friends School for grades 7 through 12. He graduated with an AB in physics from Harvard magna cum laude in 1981 and received his PhD in physics from Berkeley in 1986. Perlmutter's PhD thesis, titled "An Astrometric Search for a Stellar Companion to the Sun" and supervised by Richard A. Muller, described the development and use of an automated telescope to search for Nemesis candidates. At the same time, he was using this telescope to search for Nemesis and supernovae, which would lead him to his award-winning work in cosmology. Perlmutter attributes the idea for an automated supernova search to Luis Alvarez, a 1968 Nobel laureate, who shared his idea with Perlmutter's research adviser.

Work

Perlmutter heads the Supernova Cosmology Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It was this team along with the competing High-z Supernova Search Team led by Riess and Schmidt, which found evidence of the accelerating expansion of the universe based on observing Type Ia supernova in the distant universe. Type Ia supernova occurs whenever a white dwarf star gains enough additional mass to pass above the Chandrasekhar limit, usually by stealing additional mass from a companion star. Since all Type Ia supernovae are believed to occur in essentially the same way, they form a standard candle whose intrinsic luminosity can be assumed to be approximately the same in all cases. By measuring the apparent luminosity of the explosion from Earth, researchers can then infer the distance to supernova. Comparing this inferred distance to the apparent redshift of the explosion allows the observer to measure both the distance and relative velocity of the supernova.

The Supernova Cosmology Project concluded that these distant supernovae were receding more quickly than would be expected due to the Hubble expansion alone, and, by inference, the expansion of the universe must have been accelerated over the billions of years since the supernovae occurred. The High-z Team also came to a similar conclusion. The two teams' reports were published within weeks of each other, and their conclusions were readily accepted by the scientific community due to corroborating theories. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by other lines of evidence. These findings reinvigorated research into the nature of the universe, and especially into the role of dark energy. For this work Perlmutter was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared jointly with Riess and Schmidt.

Perlmutter is also a lead investigator in the Supernova/Acceleration Probe project, which aims to build a satellite dedicated to finding and studying more supernovae in the distant universe. The goal is to more precisely determine the rate at which the universe has been accelerating. He is also a participant in the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which aims to increase our understanding of recent global warming through improved analyses of climate data.

Perlmutter is a professor and currently teaches at UC Berkeley.

Awards and recognition

Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian P. Schmidt being awarded the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy. The trio would later be awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 2002, Perlmutter won the Department of Energy's E. O. Lawrence Award in Physics. In 2003, he was awarded the California Scientist of the Year Award, and, in 2005, he won the John Scott Award and the Padua Prize. In 2006, he shared the Shaw Prize in Astronomy with Adam Riess and Brian P. Schmidt. The same year, Perlmutter won the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize.

Perlmutter and his team shared the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize (a $500,000 award) with Schmidt and the High-Z Team for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe. In 2010, Perlmutter was named a Miller Senior Fellow of the Miller Institute at the University of California Berkeley. In 2011, Perlmutter and Riess were named co-recipients of the Albert Einstein Medal.

Perlmutter shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Riess and Schmidt. The Nobel Prize includes a SEK 10 million cash award (approximately US$1.5 million). Perlmutter received one-half of the cash prize, while Riess and Schmidt shared the other half.

In 2014, Perlmutter received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Perlmutter, Schmidt, Riess and their teams shared the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with $3 million to be split among them.

A United States Department of Energy 2020 supercomputer is named Perlmutter in his honor.

Family

Saul Perlmutter has two sisters: Shira Perlmutter (b. 1956), a lawyer, and Tova Perlmutter (b. 1967), a nonprofit executive. He is married to Laura Nelson, an anthropologist at University of California, Berkeley, and has one daughter, Noa.

Popular culture

Reference to Saul Perlmutter was made on the CBS television comedy series The Big Bang Theory during the 2011 episode "The Speckerman Recurrence". In the episode, the character Sheldon Cooper watches the Nobel award ceremony on his laptop, and jealously berates Perlmutter: "Look at Dr. Saul Perlmutter up there, clutching that Nobel prize. What's the matter Saul, you afraid somebody's going to steal it? Like you stole Einstein's cosmological constant?" Then later: "Oh, now Perlmutter's shaking the King's hand. Yeah, check for your watch, Gustaf, he might have lifted it."

Perlmutter was also referenced in the 2011 episode of The Big Bang Theory, "The Rhinitis Revelation". In a conversation with his mother, Sheldon says, "I’ve got a treat for us tomorrow, Mom. I’m taking you to see Saul Perlmutter give a lecture about his Nobel Prize-winning work in cosmology. And the best part is, at the Q and A afterward, I’ve worked up a couple of Q’s that will stump his sorry A." Later in the episode, Sheldon criticises the lecture and questions the decision to award Perlmutter a Nobel Prize.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-12 15:04:31

2132) Adam Riess

Gist:

Life

Adam Riess grew up in Warren, New Jersey, where his father ran a frozen-foods distribution company and his mother worked as a psychologist. After receiving his PhD from Harvard University in 1996, Riess was employed at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a member of the High-Z Supernova Search Team, within which he conducted his Nobel Prize-awarded work. Riess moved to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland in 1999. He has held a professorship at Johns Hopkins University since 2005. He is married with two children.

Work

The universe’s stars and galaxies are moving away from one another; the universe is expanding. Up until recently, the majority of astrophysicists believed that this expansion would eventually wane, due to the effect of opposing gravitational forces. Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess studied exploding stars, called supernovae. Because the light emitted by stars appears weaker from a larger distance and takes on a reddish hue as it moves further from the observer, the researchers were able to determine how the supernovae moved. In 1998 they reached a surprising result: the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.

Summary

Adam Riess (born December 16, 1969, Washington, D.C., U.S.) is an American astronomer who was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of dark energy, a repulsive force that is the dominant component (73 percent) of the universe. He shared the prize with physicist Saul Perlmutter and astronomer Brian Schmidt. Riess wrote articles on dark energy and dark matter for the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Riess received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. He received a master’s (1994) and a doctoral degree (1996) in astrophysics from Harvard University, where he shared an adviser, Robert Kirshner, with Schmidt. In 1996 Riess became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and he then became an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore in 1999. He joined the department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, as a professor in 2006.

Riess’s work concentrated on using Type Ia supernovae to measure the expansion rate of the universe. In his doctoral thesis, he accounted for the effects of distance, luminosity, and extinction by intervening dust on how the light received from a Type Ia supernova changed with time. These calculations allowed these supernovae to be used to measure accurate distances to faraway galaxies. He joined Schmidt’s High-Z SN Search team, an international group of astronomers that searched for Type Ia supernovae, in 1994. Riess, Schmidt, and the team found in 1998 that Type Ia supernovae that exploded when the universe was younger were fainter than expected. Thus, the supernovae were farther away than expected. This implied that the expansion rate of the universe is faster now than it was in the past, a result of the current dominance of the repulsive action of dark energy. A team headed by Perlmutter independently reached the same conclusion. The acceleration of the universe was a startling result that completely changed cosmology; the majority of the universe’s mass-energy was of a completely unknown nature.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Riess received various honours. In 2020 he was among the American Astronomical Society’s inaugural fellows.

