crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-16 16:13:54

2164) Paul L. Modrich

Gist:

Life

Paul Modrich was born and raised in Raton, New Mexico, USA. His father was a biology teacher and encouraged his curiosity in nature. Modrich received his doctorate at Stanford University in 1973 and also studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1976 he works at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. He is also affiliated with Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Work

Living cells have DNA molecules that carry an organism's genes. For the organism to live and develop, its DNA cannot change. DNA molecules are not completely stable, and they can be damaged. In 1989, through studies of bacterial viruses, Modrich showed how methyl groups attached to the DNA molecule act as signals for repairing incorrect replications of DNA. These discoveries have increased our understanding of how the living cell works, the causes of cancer and about aging processes.

Summary

Paul Modrich (born 1946, Raton, New Mexico, U.S.) is an American biochemist who discovered mismatch repair, a mechanism by which cells detect and correct errors that are introduced into DNA during DNA replication and cell division. Modrich was among the first to show that a common form of inherited colorectal cancer is due to defective mismatch repair. For his contributions to the understanding of DNA repair and its role in human disease, Modrich received the 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (shared with Swedish biochemist Tomas Lindahl and Turkish-American biochemist Aziz Sancar).

Modrich received a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1968 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1973 from Stanford University. In 1976, following postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School, he went to Duke University, where he joined the faculty as an assistant professor, and in 1988 he was named James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry.

As a graduate student at Stanford, Modrich investigated an enzyme called ligase and its ability to catalyze the joining together of nucleotides in the DNA of the bacterium Escherichia coli. He found that ligase enzymes are essential to normal DNA synthesis in E. coli and hence are fundamental to the bacterium’s survival. In the late 1970s, intrigued by DNA lesions and the process of DNA replication, Modrich began to examine base-pair mismatches in E. coli DNA that are acquired during homologous recombination (the exchange of genetic material between two identical or nearly identical strands of DNA during DNA replication). By the early 1980s he had developed an assay to analyze mismatched base pairs. The development facilitated his subsequent identification and characterization of proteins and events involved in methyl-directed mismatch repair in E. coli, in which the absence of methyl groups on newly synthesized daughter strands of DNA serves as the signal for the initiation of mismatch repair.

In the early 1990s Modrich described the excision mechanism by which mismatched DNA is targeted and eliminated in E. coli cells. He also elucidated the mechanism of mismatch repair in human cells, revealing key similarities to the mechanism used by bacteria. He later uncovered a role for mismatch repair deficiency in hereditary nonpolyposis colon cancer (Lynch syndrome)—the most prevalent type of hereditary colorectal malignancy in humans—as well as in certain neurodegenerative conditions, such as Huntington disease.

Modrich was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1993 and the following year became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2004.

Details

Paul Lawrence Modrich (born June 13, 1946) is an American biochemist, James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is known for his research on DNA mismatch repair. Modrich received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015, jointly with Aziz Sancar and Tomas Lindahl.

Early life and education

Modrich was born on June 13, 1946, in Raton, New Mexico to Laurence Modrich and Margaret McTurk. He has a younger brother Dave. His father was a biology teacher and coach for basketball, football and tennis at Raton High School where he graduated in 1964. Modrich is of Croatian, Montenegrin, German and Scottish (Gaelic)]origin. His paternal grandfather, of Croatian descent, is probably from the small village of Modrići near Zadar, and grandmother of Montenegrin descent, both immigrated to the United States from coastal Croatia in the late 19th century. His maternal family is of mixed German and Scotch-Irish descent. Modrich married fellow scientist Vickers Burdett in 1980.

Modrich obtained a B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 and subsequently a Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1973. He continued his research as a postdoc in the lab of Charles C. Richardson at Harvard Medical School for a year (1973–1974).

Research

Modrich became an assistant professor at the chemistry department of University of California, Berkeley in 1974. He joined Duke University's faculty in 1976 and has been a Howard Hughes Investigator since 1995. He works primarily on strand-directed mismatch repair. His lab demonstrated how DNA mismatch repair serves as a copyeditor to prevent errors from DNA polymerase. Matthew Meselson previously proposed the existence of recognition of mismatches. Modrich performed biochemical experiments to study mismatch repair in E. coli. They later searched for proteins associated with mismatch repair in humans.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-17 15:40:31

2165) Aziz Sancar

Gist:

Life

Aziz Sancar was born in Savur in southeast Turkey in a lower middle class family. His parents had no education but considered education important for their children. Sancar studied at Istanbul University and at the University of Texas, Dallas, where his received his doctorate in 1977. He is a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill. Aziz Sancar is married to Gwen Boles Sancar who also is a professor in biochemistry and biophysics.

Work

Living cells have DNA molecules that carry an organism's genes. For the organism to live and develop, its DNA cannot change. DNA molecules are not completely stable, and they can be damaged. In 1983, through studies of bacteria, Aziz Sancar showed how certain protein molecules, certain repair enzymes, repair DNA damaged by ultraviolet (UV) light. These discoveries have increased our understanding of how the living cell works, the causes of cancer and aging processes.

Summary

Aziz Sancar (born September 8, 1946, Savur, Mardin, Turkey) is a Turkish-American biochemist who contributed to mechanistic discoveries underlying a cellular process known as nucleotide excision repair, whereby cells correct errors in DNA that arise as a result of exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light or certain mutation-inducing chemicals. For his discoveries pertaining to mechanisms of DNA repair, Sancar received the 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (shared with Swedish biochemist Tomas Lindahl and American biochemist Paul Modrich).

Sancar received an M.D. in 1969 from the Istanbul Medical School and subsequently worked as a local physician near Savur. In 1973 he went to the United States to study molecular biology at the University of Texas, Dallas, where four years later he completed a Ph.D. He then accepted a position as a research associate at Yale University and in 1982 joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, where he later was named the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

As a graduate student, Sancar studied an enzyme known as DNA photolyase in the bacterium Escherichia coli. At the time, the enzyme had been recently found to mediate the process of photoreactivation, whereby visible light induces enzymatic reactions that repair DNA damaged by UV irradiation. After moving to Yale, Sancar turned his attention to several other DNA repair factors in E. coli, namely the genes uvrA, uvrB, and uvrC. He purified the genes and reconstituted them in vitro (“in glass,” or outside a living organism), leading to his discovery of the excision repair function of an enzyme known as uvrABC nuclease (excision nuclease, or excinuclease) in E. coli. The enzyme specifically targeted DNA that had been damaged by UV or chemical exposure, cutting the affected DNA strand at each end of the damaged region and thereby enabling the removal of the damaged nucleotides.

Sancar and his colleagues later reconstituted a human excision nuclease, identified components required for nucleotide excision repair in human cells, and proposed that human cells employed additional enzymes in the removal of the excised portion of DNA. He also identified a role for defective nucleotide excision repair in the production of neurological abnormalities associated with xeroderma pigmentosum, a neurodegenerative condition that predisposes individuals to skin cancer. Abnormalities in nucleotide excision repair also were found to underlie other rare hereditary disorders, including math syndrome (characterized by multisystemic effects, such as dwarfism and photosensitivity) and photosensitive trichothiodystrophy (characterized by sulfur-deficient brittle hair, developmental abnormalities, and extreme sensitivity to ultraviolet light with normal skin cancer risk).

From the early 1980s Sancar continued to investigate photolyase in E. coli, and later he began to explore DNA damage checkpoints. He discovered two light-harvesting chromophores in photolyase, which he proposed were key components of the photolyase reaction mechanism and its activity at the blue end of the visible light spectrum. In the early 2000s he directly observed, for the first time, the mechanism of DNA repair by photolyase. Sancar also investigated human photolyase orthologs (genes evolutionarily related to E. coli DNA photolyase) known as cryptochrome 1 and 2. He found that the cryptochromes, which are located in the eye, function as photoreceptive components of the mammalian circadian clock.

Sancar was an elected member of multiple academies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2004), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2005), and the Turkish Academy of Sciences (2006).

Details

Aziz Sancar (born 8 September 1946) is a Turkish molecular biologist specializing in DNA repair, cell cycle checkpoints, and circadian clock. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair. He has made contributions on photolyase and nucleotide excision repair in bacteria that have changed his field.

Sancar is currently the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is the co-founder of the Aziz & Gwen Sancar Foundation, which is a non-profit organization to promote Turkish culture and to support Turkish students in the United States.

Early life

Aziz Sancar was born on 8 September 1946 to a lower-middle-class family in the Savur district of Mardin Province, southeastern Turkey. His oldest brother Kenan Sancar is a retired brigadier general in the Turkish Armed Forces. He is the second cousin of the politician Mithat Sancar, who is a member of parliament from and chairman of HDP. He is the seventh of eight children.

His parents were uneducated; however, they put great emphasis on his education. He was educated by idealistic teachers who received their education in the Village Institutes, he later stated that this was a great inspiration to him. Throughout his school life, Sancar had great academic success that was noted by his teachers. He wanted to study chemistry whilst at high school, but was persuaded to study medicine after five of his classmates also got into medicine along with him. As such, he studied medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of Istanbul University.

Origins

According to his own account, he spoke Arabic with his parents and Turkish with his siblings. However, when asked about his origins, Sancar only underlined his Turkish nationality. Still, his cousin, Mithat Sancar, mentioned that their family is of Arab origins. Aziz Sancar's brother Tahir claimed in an interview that their family descended from Oghuz Turks from Central Asia, also mentioning that they are idealists. During his years at Istanbul University, he was involved with the Turkish nationalist organization Idealist Hearths (Ülkü Ocakları).

Education

Sancar received his primary education near his hometown of Savur. He then completed his MD degree in Istanbul University of Turkey in 1969 and he graduated from school as the top student. He completed his PhD degree on the photoreactivating enzyme of E. coli in 1977 at The University of Texas at Dallas in the laboratory of Claud Stan Rupert, now Professor Emeritus.

Career

Sancar is an honorary member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

After graduating from Istanbul University, Sancar returned to Savur. Although he wanted to go to the United States, he was recommended to try out being a doctor, and he worked as a doctor in the region for 1.5 years. He then won a scholarship from TÜBİTAK to pursue further education in biochemistry at Johns Hopkins University, but returned to Savur in 1973 as a doctor after spending 1.5 years there due to having social difficulties and inability to adapt to the American way of life. He only spoke French when he arrived in the US, but learned English during his education at Johns Hopkins.

Soon after, he wrote to Rupert, who had been involved in the discovery of DNA repair and was at Johns Hopkins during Sancar's time there but had since moved to the University of Texas at Dallas. He was accepted and completed his PhD in molecular biology there. His interest had been stimulated by the recovery of bacteria, which had been exposed to deadly amounts of ultraviolet radiation, upon their illumination with blue light. In 1976, as part of his doctoral dissertation, he managed to replicate the gene for photolyase, an enzyme that repairs thymine dimers that result from ultraviolet damage.

After completing his PhD, Sancar had three rejected applications for postdoctoral positions and then took up work at Yale University as a laboratory technician. He worked at Yale for five years. Here, he started his field-changing work on nucleotide excision repair, another DNA mechanism that works in the dark. In the laboratory of Dean Rupp, he elucidated the molecular details of this process, identifying UvrABC endonuclease and the genes that code for it, and furthermore discovering that these enzymes cut twice on the damaged strand of DNA, removing 12–13 nucleotides that include the damaged part.

Following his mechanistic elucidations of nucleotide exchange repair, he was accepted as a lecturer at the University of North Carolina, the only university that he got a positive response from out of the 50 he applied to. He has stated that his accent of English was detrimental to his career as a lecturer. At Chapel Hill, Sancar discovered the following steps of nucleotide excision repair in bacteria and worked on the more complex version of this repair mechanism in humans.

His longest-running study has involved photolyase and the mechanisms of photo-reactivation. In his inaugural article in the PNAS, Sancar captured the photolyase radicals he has chased for nearly 20 years, thus providing direct observation of the photocycle for thymine dimer repair.

Aziz Sancar was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 as the first Turkish member. He is the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is married to Gwen Boles Sancar, who graduated the same year and who is also a professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Together, they founded Carolina Türk Evi, a permanent Turkish Center in close proximity to the campus of UNC-CH, which provides graduate housing for four Turkish researchers at UNC-CH, short term guest services for Turkish visiting scholars, and a center for promoting Turkish-American interchange.

Research on circadian clock

Sancar and his research team have discovered that two genes, Period and Cryptochrome, keep the circadian clocks of all human cells in proper rhythm, syncing them to the 24 hours of the day and seasons. Their findings were published in the Genes and Development journal on September 16, 2014. Sancar's research has provided a complete understanding of the workings of Circadian clocks in humans, which may be used to treat a wide range of different illnesses and disorders such as jet-lag and seasonal affective disorder, and may be useful in controlling and optimizing various cancer treatments.

Personal life

Sancar is married to Gwen Boles Sancar, with whom he met during his PhD in Dallas, where she was also studying molecular biology. They got married in 1978.

Sancar is a practicing Muslim. In an interview, he stated: "I am proud to be Muslim, but I can not state this fact in many regions of the United States due to ongoing issues." In the immediate aftermath of being awarded the Nobel Prize, his ethnicity was questioned in social media. Sancar said he was "disturbed by some of the questions he received," particularly by questions about his ethnic background. When asked as to whether he is "a Turk or half-Arab" by the BBC, Aziz Sancar responded: "I told them that I neither speak Arabic nor Kurdish and that I was a Turk," he said. "I'm a Turk, that's it." Aziz Sancar's brother Tahir informed in an interview that their family descended from Oghuz Turks who once migrated from Central Asia. He also said that his brother's Nobel Prize was an honor for all of Turkey, including the Kurds.

In an interview, Sancar stated that in his youth, he was an idealist but he didn't participate in activities. In another interview, Sancar stated that he supports moderate Pan-Turkism. On September 26, 2021, Sancar was the honorary guest of the Turkic Council on occasion of the meeting of the foreign secretaries from member states and has given a presentation titled "Knowledge and the National Awakening of the Turkic World", as announced by Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu.

Awards
He was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair. He was granted Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in Molecular Biophysics in 1984. Sancar is the second Turkish Nobel laureate after Orhan Pamuk, who is also an alumnus of Istanbul University.

Aziz Sancar donated his original Nobel Prize golden medal and certificate to the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, with a presidential ceremony on 19 May 2016, which is the 97th anniversary of Atatürk initiating the Turkish War of Independence. He delivered a replica of his Nobel medal and certificate to Istanbul University, from which he earned his MD.