Details

Adam Guy Riess (born December 16, 1969) is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Family

Riess was born in Washington, D.C., one of three children. He grew up in Warren, New Jersey, where his father (Naval engineer Michael Riess) owned a frozen-foods distribution company, Bistro International, and his mother (Doris Riess) worked as a clinical psychologist. Michael Riess (1931–2007) immigrated to the United States with his parents (journalist, war correspondent and author Curt Martin Riess and Ilse Posnansky)from Germany on the ship SS Europa (1928) in 1936. Riess is by birth Jewish. Adam Riess has two sisters – Gail Saltz, a psychiatrist, and Holly Hagerman, an artist. Riess married Nancy Joy Schondorf in 1998.

Education

He attended Watchung Hills Regional High School, graduating in the class of 1988. He also attended the prestigious New Jersey Governor's School in the Sciences in 1987. Riess then graduated Phi Beta Kappa from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1996; it resulted in measurements of over twenty new Type Ia supernovae and a method to utilize Type Ia supernovae as accurate distance indicators by correcting for intervening dust and intrinsic inhomogeneities. Riess's PhD thesis was supervised by Robert Kirshner and William H. Press and won the Robert J. Trumpler Award in 1999 for PhD theses of unusual importance to astronomy.

Research

Riess was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1996 through 1999, during which period his first seminal paper on the discovery of an accelerating universe was published. In 1999, he moved to the Space Telescope Science Institute and took up a position at Johns Hopkins University in 2006. He also sits on the selection committee for the Astronomy award given under the auspices of the Shaw Prize. In July 2016, Riess was named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University for his accomplishments as an interdisciplinary researcher and excellence in teaching the next generation of scholars. The Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships were established in 2013 by a gift from Michael Bloomberg.

Riess jointly led the study with Brian Schmidt in 1998 for the High-z Supernova Search Team which first reported evidence that the universe's expansion rate is accelerating through monitoring of Type Ia supernovae. The team's observations were contrary to the existing theory that the expansion of the universe was slowing down; instead, by monitoring the color shifts in the light from supernovae from Earth, they discovered that these billion-year old novae were still accelerating. This result was also found nearly simultaneously by the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter. The corroborating evidence between the two competing studies led to the acceptance of the accelerating universe theory, and initiated new research to understand the nature of the universe, such as the existence of dark energy. The discovery of the accelerating universe was named 'Breakthrough of the Year' by Science magazine in 1998, and Riess was jointly awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Schmidt and Perlmutter for their groundbreaking work.

From 2002 to 2007 Riess led the Higher-Z SN Team which used the Hubble Space Telescope to find dozens of type Ia supernovae at z>1, first demonstrating that the expansion of the Universe was decelerating before it began accelerating and ruling out astrophysical contamination of SN Ia.

Riess is also known for his efforts to measure the local value of the Hubble constant while leading the SH0ES Team since 2005 with measurements that approach 1% precision and which indicate a discrepancy with the model-based prediction from the CMB, a problem widely known in cosmology as the Hubble tension.

Awards and honors

Riess received the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's Robert J. Trumpler Award in 1999 and Harvard University's Bok Prize in 2001. He won the American Astronomical Society's Helen B. Warner Prize in 2003 and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Physics in 2004 for the discovery of cosmic acceleration.

In 2006, he shared the $1 million Shaw Prize in Astronomy with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for contributions to the discovery of the acceleration of the universe.

Schmidt and all the members of the High-Z Team (as defined by the co-authors of Riess et al. 1998) shared the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize, a $500,000 award, with the Supernova Cosmology Project (the set defined by the co-authors of Perlmutter et al. 1999) for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Riess was the winner of MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 2008. He was also elected in 2009 to the National Academy of Sciences.

Along with Perlmutter and Schmidt, he was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the discovery of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

Riess, along with Brian P. Schmidt, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team shared in the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

In 2012, Riess received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

In 2020, Riess was made fellow of the American Astronomical Society.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-13 18:35:08

2133) Brian Schmidt

Gist:

Life

Brian Schmidt grew up in Missoula, Montana, where his father worked as a fisheries biologist. His family later relocated to Anchorage, Alaska. Schmidt received a PhD from Harvard University in 1993 and, moved to Australia the following year, where he was involved in building the High-Z Supernova Search Team, as a part of which he conducted his Nobel Prize-awarded work. Schmidt is a Professor at the Australian National University in Weston Creek, Australia. He is married with two children.

Work

The universe’s stars and galaxies are moving away from one another; the universe is expanding. Up until recently, the majority of astrophysicists believed that this expansion would eventually wane, due to the effect of opposing gravitational forces. Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess studied exploding stars, called supernovae. Because the light emitted by stars appears weaker from a larger distance and takes on a reddish hue as it moves further from the observer, the researchers were able to determine how the supernovae moved. In 1998 they reached a surprising result: the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.

Summary

Brian P. Schmidt (born February 24, 1967, Missoula, Montana, U.S.) is an astronomer who was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of dark energy, a repulsive force that is the dominant component (73 percent) of the universe. He shared the prize with American physicist Saul Perlmutter and astronomer Adam Riess. Schmidt holds dual citizenship in Australia and the United States.

Schmidt received bachelor’s degrees in physics and astronomy from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 1989. He received a master’s (1992) and a doctoral degree (1993) in astronomy from Harvard University, where he shared an adviser, Robert Kirshner, with Riess. From 1993 to 1994 he had a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1995 he received a postdoctoral fellowship at the Australian National University, Canberra, where he held various positions, eventually becoming a professor in 2010 and a naturalized Australian citizen.

Schmidt’s work involved using supernovae to determine distances to faraway galaxies. In 1994 he and American astronomer Nicholas Suntzeff formed the High-Z SN Search team, an international group of astronomers that searched for Type Ia supernovae. Because these objects have roughly the same brightness, they can be used to accurately determine the distances to faraway galaxies and, thus, the expansion rate of the universe. Schmidt, Riess, and the team found in 1998 that Type Ia supernovae that exploded when the universe was younger were fainter than expected. Thus, the supernovae were farther away than expected. This implied that the expansion rate of the universe is faster now than it was in the past, a result of the current dominance of the repulsive action of dark energy. A team headed by Perlmutter independently reached the same conclusion. The acceleration of the universe was a startling result that completely changed cosmology; the majority of the universe’s mass-energy was of a completely unknown nature.

Details

Brian Paul Schmidt (born 24 February 1967) is an American Australian astrophysicist at the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory and Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He was the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU) from January 2016 to January 2024. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. He previously held a Federation Fellowship and a Laureate Fellowship from the Australian Research Council, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2012. Schmidt shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Schmidt, an only child, was born in Missoula, Montana, where his father Dana C. Schmidt was a fisheries biologist. When he was 13, his family relocated to Anchorage, Alaska.