On January 19, 2025, during a ceremony held at the Sancar Cultural Center in the state of North Carolina, USA, TÜRKSOY General Secretary Sultan Raev presented Sancar with the Order of Cultural Ambassador of the Turkic World.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-18 16:52:26

2166) William C. Campbell (scientist)

Gist:

Life

William C. Campbell was born in Ramelton, Ireland. He studied at Trinity College at the University of Dublin and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, where he earned his doctorate in 1957. He then worked for the pharmaceutical company Merck at its Institute for Therapeutic Research until 1990. He is now affiliated with Drew University, Madison, New Jersey i USA.

Work

A number of serious infectious diseases are caused by parasites spread by insects. River blindness is caused by a tiny worm that can infect the cornea and cause blindness. Lymphatic filariasis, or elephantiasis, is also caused by a worm and produces chronic swelling. Satoshi Omura cultured bacteria, which produce substances that inhibit the growth of other microorganisms. In 1978 he succeeded in culturing a strain from which William Campbell purified a substance, avermectin, which in a chemically modified form, ivermectin, proved effective against river blindness and elephantiasis.

Summary

William Campbell (born June 28, 1930, Ramelton, Ireland) is an Irish-born American parasitologist known for his contribution to the discovery of the anthelmintic compounds avermectin and ivermectin, which proved vital to the control of certain parasitic infections in humans and other animals. For his discoveries, Campbell was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (shared with Japanese microbiologist Ōmura Satoshi and Chinese scientist Tu Youyou).

Campbell earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology from Trinity College in Dublin in 1952. He subsequently went to the United States, where he studied veterinary science, zoology, and pathology at the University of Wisconsin. In 1957, after completing a Ph.D. at Wisconsin, Campbell took a position as a research assistant at the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research in New Jersey. There in 1976 he was made the director of basic parasitology, and from 1984 to 1990 he served as a senior scientist and directed assay research and development. Campbell became a U.S. citizen in 1962.

In the 1970s researchers at Merck & Co. received a culture of the soil bacterium Streptomyces avermitilis from Ōmura Satoshi, who had discovered the species in the course of his work at the Kitasato Institute in Japan. Preliminary experiments suggested that the organism produced a substance that was potentially lethal to certain types of parasites. In 1975, using an assay that tested compounds for activity against the infectious nematode Nematospiroides dubius in mice, Campbell and colleagues at Merck discovered avermectin, which existed as several compounds, all closely related in structure and known as macrocyclic lactones. Having purified avermectin, the Merck team subjected the compound to structural modification, ultimately producing a chemical known as ivermectin. Ivermectin was found to be active against a wide array of microfilariae (larvae) produced by certain threadlike nematode parasites. Of particular consequence was its ability to clear infections in humans involving the microfilariae of Onchocerca volvulus, the cause of river blindness, and Wuchereria bancrofti and Brugia malayi, the major causes of lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis). Both river blindness and lymphatic filariasis were significant sources of debilitating illness in tropical regions of the world. The drug also proved critical to the prevention of certain arthropod and microfilariae-associated infections in other animals, including horses, sheep, and cattle; it also was used widely for the prevention of heartworm disease in cats and dogs.

In later research Campbell studied a variety of parasitic diseases, including trichinosis. He retired as research fellow emeritus at Drew University in New Jersey. During his career he served as the president of multiple organizations, including the American Society of Parasitologists. In addition to numerous research papers, Campbell edited two texts, Trichinella and Trichinosis (1983) and Chemotherapy of Parasitic Diseases (1986, with Robert S. Rew), which were critical to furthering the understanding of parasitic disease.

Details

William Cecil Campbell (born 28 June 1930) is an Irish-American microbiologist known for his work in discovering a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworms, for which he was jointly awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He helped to discover a class of drugs called avermectins, whose derivatives have been shown to have "extraordinary efficacy" in treating River blindness and Lymphatic filariasis, among other parasitic diseases affecting animals and humans. Campbell worked at the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research 1957–1990, and has become a research fellow emeritus at Drew University.

Biography

Campbell was born in Ramelton, County Donegal, Ireland in 1930, the third son of R. J. Campbell, a farm supplier. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin with James Desmond Smyth, graduating in 1952 with first class honours in Zoology. He then attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison on a Fulbright Scholarship, earning his PhD degree in 1957 for work on the liver fluke, a parasite affecting sheep.

From 1957 to 1990 Campbell worked at Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research,[8] and from 1984 to 1990 he was a Senior Scientist and Director with Assay Research and Development. He became a US citizen in 1964. One of his discoveries while at Merck was the fungicide thiabendazole, used to treat potato blight, historically a scourge of Ireland. Thiabendazole is also used to treat trichinosis in humans.

Campbell is best known for his work on parasitic diseases. Japanese microbiologist Satoshi Ōmura isolated and cultured many varieties of natural soil-based bacteria from the group Streptomyces. Campbell led a team at Merck in studying Ōmura's cultures and examining their effectiveness in treating parasites in domestic and farm animals. From a sample of Streptomyces avermitilis, naturally occurring in soil, he derived a macrocyclic lactone. After further modification, it was named ivermectin (generic) or Mectizan.

In 1978, having identified a successful treatment for a type of worms affecting horses, Campbell realised that similar treatments might be useful against related types of worms that affect humans. In 1981, Merck carried out successful Phase 1 treatment trials in Senegal and France on river blindness. Taken orally, the drug paralyses and sterilises the parasitic worm that causes the illness. Merck went on to study the treatment of elephantiasis. The research of Satoshi Ōmura, William Campbell, and their co-workers created a new class of drugs for the treatment of parasites.

In 1987, Merck decided to donate Ivermectin (Mectizan) to developing countries. Campbell was instrumental in that decision. With the World Health Organization they created an "unprecedented" drug donation program, with the intention of wiping out river blindness. As of 2001 an estimated 25 million people were being treated each year, in a total of 33 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. As of 2013, the Carter Center's International Task Force for Disease Eradication independently verified that the disease had been eradicated in Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico.

The greatest challenge for science is to think globally, think simply and act accordingly. It would be disastrous to neglect the diseases of the developing world. One part of the world affects another part. We have a moral obligation to look after each other, but we're also naturally obligated to look after our own needs. It has to be both.

From 1990 to 2010, when he retired, Campbell was a research fellow at Drew University in Madison, N.J., where he supervised undergraduate research and taught courses in parasitology. He has written about the history of parasitology in Antarctic exploration, including the work of surgeon Edward L. Atkinson in Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition.

In 2002, Campbell was elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. In 2015, he and Satoshi Ōmura shared half of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research on therapies against infections caused by roundworm parasites, using derivatives of avermectin. Campbell is the seventh Irish person to be awarded a Nobel Prize, including Ernest Walton who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1951 and Samuel Beckett for Literature in 1968.

Personal life

William C. Campbell is married to Mary Mastin Campbell. He is a published poet and painter. His recreational activities include table tennis and kayaking.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-19 16:11:38

2167) Satoshi Ōmura

Gist:

Life

Satoshi Omura was born in Nirasaki, Yamanashi, Japan. He studied at the University of Yamanashi and at the Tokyo University of Science. He holds two doctorates: one in pharmaceutical science from the University of Tokyo from 1968 and one in chemistry from the Tokyo University of Science from 1970. He has then primarily worked at the Kitasato University, Minato, Tokyo, but is also affiliated with Wesleyan University, Middleton, Connecticut, USA.