Schmidt attended Bartlett High School in Anchorage, Alaska, and graduated in 1985. He has said that he wanted to be a meteorologist "since I was about five-years-old [but] ... I did some work at the USA National Weather Service up in Anchorage and didn't enjoy it very much. It was less scientific, not as exciting as I thought it would be—there was a lot of routine. But I guess I was just a little naive about what being a meteorologist meant." His decision to study astronomy, which he had seen as "a minor pastime", was made just before he enrolled at university. Even then, he was not fully committed: he said "I'll do astronomy and change into something else later", and just never made that change.

He graduated with a BS (Physics) and BS (Astronomy) from the University of Arizona in 1989. He received his AM (Astronomy) in 1992 and then PhD (Astronomy) in 1993 from Harvard University. Schmidt's PhD thesis was supervised by Robert Kirshner and used Type II Supernovae to measure the Hubble Constant.

While at Harvard, he met his future wife, the Australian (Jenny) Jennifer M. Gordon who was a PhD student in economics. In 1994, they moved to Australia.

Research and career

Schmidt was a postdoctoral research Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (1993–1994) before moving on to the ANU's Mount Stromlo Observatory in 1995.

In 1994, Schmidt and Nicholas B. Suntzeff formed the High-Z Supernova Search Team to measure the expected deceleration of the universe and the deceleration parameter (q0) using distances to Type Ia supernovae. In 1995, the HZT at a meeting at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian elected Schmidt as the overall leader of the HZT. Schmidt led the team from Australia and in 1998 in the HZT paper with first author Adam Riess the first evidence was presented that the universe's expansion rate is not decelerating; it is accelerating. The team's observations were contrary to the then-current models, which predicted that the expansion of the universe should be slowing down, and when the preliminary results emerged Schmidt assumed it was an error and he spent the next six weeks trying to find the mistake. But there was no mistake: contrary to expectations, by monitoring the brightness and measuring the redshift of the supernovae, they discovered that these billion-year old exploding stars and their galaxies were accelerating away from our reference frame. This result was also found nearly simultaneously by the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter. The corroborating evidence between the two competing studies led to the acceptance of the accelerating universe theory and initiated new research to understand the nature of the universe, such as the existence of dark energy. The discovery of the accelerating universe was named 'Breakthrough of the Year' by Science in 1998, and Schmidt was jointly awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Riess and Perlmutter for their groundbreaking work.

Schmidt is currently leading the SkyMapper telescope Project and the associated Southern Sky Survey, which will encompass billions of individual objects, enabling the team to pick out the most unusual objects. In 2014 they announced the discovery of the first star which did not contain any iron, indicating that it is a very primitive star, probably formed during the first rush of star formation following the Big Bang.

He is the chairman of the board of directors of Astronomy Australia Limited, and he serves on the management committee of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO). In July 2012 Schmidt was given a three-year appointment to sit on the Questacon Advisory Council. As of March 2017, Schmidt serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors.

ANU Vice-Chancellor

On 24 June 2015 it was announced Schmidt would replace Ian Young as the 12th Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University, to commence his tenure on 1 January 2016. The Chancellor of the ANU, Professor Gareth Evans, said, "Brian Schmidt is superbly placed to deliver on the ambition of ANU founders – to permanently secure our position among the great universities of the world, and as a crucial contributor to the nation ... We had a stellar field of international and Australian candidates, and have chosen an inspirational leader. ... Brian's vision, vitality, global stature and communication skills are going to take our national university to places it has never been before." On 2 February 2023, Schmidt announced that he would be stepping down as vice chancellor at the end of the year.

Science advocacy

The publicity that came with winning the Nobel Prize has given Schmidt the opportunity to help the public understand why science is important to society, and to champion associated causes.

Public education

One of his first acts after winning the Nobel Prize was to donate $100,000 out of his prize money to the PrimaryConnections program, an initiative of the Australian Academy of Science that assists primary school teachers. He has continued to press for improvements to the public school system, particularly in the sciences and mathematical literacy (numeracy). He sees the major problem is that so few of the teachers are trained in "STEM" (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. He used the opportunity of delivering a speech at the National Press Club to call for more focus on the public education system, including holding principals more accountable and the proper use of standardised testing, concluding with the warning that otherwise "the fundamental tenet of Australian democracy, that we all deserve a fair go, is at risk of being eroded away along with our public school system." At the other end of the spectrum, he also raises the profile of the matter by visiting primary schools personally to answer children's questions.

Funding for scientific and medical research

Schmidt is a strong supporter of funding scientific and medical research on a long-term, non-partisan basis driven by a national research strategy. He has often voiced his concern that the current year-to-year uncertainty and lack of co-ordination make it difficult to establish and staff large facilities, or to participate in multi-national ventures, and that scientists spend too much time applying for funding instead of doing research. Interviewed by the Australian Financial Review, Schmidt was characteristically forthright: "It's unclear to me whether or not we will continue to be a great astronomy nation... If we're damaged it will take 20 years to fix ourselves. It only takes one year to cause 20 years of damage."

Climate change

He urges people to pay attention to the consensus of expert opinions, instead of basing their conclusions on the incomplete information which they personally know. Launching the Australian Academy of Science's report "The science of climate change: questions and answers", Schmidt commented that "Whenever this subject comes up, it never ceases to amaze me how each person I meet suddenly becomes an expert... More surprising is the supreme confidence that non-experts (scientists and non-scientists alike) have in their own understanding of the subject." He even put up $10,000 of his own money in a bet with Maurice Newman, who is the chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Council, that global temperatures will rise. In 2015, he presented the Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change on the final day of the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, which was signed by 76 Nobel Laureates and handed to then President of the French Republic, François Hollande, as part of the successful COP21 climate summit in Paris.
Awards and honours

Schmidt has received the Australian Government's inaugural Malcolm McIntosh Prize for achievement in the Physical Sciences in 2000, Harvard University's Bok Prize in 2000, the Australian Academy of Science's Pawsey Medal Medal in 2001, and the Astronomical Society of India's Vainu Bappu Medal in 2002. He was the Marc Aaronson Memorial Lecturer in 2005, the same year he received an ARC Federation Fellowship, and in 2006 he shared the Shaw Prize in Astronomy with Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter. In 2009, he was awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship.

Schmidt and the other members of the High-Z Team (the set defined by the co-authors of Riess et al. 1998) shared the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize, a $500,000 award, with Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Supernova Cosmology Project (the set defined by the co-authors of Perlmutter et al. 1999) for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Schmidt, along with Riess and Perlmutter, jointly won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for their observations which led to the discovery of the accelerating universe.

Schmidt was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in the 2013 Australia Day Honours. He was called "Australian of the Year" for 2011 by The Australian newspaper. He is a Fellow and council member of the Australian Academy of Science, The United States National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, and Foreign Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences.

Schmidt, Adam Riess, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team shared in the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-14 16:50:23

2134) Dan Shechtman

Gist:

Life

Dan Shechtman was born in Tel Aviv, in what was then the British Mandate for Palestine. He earned his PhD in materials science from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa in 1972. Shechtman has been associated with Technion since that time, but has also spent time abroad. He made his Nobel Prize-awarded discovery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in the early 1980s. Shechtman has also been connected with Iowa State University in Ames in the United States since 2004. He is married with four children.