Work

A number of serious infectious diseases are caused by parasites spread by insects. River blindness is caused by a tiny worm that can infect the cornea and cause blindness. Lymphatic filariasis, or elephantiasis, is also caused by a worm and produces chronic swelling. Satoshi Omura cultured bacteria, which produce substances that inhibit the growth of other microorganisms. In 1978 he succeeded in culturing a strain from which William Campbell purified a substance, avermectin, which in a chemically modified form, ivermectin, proved effective against river blindness and elephantiasis.

Summary

Ōmura Satoshi (born July 12, 1935, Yamanashi prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese microbiologist known for his discovery of natural products, particularly from soil bacteria. Of special importance was Ōmura’s discovery of the bacterium Streptomyces avermitilis, from which the anthelmintic compound avermectin was isolated. A derivative of avermectin known as ivermectin became a key drug used in the control of certain parasitic diseases in humans and other animals. For his contributions to the discovery of avermectin and ivermectin, Ōmura received the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (shared with Irish-born American parasitologist William Campbell and Chinese scientist Tu Youyou).

Ōmura earned a bachelor’s degree in 1958 from the University of Yamanashi and a master’s in 1963 from the Tokyo University of Science. In 1968 he completed a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Tokyo, and two years later, having returned to the Tokyo University of Science, he also earned a Ph.D. in chemistry. From 1963 to 1965, Ōmura worked as a research associate at the University of Yamanashi, and he afterward served under the same title at the Kitasato Institute, then one of the world’s leading microbiology research facilities. While completing his Ph.D. studies and carrying out research at the institute, he took a position as an associate professor at nearby Kitasato University. Between 1968 and 2007, when Ōmura was named professor emeritus at Kitasato University, he served variously as director and president of the Kitasato Institute as well as a professor and director of the university (the university became part of the institute in 2008). In 2013 he was given the title distinguished emeritus professor at Kitasato.

From the mid-1960s, Ōmura’s research centred on the discovery and isolation of naturally occurring bioactive chemical compounds from microorganisms, particularly from bacteria living in the soil. Ōmura developed novel techniques that facilitated the growth of soil bacteria in laboratory cultures and enabled the characterization of the substances they produced. Among his first major discoveries was the identification in the mid-1970s of cerulenin, an antibiotic produced by a species of fungus. Ōmura found that cerulenin worked by inhibiting the biosynthesis of fatty acids. The compound subsequently became an important research tool.

Also in the mid-1970s, Ōmura discovered and successfully cultured new strains of Streptomyces soil bacteria, including S. avermitilis. Ōmura sent a culture of S. avermitilis to researchers at Merck Research Laboratories in the United States. There, from broth collected from cultures of the organism, parasitologist William Campbell and colleagues identified a new family of compounds known as avermectins. The Merck researchers subsequently modified the avermectin structure, thereby producing ivermectin, which was found to be active against the microfilariae (larvae) of certain threadlike nematodes. Ivermectin became one of the world’s most-important anthelmintic agents, being used to treat various microfilariae-associated parasitic diseases in humans and other animals. In humans, the drug proved to be especially valuable for the prevention of river blindness and lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis), which were major causes of debilitating disease in the tropics.

Ōmura discovered a number of other important microbial products, including many that became widely used as agrochemicals or as reagents in laboratory research and some that were found to possess antitumour activity. Much of Ōmura’s later research focused on elucidating the genetic mechanisms underlying the production of chemical substances by microorganisms.

Ōmura was an author on more than 1,100 scientific papers and was a member of multiple societies, including the Royal Society of Chemistry, to which he was elected an honorary member in 2005. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he was the recipient of many other honours and awards, including the Canada Gairdner Global Health Award (2014).

Details

Satoshi Ōmura (Ōmura Satoshi, born 12 July 1935) is a Japanese biochemist. He is known for the discovery and development of hundreds of pharmaceuticals originally occurring in microorganisms. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with William C. Campbell for their role in the discovery of avermectins and ivermectin, the world's first endectocide and a safe and highly effective microfilaricide. It is believed that the large molecular size of ivermectin prevents it from crossing the blood/aqueous humour barrier, and renders the drug an important treatment of helminthically-derived blindness.

Early life and education

Satoshi Ōmura was born in Nirasaki, Yamanashi Japan in 1935, the second son of Ōmura family. After graduating from the University of Yamanashi in 1958, he was appointed to science teacher at Tokyo Metropolitan Sumida Tech High School. In 1960, he became an auditor of Koji Nakanishi’s course at Tokyo University of Education, one year later, he enrolled in the Tokyo University of Science (TUS) and studied sciences. Ōmura received his M.S. degree from TUS and his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Tokyo (1968, a Dissertation PhD) and a Ph.D. in Chemistry at TUS (1970).

Career

Since 1965 Ōmura served at Kitasato Institute system. From 1970 to 1990, he also became a part-time lecturer at Tokyo University of Science.

In 1971 while he was a visiting professor at Wesleyan University, he consulted the chairman of the American Chemical Society, Max Tishler, at an international conference. Together they successfully acquired research expenses from Merck & Co. Ōmura was considering continuing his research in the United States, but ultimately he decided to return to Japan.

In 1973, he became a director of the antibiotic laboratory at Kitasato University, and he also started collaborative research with Merck & Co.

In 1975, he became professor of Kitasato University School of Pharmacy. Meanwhile, the Ōmura laboratory raised many researchers and produced 31 university professors and 120 doctors.

At present date, Ōmura is professor emeritus at Kitasato University and Max Tishler Professor of Chemistry at Wesleyan University.

Research

Satoshi Ōmura is known for the discovery and development of various pharmaceuticals originally occurring in microorganisms. He was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with William C. Campbell for discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites. More precisely, his research group isolated a strain of Streptomyces avermitilis that produce the anti-parasitical compound avermectin. Campbell later acquired these bacteria and developed the derived drug ivermectin that was first commercialised for veterinary use in 1981 later put to human use against Onchocerciasis in 1987–88 with the name Mectizan, and is today used against river blindness, lymphatic filariasis, scabies, other parasitic infections.

Since the 1970s, Ōmura has discovered more than 480 new compounds, of which 25 kinds of drugs and reagents are in use. Examples include andrastin, herbimycin, neoxaline as well as:

* a specific inhibitor of protein kinase named staurosporine;
* a proteasome inhibitor named lactacystin;
* a fatty acid biosynthesis inhibitor named cerulenin;

Furthermore, compounds having a unique structure and biological activity discovered by Omura are drawing attention in drug discovery research, and new anticancer drugs and the like have been created.

Social role

Ōmura served as deputy director and director at the Kitasato Institute. He was devoted to rebuild the laboratory and promoting the establishment of the medical center that is now Kitasato University Medical Center. Meanwhile, he established a path to rebuilding of the corporate school juridical person, which has integrated with the School corporation Kitasato Gakuen. He succeeded in establishing a new "School corporation Kitasato Institute". In addition, he served as president of the School corporation Joshibi University of Art and Design twice, and served as the honorary school chief of the School corporation Kaichi Gakuen. In 2007, he established the Nirasaki Omura Art Museum on his collection.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-20 15:46:49

2168) Tu Youyou

Gist:

Life

Tu Youyou was born and raised in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China. She studied at the Peking University in Beijing. Since 1965 she has worked at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, where she is now Chief Scientist. Tu Youyou is married and has two daughters.

Work

A number of serious infectious diseases are caused by parasites spread by insects. Malaria is caused by a single-cell parasite that causes severe fever. In the 1970s, after studies of traditional herbal medicines, Tu Youyou focused on sweet wormwood and managed to extract a substance, artemisinin, which inhibits the malaria parasite. Drugs based on artemisinin have led to the survival and improved health of millions of people.

Summary

Tu Youyou (born December 30, 1930, Ningbo, Zhejiang province, China) is a Chinese scientist and phytochemist known for her isolation and study of the antimalarial substance qinghaosu, later known as artemisinin, one of the world’s most effective malaria-fighting drugs. For her discoveries, Tu received the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (shared with Irish-born American parasitologist William Campbell and Japanese microbiologist Ōmura Satoshi).

Tu studied at the department of pharmaceutics of Beijing Medical College. After earning a degree there in 1955, she was chosen to join the Institute of Materia Medica at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (later the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences). From 1959 to 1962, she participated in a full-time training course in the use of traditional Chinese medicine that was geared toward researchers with knowledge of Western medicine. The course provided a foundation for her later application of traditional Chinese medical knowledge to modern drug discovery.

In 1969, during the Vietnam War (1954–75), Tu was appointed to lead Project 523, a covert effort to discover a treatment for malaria. The project was initiated by the Chinese government at the urging of allies in North Vietnam, where malaria had claimed the lives of numerous soldiers. Tu and her team of researchers began by identifying plants with supposed activity against malaria on the basis of information from folk medicine and remedies described in ancient Chinese medical texts. Her team identified some 640 plants and more than 2,000 remedies with potential antimalarial activity and subsequently tested 380 extracts from about 200 of the plant species for their ability to rid malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites from the blood of infected mice. An extract obtained from the sweet wormwood plant (qinghao), Artemisia annua, showed particular promise. In 1971, after refining the extraction process, Tu and colleagues successfully isolated a nontoxic extract from sweet wormwood that effectively eliminated Plasmodium parasites from mice and monkeys. Clinical studies were soon thereafter carried out in malaria patients, in whom sweet wormwood extracts were found to quickly lower fever and reduce parasite levels in the blood. In 1972 Tu and colleagues isolated the active compound in the extracts, which they named qinghaosu, or artemisinin.

Although Tu had relied on information from ancient texts, the works said little about the plant known as qinghao, and many of her team’s early attempts to reproduce their initial findings on the plant’s antimalarial activity failed. Eventually, however, Tu discovered that the leaves of sweet wormwood contain artemisinin and that the compound is extracted optimally at relatively low temperatures. Tu initially was prevented from publishing her team’s findings, because of restrictions on the publication of scientific information that were in place in China at the time. The work finally reached international audiences, to wide acclaim, in the early 1980s. In the early 2000s, the World Health Organization recommended the use of artemisinin-based combination drug therapies as first-line treatment for malaria.

Tu continued to investigate artemisinin and developed a second antimalarial compound, dihydroartemisinin, which is a bioactive artemisinin metabolite. In 2011 she received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for her contributions to the discovery of artemisinin.

Details

Tu Youyou (born 30 December 1930) is a Nobel Prize-winning Chinese malariologist and pharmaceutical chemist. She discovered artemisinin (also known as qīnghāosù) and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria, a breakthrough in twentieth-century tropical medicine, saving millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America.

For her work, Tu received the 2011 Lasker Award in clinical medicine and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura. Tu is the first Chinese Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine and the first female citizen of the People's Republic of China to receive a Nobel Prize in any category. She is also the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Award. Tu was born, educated and carried out her research exclusively in China.

Tu was bestowed the Medal of the Republic, the highest honorary medal of the People's Republic of China, in September 2019.

Early life

Tu was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China, on 30 December 1930.

My [first] name, Youyou, was given by my father, who adapted it from the sentence translated as "Deer bleat youyou while eating wild Hao" in the Chinese Book of Odes. How this links my whole life with qinghao will probably remain an interesting coincidence forever.

— Tu Youyou, when interviewed in 2011 after being awarded the 2011 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award

She attended Xiaoshi Middle School for junior high school and the first year of high school, before transferring to Ningbo Middle School in 1948. A tuberculosis infection interrupted her high-school education, but inspired her to go into medical research. From 1951 to 1955, she attended Peking University Medical School / Beijing Medical College. In 1955, Youyou Tu graduated from Beijing Medical University School of Pharmacy and continued her research on Chinese herbal medicine in the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. Tu studied at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and graduated in 1955. Later Tu was trained for two and a half years in traditional Chinese medicine.

After graduation, Tu worked at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (now the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medical Sciences) in Beijing.

Research career

Tu carried on her work in the 1960s and 70s, including during China's Cultural Revolution.

Schistosomiasis

During her early years in research, Tu studied Lobelia chinensis, a traditional Chinese medicine believed to be useful for treating schistosomiasis, caused by trematodes which infect the urinary tract or the intestines, which was widespread in the first half of the 20th century in South China.

Malaria

In 1967, during the Vietnam War, President Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam asked Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai for help in developing a malaria treatment for his soldiers trooping down the Ho Chi Minh trail, where a majority came down with a form of malaria which is resistant to chloroquine. Because malaria was also a major cause of death in China's southern provinces, especially Guangdong and Guangxi, Zhou Enlai convinced Mao Zedong to set up a secret drug discovery project named Project 523 after its starting date, 23 May 1967.

In early 1969, Tu was appointed head of the Project 523 research group at her institute. Tu was initially sent to Hainan, where she studied patients who had been infected with the disease.

Scientists worldwide had screened over 240,000 compounds without success. In 1969, Tu, then 39 years old, had an idea of screening Chinese herbs. She first investigated the Chinese medical classics in history, visiting practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine all over the country on her own. She gathered her findings in a notebook called A Collection of Single Practical Prescriptions for Anti-Malaria. Her notebook summarized 640 prescriptions. By 1971, her team had screened over 2,000 traditional Chinese recipes and made 380 herbal extracts, from some 200 herbs, which were tested on mice.

One compound was effective, sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua), which was used for "intermittent fevers," a hallmark of malaria. As Tu also presented at the project seminar, its preparation was described in a recipe from a 1,600-year-old traditional Chinese herbal medicine text titled Emergency Prescriptions Kept Up One's Sleeve. At first, it was ineffective because they extracted it with traditional boiling water. Tu discovered that a low-temperature extraction process could be used to isolate an effective antimalarial substance from the plant; Tu says she was influenced by the source, written in 340 by Ge Hong, which states that this herb should be steeped in cold water. This book instructed the reader to immerse a handful of qinghao in water, wring out the juice, and drink it all. Since hot water damages the active ingredient in the plant, she proposed a method using low temperature ether to extract the effective compound instead. Animal tests showed it was completely effective in mice and monkeys.

In 1972, she and her colleagues obtained the pure substance and named it qinghaosu , or artemisinin in English. This substance has now saved millions of lives, especially in the developing world. Tu also studied the chemical structure and pharmacology of artemisinin. Tu's group first determined the chemical structure of artemisinin. In 1973, Tu was attempting to confirm the carbonyl group in the artemisinin molecule when she accidentally synthesized dihydroartemisinin.