Work

In the majority of solid matter are crystals: atoms are organised in an ordered pattern. Physicists long believed that the structures of all crystals consisted of patterns that repeated over and over again. In 1982, when Dan Shechtman was studying what are known as diffraction patterns, which occur when x-rays are passed through the crystals, he discovered a regular diffraction pattern that did not match any periodically repeated structure. This showed that there are crystal structures that are mathematically regular, but that do not repeat themselves. These are called quasicrystals.

Summary

Daniel Shechtman (born January 24, 1941, Palestine [now Tel Aviv–Yafo, Israel]) is an Israeli chemist who was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals, a type of crystal in which the atoms are arranged in a pattern that follows mathematical rules but without the pattern ever repeating itself.

Shechtman received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa in 1966. He then earned a master’s (1968) and a doctoral degree (1972) in materials engineering from Technion. From 1972 to 1975 he was a postdoctoral associate at the Aerospace Research Laboratories at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. From 1977 he held various positions at Technion, finally becoming a professor in 1984. He was a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (1981–97) and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (1997–2004). From 2004 he was a professor of materials science and engineering at Iowa State University, Ames.

In 1982, while on sabbatical at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Shechtman was investigating the metallurgical properties of aluminum-iron and aluminum-manganese alloys for a research program sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Shechtman and his colleagues mixed aluminum and manganese in a roughly six-to-one proportion; they then heated the mixture and, once it melted, rapidly cooled it back into the solid state. Using an electron microscope, Shechtman found that the solidified alloy unexpectedly displayed fivefold symmetry; that is, rotating it by 72° (360°/5) reproduced the same structure. Such a symmetry was considered impossible in crystals, since it could not provide the basis of a repeating, regular structure. The alloy’s structure was aperiodic (i.e., it did not repeat).

Shechtman was vilified for insisting that he had discovered a crystal with a fivefold symmetry and an aperiodic structure; the types of structures possible in a crystal had been considered a closed subject since the 1890s. Shechtman was asked to leave his research group at the National Bureau of Standards, and it was not until 1984 that he was able to publish his findings. Later that year American physicist Paul Steinhardt and Israeli physicist Dov Levine coined the term quasicrystal to describe Shechtman’s discovery. Even then, few scientists were convinced. American chemist Linus Pauling was particularly vehement, saying, “There are no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.” Many crystallographers, who used X-rays in their work, were reluctant to accept Shechtman’s findings, which were produced with an electron microscope. In 1987 Shechtman was vindicated when scientists in France and Japan made quasicrystals that were large enough to be examined with X-rays.

Details

Dan Shechtman (born January 24, 1941) is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy's Ames National Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University. On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., Shechtman discovered the icosahedral phase, which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals.

He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals, making him one of six Israelis who have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Biography

Dan Shechtman was born in 1941 in Tel Aviv, in what was then Mandatory Palestine; the city became part of the new state of Israel in 1948. He grew up in Petah Tikva and Ramat Gan in a Jewish family. His grandparents had immigrated to Palestine during the Second Aliyah (1904–1914) and founded a printing house. As a child Shechtman was fascinated by Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island (1874), which he read many times. His childhood dream was to become an engineer like the main protagonist, Cyrus Smith.

I thought that was the best thing a person could do. The engineer in the book knows mechanics and physics, and he creates a whole way of life on the island out of nothing. I wanted to be like that.

— Dan Shechtman

Shechtman is married to Prof. Tzipora Shechtman, Head of the Department of Counseling and Human Development at Haifa University, and author of two books on psychotherapy. They have a son Yoav Shechtman (a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of W. E. Moerner) and three daughters: Tamar Finkelstein (an organizational psychologist at the Israeli police leadership center), Ella Shechtman-Cory (a PhD in clinical psychology), and Ruth Dougoud-Nevo (also a PhD in clinical psychology).

Academic career

After receiving his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from the Technion in 1972, where he also obtained his B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering in 1966 and M.Sc. in Materials Engineering in 1968, Shechtman was an NRC fellow at the Aerospace Research Laboratories at Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio, where he studied for three years the microstructure and physical metallurgy of titanium aluminides. In 1975, he joined the department of materials engineering at Technion. In 1981–1983 he was on sabbatical at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied rapidly solidified aluminum transition metal alloys, in a joint program with NBS. During this study he discovered the icosahedral phase which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals.

In 1992–1994 he was on sabbatical at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he studied the effect of the defect structure of CVD diamond on its growth and properties. Shechtman's Technion research is conducted in the Louis Edelstein Center, and in the Wolfson Centre which is headed by him. He served on several Technion Senate Committees and headed one of them.

Shechtman joined the Iowa State faculty in 2004. He currently spends about five months a year in Ames on a part-time appointment.

Since 2014 he has been the head of the International Scientific Council of Tomsk Polytechnic University.

Work on quasicrystals

Shechtman's Nobel Prize–winning work was in the area of quasicrystals, ordered crystalline materials lacking repeating structures, such as this Al-Pd-Mn alloy.

From the day Shechtman published his findings on quasicrystals in 1984 to the day Linus Pauling died in 1994, Shechtman experienced hostility from him toward the non-periodic interpretation. "For a long time it was me against the world," he said. "I was a subject of ridicule and lectures about the basics of crystallography. The leader of the opposition to my findings was the two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, the idol of the American Chemical Society and one of the most famous scientists in the world. For years, 'til his last day, he fought against quasi-periodicity in crystals. He was wrong, and after a while, I enjoyed every moment of this scientific battle, knowing that he was wrong."

Linus Pauling is noted saying "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists." Pauling was apparently unaware of a paper in 1981 by H. Kleinert and K. Maki which had pointed out the possibility of a non-periodic Icosahedral Phase in quasicrystals. The head of Shechtman's research group told him to "go back and read the textbook" and a couple of days later "asked him to leave for 'bringing disgrace' on the team." Shechtman felt rejected. On publication of his paper, other scientists began to confirm and accept empirical findings of the existence of quasicrystals.

The Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that "his discovery was extremely controversial," but that his work "eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter." Through Shechtman's discovery, several other groups were able to form similar quasicrystals by 1987, finding these materials to have low thermal and electrical conductivity, while possessing high structural stability. Quasicrystals have also been found naturally.

A quasiperiodic crystal, or, in short, quasicrystal, is a structure that is ordered but not periodic. A quasicrystalline pattern can continuously fill all available space, but it lacks translational symmetry. "Aperiodic mosaics, such as those found in the medieval Islamic mosaics of the Alhambra palace in Spain and the Darb-i Imam shrine in Iran, have helped scientists understand what quasicrystals look like at the atomic level. In those mosaics, as in quasicrystals, the patterns are regular – they follow mathematical rules – but they never repeat themselves. An intriguing feature of such patterns, [which are] also found in Arab mosaics, is that the mathematical constant known as the Greek letters phi or tau, or the "golden ratio", occurs over and over again. Underlying it is a sequence worked out by Fibonacci in the 13th century, where each number is the sum of the preceding two."

Quasicrystalline materials could be used in a large number of applications, including the formation of durable steel used for fine instrumentation, and non-stick insulation for electrical wires and cooking equipment., but presently have no technological applications.

The Nobel prize was 10 million Swedish krona (approximately US$1.5 million).

Presidential bid

On January 17, 2014, in an interview with Israel's Channel One, Shechtman announced his candidacy for President of Israel. Shechtman received the endorsement of the ten Members of Knesset required to run. In the elections, held on June 10, 2014, he was awarded only one vote. This led Israeli press and Israeli humorists to qualify Shechtman as "quasi-president" in reference to the "quasi-scientist" quote.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-15 16:55:00

2135) Bruce Allan Beutler

Gist:

Life

Bruce Beutler was born in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in California. His mother was a journalist and his father a geneticist. After having studied to become a medical doctor at the University of Chicago, Beutler conducted his Nobel Prize-awarded work at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas in the 1990s. He later returned to the center after having worked at Rockefeller University in New York, Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Beutler was formerly married and has three children.

Work

When bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms attack our bodies, our immune system goes to work. It has two lines of defence, the innate immunity and the adaptive immunity. Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffman have contributed to our understanding of how so-called receptors detect microorganisms and activate our innate immunity. In 1998, by studying mice with mutations, Bruce Beutler found a gene which is active in the development of a receptor which binds lipopolysaccharide, a substance produced by several pathogenic bacteria.

Summary

Bruce A. Beutler (born December 29, 1957, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American immunologist and corecipient, with French immunologist Jules A. Hoffmann and Canadian immunologist and cell biologist Ralph M. Steinman, of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his “discoveries concerning the activation of the innate immune system.” The innate immune system is the body’s first line of defense against infection by potential pathogens (disease-causing entities), which include viruses and bacteria.

Beutler was raised in Arcadia, California, a small city in Los Angeles county. His father was a scientist and physician and his mother a technical writer. From a young age, Beutler was interested in nature and biology, and, after reading American geneticist and biophysicist James D. Watson’s Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965), he became interested in the then-burgeoning field of molecular biology. By age 14 Beutler could purify proteins and characterize enzymes, skills he learned in his father’s laboratory at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte (near Arcadia). The young Beutler also worked in the laboratory of Japanese-born American geneticist and evolutionary biologist Susumu Ohno, who was known for his research on gender determination and gene duplication.

Beutler was a precocious student, skipping several grades in high school and graduating from the University of California, San Diego, with a degree in biology at age 18. Taking his father’s advice, Beutler next decided to acquire a deeper knowledge of pathology and pharmacology and enrolled as a medical student at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1981. In 1983, following an internship in internal medicine and a residency in neurology at the University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Beutler became a researcher at Rockefeller University in New York City, later joining the university’s faculty and working as a physician at the university’s hospital. In 1986 he returned to the Southwestern Medical Center, this time working as an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and as a professor in the department of internal medicine. He transferred to the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, in 2000, where he served as a professor in the department of immunology and, beginning in 2007, as chairman of the department of genetics. In 2011 he announced his return to the Southwestern Medical Center.

Beutler’s Nobel Prize-winning research took place primarily between 1984 and 1998. During that time he made a series of discoveries that revealed how cells detect infection and how the innate immune system is activated in response to infection. This work began with the isolation of mouse tumour necrosis factor (TNF), a protein that regulates inflammatory and immune responses. Beutler subsequently discovered and characterized properties of TNF that suggested it contributed to immune system-generated inflammation. Using recombinant DNA technology, he proceeded to create molecules capable of inhibiting TNF, which proved effective in mitigating inflammation. One of these inhibitors, etanercept (Enbrel), became widely used in the treatment of chronic inflammatory diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, and psoriasis.

The last of Beutler’s major breakthroughs was his discovery of the receptor molecule for lipopolysaccharide (LPS; sometimes also called endotoxin), which he first encountered during research as an undergraduate. The discovery provided further insight into the initial steps leading to inflammation and led to his involvement in the discovery in the late 1990s of mutations in a mouse gene known as Tlr4 (toll-like receptor 4) that contribute to septic shock. Whereas the normal Tlr4 protein recognizes LPS and thereby mediates the immune response to bacteria carrying the toxin, the mutated version results in unchecked bacterial growth, such that when the body reacts, large quantities of bacteria-destroying immune molecules are released into the bloodstream. This violent attack results in a massive release of LPS, causing tissue damage, low blood pressure, and reduced organ function—symptoms typical of septic shock. Much of Beutler’s later research maintained a focus on elucidating the role of genetics in immunity.

Beutler was the recipient of multiple awards, including the 2004 Robert Koch Prize (shared with Hoffmann and Japanese scientist Shizuo Akira), the 2009 Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research (shared with Steinman and American immunologist Charles A. Dinarello), and the 2011 Shaw Prize (shared with Hoffmann and Russian scientist Ruslan M. Medzhitov). Beutler was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2008).

Details

Bruce Alan Beutler (born December 29, 1957) is an American immunologist and geneticist. Together with Jules A. Hoffmann, he received one-half of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for "discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity." Beutler discovered the long-elusive receptor for lipopolysaccharide (LPS; also known as endotoxin). He did so by identifying spontaneous mutations in the gene coding for mouse Toll-like receptor 4 (Tlr4) in two unrelated strains of LPS-refractory mice and proving they were responsible for that phenotype. Subsequently, and chiefly through the work of Shizuo Akira, other TLRs were shown to detect signature molecules of most infectious microbes, in each case triggering an innate immune response.

The other half of the Nobel Prize went to Ralph M. Steinman for "his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity."

Beutler is currently a Regental Professor and Director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas.

Early life and education

Born in Chicago, Illinois, to a Jewish family, Beutler lived in Southern California between the ages of 2 and 18 (1959 to 1977). For most of this time, he lived in city of Arcadia, a northeastern suburb of Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Valley. During these years, he spent much time hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains, and in regional national parks (Sequoia, Yosemite, Joshua Tree, and Grand Canyon), and was particularly fascinated by living things. These experiences impelled an intense interest in biological science. His introduction to experimental biology, acquired between the ages of 14 and 18, included work in the laboratory of his father, Ernest Beutler, then at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, CA. There he learned to assay enzymes of red blood cells and became familiar with methods for protein isolation. He published his studies of an electrophoretic variant of glutathione peroxidase, as well as the inherent catalytic activity of inorganic selenite, at the age of 17.

Beutler also worked in the City of Hope laboratory of Susumu Ohno, a geneticist known for his studies of evolution, genome structure, and gender differentiation in mammals. Ohno hypothesized that the major histocompatibility complex proteins served as anchorage sites for organogenesis-directing proteins. He further suggested that H-Y antigen, a minor histocompatibility protein encoded by a gene on the Y chromosome and absent in female mammals, was responsible for directing organogenesis of the indifferent gonad to form a testis. In studying H-Y antigen, Beutler became conversant with immunology and mouse genetics during the 1970s. While a college student at the University of California at San Diego, Beutler worked in the laboratory of Dan Lindsley, a Drosophila geneticist interested in spermatogenesis and spermiogenesis in the fruit fly. There, he learned to map phenotypes to chromosomal regions using visible phenotypic markers. He also worked in the laboratory of Abraham Braude, an expert in the biology of LPS.