Tu voluntered to be the first human test subject. "As head of this research group, I had the responsibility," she said. It was safe, so she conducted successful clinical trials with human patients. Her work was published anonymously in 1977. In 1981, she presented the findings related to artemisinin at a meeting with the World Health Organization.

For her work on malaria, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine on 5 October 2015.

Later career

Tu Youyou was promoted to Researcher (the highest researcher rank in mainland China equivalent to the academic rank of a full professor) in 1980, shortly after the beginning of the Chinese economic reform in 1978. In 2001, she was promoted to academic advisor for doctoral candidates. As of 2023, she is the chief scientist of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences.

As of 2007, her office is in an old apartment building in Dongcheng District, Beijing.

Before 2011, Tu Youyou had been obscure for decades, and is described as "almost completely forgotten by people".

Tu is regarded as the "Three-Without Scientist" – no postgraduate degree (there was no postgraduate education then in China), no study or research experience abroad, and not a member of either of the Chinese national academies, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering. Tu is now regarded as a representative figure of the first generation of Chinese medical workers since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-21 16:29:29

2169) David Thouless

Gist:

Life

David Thouless was born in Bearsden, Scotland. After studies at Cambridge University he received a PhD from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 1958. His supervisor was the future Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe. After stays at University of California, Berkeley and Cambridge University he became a professor at the University of Birmingham in 1965. After a few years at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, he became a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle in 1980. David Thouless is married with three children.

Work

Matter occurs in different phases, for example as a gas, liquid or solid. At very low temperatures unusual phases, such as superconductivity or superfluidity, may also occur. In the early 1970s David Thouless and Michael Kosterlitz used the concepts of topology, a branch of mathematics, to describe phase transitions in thin layers at low temperatures. Later, Thouless also explained the quantum Hall effect, stepwise shifts in electrical conductivity in thin layers.

Summary

David Thouless (born September 21, 1934, Bearsden, Scotland—died April 6, 2019, Cambridge, England) was a British-born American physicist who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on using topology to explain superconductivity and the quantum Hall effect in two-dimensional materials. He shared the prize with British-born American physicists Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz.

Thouless received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Cambridge in 1955 and a doctorate in theoretical physics in 1958 from Cornell University. He was a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1958 to 1959 and then was a research fellow at the University of Birmingham until 1961. He returned to Cambridge and was a lecturer until 1965 and was a professor of mathematical physics at Birmingham from 1965 to 1978. After being a professor of applied science at Yale University from 1979 to 1980, he went to the University of Washington, Seattle, as a professor of physics and became an emeritus professor in 2003.

In the early 1970s, when Thouless and Kosterlitz were at Birmingham together, they became interested in phase transitions in two dimensions. Phase transitions happen when a material changes from one ordered type of matter to another; the melting of ice is a phase transition because the water changes from one phase (solid ice) to another (liquid water). In two dimensions, it was believed, random thermal fluctuations would make any kind of order and thus any kind of phase transition impossible. If there were no phase transitions, phenomena like superfluidity and superconductivity could not occur. Thouless and Kosterlitz discovered a topological phase transition in which, at cold temperatures, spinning vortices would form in closely separated pairs and, as the temperature increased, the material would enter another phase in which the vortices split apart and travel freely. This transition is known as the Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) transition (or sometimes the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless [BKT] transition).

In 1983 Thouless also used topology to explain the quantum Hall effect, in which, when a thin conducting layer is placed between two semiconductors and cooled to near absolute zero (−273.15 °C [−459.67 °F]), the electrical resistance of the conductor changes in discrete steps as a magnetic field varies. In fact, the inverse of the electrical resistance, called the conductance, varies in integer steps. He found that the conductance followed a kind of integer known from topology as the Chern number. This work was later extended by Haldane to show that such effects that were dependent on the Chern number could occur even without a magnetic field.

Details

David James Thouless (21 September 1934 – 6 April 2019) was a British condensed-matter physicist. He was awarded the 1990 Wolf Prize and a laureate of the 2016 Nobel Prize for physics along with F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.

Education

Born on 21 September 1934 in Bearsden, Scotland to English parents, Priscilla (Gorton) Thouless, an English teacher, and Robert Thouless a psychologist and broadcaster. David Thouless was educated at St Faith's School then Winchester College and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate student of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He obtained his PhD at Cornell University, where Hans Bethe was his doctoral advisor.

Career and research

Thouless was a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, and also worked in the physics department from 1958 to 1959, giving a course on atomic physics. He was the first director of studies in physics at Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1961–1965, professor of mathematical physics at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom in 1965–1978, and professor of applied science at Yale University from 1979 to 1980, before becoming a professor of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1980. Thouless made many theoretical contributions to the understanding of extended systems of atoms and electrons, and of nucleons. He also worked on superconductivity phenomena, properties of nuclear matter, and excited collective motions within nuclei.

Thouless made many important contributions to the theory of many-body problems. For atomic nuclei, he cleared up the concept of 'rearrangement energy' and derived an expression for the moment of inertia of deformed nuclei. In statistical mechanics, he contributed many ideas to the understanding of ordering, including the concept of 'topological ordering'. Other important results relate to localised electron states in disordered lattices.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-22 16:57:28

2170) Duncan Haldane

Gist:

Life

Duncan Haldane was born in London, Great Britain. After attending St Paul's School in London he studied at Cambridge University, where he received a PhD in 1978. His supervisor was the future Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson. Haldane has worked at Institut Laue–Langevin in Grenoble, France, the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the University of California San Diego, And, since 1990, at Princeton University, New Jersey. Duncan Haldane is married to Odile Belmont.

Work

Matter occurs in different phases, for example as a gas, liquid or solid. At very low temperatures unusual phases may occur, for example superconductivity and unusual types of magnetism. To describe these phases and phase transitions Duncan Haldane used the concepts of topology, a branch of mathematics. For example, during the 1980s, he explained magnetic properties of chains of atoms in certain materials. In the future, these results may contribute to the development of new materials and electronic components.

Summary

Duncan Haldane (born September 14, 1951, London, England) is a British-born American physicist who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on explaining properties of one-dimensional chains of atomic magnets and of two-dimensional semiconductors. He shared the prize with British-born American physicists David Thouless and Michael Kosterlitz.

Haldane received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Cambridge in 1973 and a doctorate in physics from the same institution in 1978. He worked as a physicist at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France, from 1977 to 1981. He was an assistant professor of physics from 1981 to 1985 at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and then worked at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, from 1985 to 1997. He was a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, from 1987 to 1990 and then went to Princeton University.

In the 1960s and ’70s much theoretical work had been done on chains of atomic magnets, specifically those with a spin of 1/2. It was assumed that those chains of atomic magnets with integer spins would behave the same way. In 1983 Haldane used topological techniques to show that the two types of chains were very different.

In 1988 Haldane extended work that had been done on the quantum Hall effect by Thouless, who had explained why the electrical conductance in that effect changed in integer steps. In the quantum Hall effect, electrons were placed in a conducting layer between two semiconductors and subjected to a strong magnetic field. The electrons formed a type of fluid. Haldane showed that the fluid could occur in semiconductors even without a magnetic field. Such behaviour was first observed in 2013.

Details

Frederick Duncan Michael Haldane (born 14 September 1951) is a British-born physicist who is currently the Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He is a co-recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with David J. Thouless and J. Michael Kosterlitz.

Education

Haldane was educated at St Paul's School, London and Christ's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree followed by a PhD in 1978 for research supervised by Philip Warren Anderson.

Career and research

Haldane worked as a physicist at Institut Laue–Langevin in France between 1977 and 1981. In August 1981, Haldane became an assistant professor of physics at the University of Southern California, where he remained until 1987. Haldane was then appointed as an associate professor of physics in 1981 and later a professor of physics in 1986. In July 1986, Haldane joined the department of physics at University of California, San Diego as a professor of physics, where he remained until February 1992. In 1990, Haldane was appointed as a professor of physics in the department of physics at Princeton University, where he remains to this day. In 1999, Haldane was named as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics. In 2017, he was named the Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Physics. In the period 2013–2018, Haldane also held a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Haldane is known for a wide variety of fundamental contributions to condensed matter physics including the theory of Luttinger liquids, the theory of one-dimensional spin chains, the theory of fractional quantum hall effect, exclusion statistics, entanglement spectra and much more.

As of 2011 he is developing a new geometric description of the fractional quantum Hall effect that introduces the "shape" of the "composite boson", described by a "unimodular" (determinant 1) spatial metric-tensor field as the fundamental collective degree of freedom of Fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) states. This new "Chern-Simons + quantum geometry" description is a replacement for the "Chern-Simons + Ginzburg-Landau" paradigm introduced c.1990. Unlike its predecessor, it provides a description of the FQHE collective mode that agrees with the Girvin-Macdonald-Platzman "single-mode approximation".

Awards and honours

Haldane was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1996 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston) in 1992; a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1986) and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (1996) (UK); a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2001). Haldane was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2017. He was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society (1993); Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow (1984–88); Lorentz Chair (2008), Dirac Medal (2012); Doctor Honoris Causae of the Université de Cergy-Pontoise (2015); Lise Meitner Distinguished Lecturer (2017); Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (2017).

With David J. Thouless and J. Michael Kosterlitz, Haldane shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter".

Personal life

Haldane is a British and Slovenian citizen and United States permanent resident. Haldane and his wife, Odile Belmont, live in Princeton, New Jersey. His father was a doctor in the British Army stationed on the Yugoslavia/Austria border and there he met young medicine student Ljudmila Renko, a Slovene, and subsequently married her and moved back to England where Duncan was born.

He received Slovenian citizenship at a ceremony at the Slovenian Embassy in Washington, DC on March 22, 2019.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-23 15:45:06

2171) J. Michael Kosterlitz

Gist:

Life

Michael Kosterlitz was born into a family of Jewish immigrants in Aberdeen, Scotland. His father was a biochemist. Kosterlitz studied at Cambridge University and received a PhD at Oxford University in 1969. Thereafter he carried out some of his Nobel Prize awarded work with David Thouless at the University of Birmingham. In 1982, Kosterlitz became a professor at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Michael Kosterlitz is married with three children.

Work

Matter occurs in different phases, for example as a gas, liquid or solid. At very low temperatures unusual phases may occur, for example superconductivity, when electric current flows without resistance, and superfluidity, when a fluid flows without resistance. To describe these phases and phase transitions Michael Kosterlitz used the concepts of topology, a branch of mathematics. For example, in the early 1970s he and David Thouless described phase transitions in thin layers at low temperatures.

Summary

J. Michael Kosterlitz (born June 22, 1943, Aberdeen, Scotland) is a British-born American physicist who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in using topology to explain superconductivity in two-dimensional materials. He shared the prize with British-born American physicists David Thouless and Duncan Haldane.

Kosterlitz received a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1965 and 1969, respectively. He had a fellowship at the Istituto di Fisica Teorica in Turin, Italy, from 1969 to 1970 and was a research fellow at the University of Birmingham from 1970 to 1973. He spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, from 1973 to 1974, before returning to Birmingham. He remained there until 1982 when he became a professor of physics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

During Kosterlitz’s first stint at Birmingham in the early 1970s, he and Thouless became interested in phase transitions in two-dimensional materials. Phase transitions happen when matter changes from one type to another; for example, when water boils, it goes through a phase transition when it changes from liquid to gas. Physicists thought that two-dimensional materials would not have phase transitions, since any order that would arise would be wiped out by random thermal fluctuations. Phenomena like superfluidity and superconductivity could not happen without phase transitions. Kosterlitz and Thouless found a topological phase transition in which pairs of vortices form at cold temperatures and then disperse as the temperature increases. This change is known as the Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) transition (or the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless [BKT] transition) and appears in many other areas of physics.

Details

John Michael Kosterlitz (born June 22, 1943) is a Scottish-American physicist. He is a professor of physics at Brown University and the son of biochemist Hans Kosterlitz. He was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics along with David Thouless and Duncan Haldane for work on condensed matter physics.

Education and early life

He was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, to German-Jewish émigrés, the son of the pioneering biochemist Hans Walter Kosterlitz and Hannah Gresshöner. He was educated independently at Robert Gordon's College before transferring to the Edinburgh Academy to prepare for his university entrance examinations. He received his BA degree, subsequently converted to an MA degree, at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1969, he earned a DPhil degree from the University of Oxford as a postgraduate student of Brasenose College, Oxford.

Career and research

After a few postdoctoral positions, including positions at the University of Birmingham, collaborating with David Thouless, and at Cornell University, he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Birmingham in 1974, first as a lecturer and, later, as a reader. Since 1982, he has been professor of physics at Brown University. Kosterlitz is currently a visiting research fellow at Aalto University in Finland and since 2016 a distinguished professor at Korea Institute for Advanced Study.

Kosterlitz does research in condensed matter theory, one- and two-dimensional physics; in phase transitions: random systems, electron localization, and spin glasses; and in critical dynamics: melting and freezing.

Awards and honours

Michael Kosterlitz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2016, “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”; the Maxwell Medal and Prize from the British Institute of Physics in 1981, and the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society in 2000, especially, for his work on the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless transition. Since 1992, he has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

The Kosterlitz Centre at the University of Aberdeen is named in honour of his father, Hans Kosterlitz, a pioneering biochemist specializing in endorphins, who joined the faculty after fleeing Nazi persecution of Jews in 1934.

Personal life

Kosterlitz was a pioneer in Alpine climbing in the 1960s, known for working routes in the UK, Italian Alps, and Yosemite. There is 6a+ graded route bearing his name in the Orco Valley of the Italian Alps named Fessura Kosterlitz. Kosterlitz is an American citizen and is an atheist. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1978.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-24 17:09:18

2172) Jean-Pierre Sauvage

Gist:

Life

Jean-Pierre Sauvage was born in Paris, France. He received his doctoral degree at the Université Louis-Pasteur in Strasbourg in 1971. The future Nobel Laureate Jean-Marie Lehn was his advisor. He has worked at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS, and is a professor at the Université de Strasbourg.

Work

We can imagine that the components of the smallest machines could be molecules. For a machine to function, its parts must be able to move relative to each other. In 1983, Jean-Pierre Sauvage managed to achieve this by connecting two ring-shaped molecules into what is called a “catenane”. Unlike ordinary chemical bonds, the molecules in catenanes are linked like a chain, where the links can move relative to each other. In the future, molecular machines could be used for new materials, sensors, and energy storage systems.