Beutler received his secondary school education at Polytechnic School in Pasadena, California. A precocious student, he graduated from high school at the age of 16, enrolled in college at the University of California, San Diego, and graduated with a BA degree at the age of 18 in 1976. He then enrolled in medical school at the University of Chicago in 1977 and received his M.D. degree in 1981 at the age of 23. From 1981 to 1983 Beutler continued his medical training at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, as an intern in the Department of Internal Medicine, and as a resident in the Department of Neurology. However, he found clinical medicine less interesting than laboratory science, and decided to return to the laboratory.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-16 16:40:01

2136) Jules A. Hoffmann

Gist:

Life

Jules Hoffmann was born in Echternach, Luxembourg, and later studied biology at the university in Strasbourg, France, where he earned his doctoral degree in 1969. After a period of residence in Marburg, Germany, Hoffmann returned till Strasbourg, where he has served as a director of research laboratories under the French national research institute Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). He has also served as a professor at the university in Strasbourg. His wife, Daniele, is among his scientific colleagues and the couple has two children together.

Work

When bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms attack our bodies, our immune system goes to work. It has two lines of defence, the innate immunity and the adaptive immunity. Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffmann have contributed to our understanding of how so-called receptors detect microorganisms and activate our innate immunity. In 1996, by studying fruit flies with mutations, Hoffmann showed that the so-called Toll-gene is active in the development of receptors which are crucial for the immune system of the fly.

Summary

Jules Hoffmann (born August 2, 1941, Echternach, Luxembourg) is a French immunologist and corecipient, with American immunologist Bruce A. Beutler and Canadian immunologist and cell biologist Ralph M. Steinman, of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries relating to the activation of innate immunity (the first line of defense against infection) in the fly Drosophila. Hoffmann’s work provided a vital foundation for subsequent breakthroughs in scientists’ understanding of mammalian immunity.

Hoffmann received his primary and secondary education in Luxembourg and later moved to France, where he studied biology and chemistry as an undergraduate at the University of Strasbourg and eventually received a Ph.D. in biology in 1969. In 1964–68, while studying at Strasbourg, Hoffmann worked as a research assistant for the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), a science and technology agency with which he remained associated throughout his career, eventually establishing and serving as director of research for the Immune Response and Development in Insects unit in Strasbourg from 1978 to 2005 and serving as director for the CNRS Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology, to which the insect unit belonged, from 1993 to 2005. In 2006 he retired from CNRS as senior researcher emeritus, retaining a professorship at the University of Strasbourg.

In the 1970s and ’80s Hoffmann investigated the effects of a steroid hormone known as ecdysone on the metabolism, reproduction, and embryonic development of the migratory locust (Locusta migratoria). This work shed light on insect development and endocrinology and, more specifically, on the biosynthesis of ecdysone and the mechanism by which the hormone stimulates ecdysis (the shedding of an external skeleton, such as during metamorphosis).

In the late 1980s Hoffmann’s work turned increasingly to understanding insect immunity. In 1989, for example, Hoffmann and CNRS colleagues isolated two novel immune peptides (small proteins) from the northern blowfly Phormia terraenovae (now Protophormia terraenovae). Referred to as “insect defensins,” the peptides were found to act selectively against gram-positive bacteria (bacteria having a thick cell wall). The finding suggested that small bacteria-killing peptides, which had been reported previously only in mammals, are more widespread than was thought and that they had been evolutionarily conserved among animals.

In the mid-1990s, while studying immune responses in Drosophila, Hoffmann discovered an intracellular signaling pathway responsible for regulating a gene called drosomycin, which encodes an antifungal peptide. Hoffmann found that mutations in molecules in the signaling pathway, known as the Toll (from the German word meaning “amazing” or “great”) signaling pathway, resulted in reduced survival of Drosophila following fungal infection. The discovery was crucial because it revealed that the Toll pathway serves as a microbial sensor, activating intracellular signaling molecules in the presence of potentially infectious microorganisms and thereby stimulating the production of antimicrobial peptides capable of destroying the infectious agents. Hoffmann’s work prompted others to search for Toll-like receptors with antimicrobial activity in mammals; the subsequent discovery of such receptors led to significant advances in scientists’ understanding of innate immunity in mammals, including humans, and in the development of new antimicrobial agents.

Hoffmann was a member of several organizations, including the European Molecular Biology Organization and the French National Academy of Sciences, for which he served as vice president (2005–06) and president (2007–08). He was also a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a foreign associate of the American National Academy of Sciences. He received a number of honours throughout his career, including the 2004 Robert Koch Prize (shared with Beutler and Japanese scientist Shizuo Akira), the 2007 Balzan Prize (shared with Beutler), and the 2010 Keio Medical Science Prize (shared with Akiro).

Details

Jules Alphonse Nicolas Hoffmann (born 2 August 1941) is a French biologist. During his youth, growing up in Luxembourg, he developed a strong interest in insects under the influence of his father, Jos Hoffmann. This eventually resulted in the younger Hoffmann's dedication to the field of biology using insects as model organisms. He currently holds a faculty position at the University of Strasbourg. He is a research director and member of the board of administrators of the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Strasbourg, France. He was elected to the positions of Vice-President (2005–2006) and President (2007–2008) of the French Academy of Sciences. Hoffmann and Bruce Beutler were jointly awarded a half share of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity,". [More specifically, the work showing increased Drosomycin expression following activation of Toll pathway in microbial infection.]

Hoffmann and Bruno Lemaitre discovered the function of the fruit fly Toll gene in innate immunity. Its mammalian homologs, the Toll-like receptors, were discovered by Beutler. Toll-like receptors identify constituents of other organisms like fungi and bacteria, and trigger an immune response, explaining, for example, how septic shock can be triggered by bacterial remains.

Education

Jules Hoffmann went to the Lycée de Garçons de Luxembourg before leaving to France. Hoffmann received undergraduate degrees in biology and chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, France. In 1969, he completed his Ph.D. in biology also at the University of Strasbourg under Pierre Joly in Laboratory of General Biology at the Institute of Zoology. His post-doctoral training was at the Institut für Physiologische Chemie at Philipps-Universität in Marburg an der Lahn, Germany, in 1973–1974.

Studies and Research Careers

During his Ph.D. program under Pierre Joly, Hoffmann started his research in studying antimicrobial defenses in grasshoppers, inspired by the previous works done in the laboratory of Pierre Joly showing that no opportunistic infections were apparent in insects after the transplantation of certain organs from one to another. Hoffmann confirmed discovery of phagocytosis done by Eli Metchnikoff, through injection of Bacillus thuringiensis and observation of increase of phagocytes. In addition, he showed strong correlation between hematopoiesis and antimicrobial defenses by assessing the susceptibility of an insect to the microbial infection after X-ray treatment. Hoffmann shifts from using grasshopper model to using dipteran species in the 80s. By using Phormia terranovae, Hoffmann and his colleagues were able to identify 82-residues long antimicrobial polypeptide named Diptericin which was glycine-rich, along with other polypeptides in Drosophila melanogaster such as Defensin, Cecropin, and Attacin. Further molecular genetic analysis revealed that the promoters for the genes encoding these antimicrobial peptides contained DNA sequences similar to the binding elements for NF-κB in mammalian DNA. Dorsal gene, critical in dorso-ventral patterning in the early embryo of Drosophila melanogaster was also identified to be in this NF-κB family. It was initially speculated by Hoffmann and colleagues that activity of Dorsal was directly linked to the expression of the Diptericin gene. However, it turned out that Diptericin was normally induced even in the loss-of-function Dorsal mutants. Further conducted research showed that Diptericin expression was dependent on the expression of imd gene. Identification of another antifungal peptide named Drosomycin and RNA blots demonstrated that two distinct pathways(Toll, Imd) exist, involving Drosomycin and Diptericin respectively. Similarities of structure and function between several members in the Drosophila embryo and members in mammals being noted, study "The Dorsoventral Regulatory Gene Cassette spätzle/Toll/cactus Controls the Potent Antifungal Response in Drosophila Adults" by Lemaitre and Hoffmann in 1996 illuminated the possible existing innate immunity in Drosophila in response to fungal challenge. Later works identified that Toll transmembrane receptors are present in a wide variety of phyla and are conserved through evolution along with conservation of NF-κB activating cascades.

Hoffmann was a research assistant at CNRS from 1964 to 1968, and became a research associate in 1969. Since 1974 he has been a Research Director of CNRS. Between 1978 and 2005 he was Director of the CNRS research unit "Immune Response and Development in Insects", and from 1994 to 2005 he was director of the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of CNRS in Strasbourg.

Hoffmann is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the French Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europaea, the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the United States National Academy of Sciences[when?], the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Fondation Écologie d'Avenir[9] and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Hoffmann became a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 2012.

In 2015, Hoffmann 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.

Controversy

Bruno Lemaitre, a research associate in the Hoffmann laboratory at the time when the major work on Drosophila innate immunity was conducted (for which Hoffmann was awarded the Nobel), claims he was inadequately recognized by Hoffmann as the instigator of and main contributor to the nobel-winning work. Lemaitre now supervises his own laboratory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-17 15:47:52

2137) Ralph M. Steinman

Gist:

Life

Ralph Steinman was born in Montreal and grew up in Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada, where his father ran a clothing store. After studying at McGill University in Montreal, he studied to become a doctor at Harvard Medical School in Boston in the United States. Steinman began work at Rockefeller University in New York in 1970 and was granted a professorship in immunology there in 1988. The Nobel Assembly was unaware that Steinman had died of cancer three days earlier when it decided to award him the Nobel Prize. He was married and is survived by his three children.

Work

When bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms attack our bodies, our immune system goes to work. It has two lines of defence, the innate immunity and the adaptive immunity. Ralph Steinman discovered, in 1973, a new cell type that he called the dendritic cell. In cell culture experiments he demonstrated that dendritic cells can activate T-cells, a cell type that has a key role in adaptive immunity and develops an immunologic memory against many different substances.

Summary

Ralph M. Steinman (born January 14, 1943, Montreal, Canada—died September 30, 2011, New York, New York, U.S.) was a Canadian immunologist and cell biologist who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (with American immunologist Bruce A. Beutler and French immunologist Jules A. Hoffmann) for his codiscovery with American cell biologist Zanvil A. Cohn of the dendritic cell (a type of immune cell) and his elucidation of its role in adaptive immunity. Steinman’s work contributed to advances in the understanding and treatment of infections, autoimmune diseases, cancer, and graft rejection. His receipt of the Nobel Prize was deemed unprecedented because of his death from pancreatic cancer just days before he was announced the winner (Cohn had died in 1993; the Nobel committee traditionally does not distribute awards posthumously).

Steinman spent his youth in Sherbrooke, Quebec, where his family ran a department store. He later moved to Montreal to attend McGill University. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1963, Steinman enrolled at Harvard Medical School and successfully completed his studies in 1968. Two years later, following an internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, he became a postdoctoral research fellow at Rockefeller University, where he worked in a laboratory directed by Cohn and American biologist James G. Hirsch. Steinman stayed at Rockefeller for the remainder of his career, moving up the ranks from assistant (1972) to associate (1976) to full (1988) professor. In 1998 he was appointed director of Rockefeller’s Christopher H. Browne Center for Immunology and Immune Diseases.

Steinman made his Nobel Prize-winning discovery in the early 1970s, when he identified an unusual cell type in a substance derived from the spleen of a mouse. In 1973 he named the cells dendritic cells for their branching, treelike appearance. Subsequent research by Steinman and Cohn revealed that dendritic cells process and present substances called antigens (proteins that stimulate antibody production) to T cells, which are a type of white blood cell. The presentation of antigen causes T cells to reproduce, become mobilized, and attack tissue cells carrying the antigen. At the time of Steinman’s discovery, a type of immune cell known as the macrophage and the other major type of white blood cell, the B cell, were thought to be the primary antigen-presenting cells in mammals. However, as Steinman and Cohn demonstrated, dendritic cells are much more powerful T-cell activators—at least 100-fold more powerful—than other types of immune cells, and they are abundant in the skin, lungs, and gastrointestinal tract—areas where cells are most likely to encounter antigens.

Steinman’s discoveries opened up new avenues for research on T-cell activation, and his work to devise methods by which large numbers of dendritic cells could be generated in a laboratory spurred interest in the development of new vaccines and immunotherapies. Harnessing the ability of dendritic cells to prompt an immune response against antigenic proteins has been of particular value in the treatment of cancer. The agent sipuleucel-T, which was developed based on Steinman’s discoveries and is used in the treatment of prostate cancer, was the first dendritic cell vaccine and first cancer vaccine to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Sipuleucel-T is manufactured by collecting antigen-presenting cells from the patient’s blood and culturing the cells in a laboratory in the presence of a protein found on prostate cancer cells. This results in activation of the antigen-presenting cell such that it is capable of triggering an immune response against prostate cancer cells following infusion into the patient’s body.

Steinman served as a scientific adviser for a variety of organizations and as an editor of several journals. He was the recipient of multiple honorary degrees and other awards, including the Robert Koch Prize (1999), the Gairdner Foundation International Award (2003), the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (2007), and the Albany Medical Center Prize (2009).

Details

Ralph Marvin Steinman (January 14, 1943 – September 30, 2011) was a Canadian physician and medical researcher at Rockefeller University, who in 1973 discovered and named dendritic cells while working as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Zanvil A. Cohn, also at Rockefeller University. Steinman was one of the recipients of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Early life and education

Ralph Steinman was born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Montreal, one of four children of Irving Steinman (d. 1995), a haberdasher, and Nettie Steinman (born Takefman, 1917–2016). The family soon moved to Sherbrooke, where the father opened and ran a small clothing store, "Mozart's." After graduating from Sherbrooke High School, Steinman moved back to Montreal, where he stayed with his maternal grandparents, Nathan and Eva Takefman. He received a bachelor of science degree from McGill University and received his M.D. (magna cum laude) in 1968 from Harvard Medical School. He completed his internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Awards

On October 3, 2011, the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine announced that he had received one half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for "his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity". The other half went to Bruce Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann, for "their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity". However, the committee was not aware that he had died three days earlier, on September 30, from pancreatic cancer. This created a complication, since the statutes of the Nobel Foundation stipulate that the prize is not to be awarded posthumously. After deliberation, the committee decided that as the decision to award the prize "was made in good faith", it would remain unchanged, and the prize would be awarded.

Steinman's daughter said that he had joked the previous week with his family about staying alive until the prize announcement. Steinman said: "I know I have got to hold out for that. They don't give it to you if you have passed away. I got to hold out for that."

Steinman had received numerous other awards and recognitions for his lifelong work on dendritic cells, such as the Albert Lasker Award For Basic Medical Research (2007), the Gairdner Foundation International Award (2003), and the Cancer Research Institute William B. Coley Award (1998). In addition, he was made a member of Institute of Medicine (U.S.; elected 2002) and the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.; elected 2001).

In 2016, the city of Sherbrooke, Quebec, where Steinman lived during his childhood, named a new street rue Ralph Steinman, in honor of the only Sherbrooke native ever to win a Nobel Prize.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-01-18 15:48:09

2138) Serge Haroche

Gist:

Life

Serge Haroche was born to a Jewish family in Casablanca, Morocco. His mother, whose family had Russian roots, was a teacher, and his father a lawyer. Aged 12, Haroche moved to France. Since moving to Paris he has worked at École Normale Superieure, CNRS (the National Center for Scientific Research), Ecole Polytechnique, and Collège de France, where he is currently employed. He has also spent periods of time working at Stanford, Harvard, and Yale universities in the US. Haroche is married with two children.

Work

When it comes to the smallest components of our universe, our usual understanding of how the world works ceases to apply. We have entered the realm of quantum physics. For a long time, many quantum phenomena could only be examined theoretically. Starting in the 1980s, Serge Haroche has designed ingenious experiments to study quantum phenomena when matter and light interact. Haroche has been able to capture photons using another kind of trap–two mirrors which they can bounce between. This device allowed Haroche to study the photons by passing atoms through the trap.

Summary

Serge Haroche (born September 11, 1944, Casablanca, Morocco) is a French physicist who was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physics for devising methods to study the quantum mechanical behaviour of individual photons. He shared the prize with American physicist David Wineland.

Haroche received degrees in physics in 1967 from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and a doctoral degree in 1971 from Université Paris VI (now Université Pierre et Marie Curie), where his adviser was French physicist Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. In 1972 and 1973 he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in California, where he worked in the laboratory of American physicist Arthur Schawlow. Until 1984 he was an assistant professor at the École Polytechnique in Paris (and from 1976, Palaiseau). From 1982 to 2001, he was a professor at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. He was also a professor at Université Pierre et Marie Curie from 1975 to 2001 and a part-time professor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, from 1984 to 1993. In 2001 he became a professor at the Collège de France in Paris, where he was chair of quantum physics. Haroche served as president of the college from 2012 to 2015, when he retired as professor emeritus.

Haroche’s work concentrated on studying individual microwave photons trapped between two mirrors. The photon trap was a cavity 2.7 cm (1.1 inches) in length, bounded by two curved superconducting mirrors. To detect the trapped photons, the experimenters projected atoms of rubidium that were in a superposition of two quantum states through the cavity, one at a time. As an atom crossed the cavity, its energy state was excited by the photon, and thus measurement of the atom’s state revealed the state of the photon without destroying it. In 1996 Haroche and collaborators succeeded in placing photons in a superposition of two quantum states. This allowed them to study quantum mechanical behaviour that had previously only been the subject of thought experiments, such as the famous Schrödinger’s cat. (In the 1930s German physicist Erwin Schrödinger, as a demonstration of the philosophical paradoxes involved in quantum theory, proposed a closed box in which a cat whose life depends on the possible radioactive decay of a particle would be both alive and dead until it is directly observed.) In 2008 Haroche and collaborators were able to observe the photons inside the cavity change from a quantum state to a classical state.

Details

Serge Haroche (born 11 September 1944) is a French physicist who was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physics jointly with David J. Wineland for "ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems", a study of the particle of light, the photon. This and his other works developed laser spectroscopy. Since 2001, Haroche is a professor at the Collège de France and holds the chair of quantum physics and in 2022 he had the Fermi Chair of Physics at University of Rome La Sapienza

In 1971 he defended his doctoral thesis in physics at the University of Paris VI: his research had been conducted under the direction of Claude Cohen-Tannoudji.

Early life and education

Haroche was born in Casablanca, Morocco, to Albert Haroche (1920–1998), from a Moroccan Jewish family, and Valentine Haroche, born Roubleva (1921–1998), a teacher who was born in Odessa to a Jewish family of physicians who relocated to Morocco in the early 1920s. His family had mixed Sephardic and Ashkenazi origins.[6] His father, a lawyer trained in Rabat, was one of seven children born to a family of teachers, Isaac and Esther Haroche, who worked at the École de l’Alliance israélite (AIU).

Both paternal grandparents of Serge Haroche had been AIU students in their respective hometowns of Marrakesh and Tétouan (the school which Esther Azerad attended in Tétouan had been founded in 1862; it was the first school of the AIU network).

Haroche's family left Morocco in 1956 at the end of the French protectorate treaty, and settled in France.

Career

Haroche worked in the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) as a research scientist from 1967 to 1975 at the French UMR Kastler–Brossel Laboratory, and spent a year (1972–1973) as a visiting post-doc in Stanford University, in Arthur Leonard Schawlow's team. In 1975 he moved to a professor position at Paris VI University. At the same time he taught in other institutions, in particular at the École polytechnique (1973–1984), MIT (1980), Harvard University (1981), Yale University (1984–1993) and Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (2000). He was head of the Physics department at the École normale supérieure from 1994 to 2000.

Since 2001, Haroche has been a professor at the Collège de France and holds the chair of quantum physics. He is a member of the Société Française de Physique, the European Physical society and a fellow and member of the American Physical Society.

In September 2012, Serge Haroche was elected by his peers to the position of administrator of the Collège de France.

On 9 October 2012 Haroche was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with the American physicist David Wineland, for their work regarding measurement and manipulation of individual quantum systems.

In 2020, Haroche was appointed by European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth Mariya Gabriel to serve on an independent search committee for the next president of the European Research Council (ERC), chaired by Helga Nowotny. in 2022 he had the Fermi Chair of Physics at University of Rome La Sapienza

Research

Haroche works primarily in atomic physics and quantum optics. He is principally known for showing quantum decoherence by experimental observation, while working with colleagues at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1996.

After a PhD dissertation on dressed atoms under the supervision of Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (who would receive the 1997 Nobel Prize) from 1967 to 1971, he developed new methods for laser spectroscopy, based on the study of quantum beats and superradiance. He then moved on to Rydberg atoms, giant atomic states particularly sensitive to microwaves, which makes them well adapted for studying the interactions between light and matter. He showed that such atoms, coupled to a superconducting cavity containing a few photons, are well-suited to the testing of quantum decoherence and to the realization of quantum logic operations necessary for the treatment of quantum information.

Math Is Fun Forum

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