Summary

Jean-Pierre Sauvage (born October 21, 1944, Paris) is a French chemist who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on molecular machines. He shared the prize with Scottish-American chemist Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Dutch chemist Bernard Feringa.

Sauvage received his doctorate from the Louis Pasteur University (now part of the University of Strasbourg) in 1971 and then joined the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) as a research fellow in Strasbourg. He had a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford from 1973 to 1974. He returned to CNRS and was a professor at Strasbourg from 1981 to 1984 and a director of research at CNRS from 1979 to 2009, when he became a director emeritus.

In 1983 Sauvage and collaborators created a molecular chain, [2]catenane. They found that a copper ion would attract a ring-shaped and a crescent-shaped part of a phenanthroline molecule. They added another crescent phenanthroline to the first crescent to make two linked rings with the copper ion in the middle and then removed the ion.

Sauvage realized that with the development of [2]catenane, molecules could be assembled into small machines. In 1994 he and his collaborators made a [2]catenane in which one ring could rotate around the other. Sauvage and collaborators in 1997 were able to control rotation in a [2]catenane through both electrochemical and photochemical means. In 2000 his group produced a rotaxane structure that could extend and contract, much like a muscle filament.

Details

Jean-Pierre Sauvage (born 21 October 1944) is a French coordination chemist working at Strasbourg University. He graduated from the National School of Chemistry of Strasbourg (now known as ECPM Strasbourg), in 1967. He has specialized in supramolecular chemistry for which he has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa.

Biography

Sauvage was born in Paris in 1944, and earned his PhD degree from the Université Louis-Pasteur under the supervision of Jean-Marie Lehn, himself a 1987 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. During his doctoral work, he contributed to the first syntheses of the cryptand ligands.[5] After postdoctoral research with Malcolm L. H. Green, he returned to Strasbourg, where he is now emeritus professor.

Sauvage's scientific work has focused on creating molecules that mimic the functions of machines by changing their conformation in response to an external signal.

His Nobel Prize work was done in 1983, when he was the first to synthesize a catenane, a complex of two interlocking ring-shaped molecules, which were bonded mechanically rather than chemically. Because these two rings can move relative to each other, the Nobel Prize cited this as a vital initial effort towards making molecular machine. The other two recipients of the prize followed up by later creating a rotaxane and a molecular rotor.

Other research includes electrochemical reduction of CO2 and models of the photosynthetic reaction center.

A large theme of his work is molecular topology, specifically mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures. He has described syntheses of catenanes and molecular knots based on coordination complexes.

He was elected a correspondent member of the French Academy of Sciences on 26 March 1990, and became a member on 24 November 1997. He is currently emeritus professor at the University of Strasbourg (Unistra).

He shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the design and synthesis of molecular machines" with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa. He was elected a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in April 2019.

As of 2021, Sauvage has an h-index of 109 according to Google Scholar and of 100 according to Scopus.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-25 01:26:47

2173) Fraser Stoddart

Gist:

Life

Fraser Stoddart was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied at the University of Edinburgh where he received his PhD in 1966. He has then been working at Queens' University, Kingston, Ontario in Canada, at the University of Sheffield, ICI Corporate Laboratory and University of Birmingham in Great Britain, and at the University of California Los Angeles and Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois in the USA. Fraser Stoddart was married to Norma Stoddart until her death in 2004 and has two children.

Work

We can imagine that the components of the smallest machines could be molecules. For a machine to function, its parts must be able to move relative to each other. Fraser Stoddart has contributed to the development of molecular machines, for example by developing a “rotaxane” in 1991. A ring-shaped molecule was threaded over another molecule that functions like an axle. In the future, molecular machines could be used for new materials, sensors, and energy storage systems.

Summary

Fraser Stoddart (born May 24, 1942, Edinburgh, Scotland—died December 30, 2024, Australia) was a Scottish-American chemist who was the first to successfully synthesize a mechanically interlocked molecule, known as a catenane, thereby helping to establish the field of mechanical bond chemistry. Stoddart’s research enabled the development of self-assembly processes and template-directed synthesis for the generation of a variety of mechanically interlocked molecules, the movements of which can be controlled. Such molecules have a wide range of applications, including as components of drug-delivery systems, electronic sensors, and motorized devices. Stoddart was recognized for his work with the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he shared with French chemist Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Dutch chemist Bernard Feringa.

Stoddart was raised in the Scottish Lowlands, in the simple life of a tenant farming family. In his youth he learned to repair tractors, various farm implements, and cars, and he had a passion for jigsaw puzzles, interests that shared common ground with his later studies of machines, chemistry, and mechanical bonds. After earning a B.S. degree in 1964 and a Ph.D. in 1966 from the University of Edinburgh, Stoddart studied as a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University at Kingston in Ontario, Canada, and later was a research fellow at the University of Sheffield. During that time he investigated the synthesis of carbohydrate-based chiral crown ethers, uniquely flexible cyclic molecules that would later feature as key components in interlocking chemical structures and supramolecular polymers.

Stoddart was a lecturer at Sheffield until 1978, when he went to the Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Corporate Laboratory in Runcorn in Cheshire, England. At the ICI laboratory he began to study the ability of crown ethers to form adducts with the highly toxic pesticides diquat and paraquat. In 1981 he returned to Sheffield as a reader in chemistry and continued the work. By the mid-1980s, using a large ring-shaped crown ether tailored to act as a molecular receptor (“host”) for each chemical (“guest”), Stoddart and colleagues were able to slide the paraquat and diquat compounds through the rings and thereby transform their properties, laying the foundation for the invention of molecular switches. His further development of host-guest chemistry led to the first template-controlled synthesis of a catenane, a mechanically interlocked molecule made up of at least two macrocycles (large rings consisting of eight or more atoms).

In 1990 Stoddart joined the University of Birmingham as chair of organic chemistry. A year later he reported the development of the first molecular shuttle, a compound called rotaxane, in which a molecular ring was able to slide along a thin rod (or “axle”) of a dumbbell-shaped molecule, switching between two residues, or docking stations. Stoddart and colleagues subsequently refined the switching mechanism and developed a molecular switch measuring a mere cubic nanometre in size. Through the 1990s he also generated other novel interlocked architectures, including olympiadane (an interlocking structure resembling the Olympic rings) and a complex branching catenane.

In 1997 Stoddart moved his laboratory to the University of California, Los Angeles. There he investigated self-assembly processes and the development of electronically reconfigurable molecular switches. He also developed molecular Borromean rings, which consist of three rings interlocked in such a way as to permit their disassociation in the event of a fracture in any one ring, and a molecular elevator, based on the stepwise descent of a ring structure sliding down supporting molecules. Those developments provided Stoddart with the impetus to explore nanoelectronic and nanoelectromechanical devices capable of operating on surfaces rather than only in solutions. In 2008 Stoddart joined the faculty of Northwestern University, serving as a professor of chemistry and as a member of the university’s board of trustees. He became the chair professor of chemistry at the University of Hong Kong in 2023.

Stoddart’s development of molecular machines, existing in energy-rich states, opened the door to what some scientists hailed as the dawn of a molecular industrial revolution, in which molecular machines, fashioned into sensors, energy-storage systems, and motors, would become an integral component of human life. He received numerous awards for his work, including the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (2007), the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2010), and the Centenary Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry (2014). He was an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2008), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012), and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2014).

Details

Sir James Fraser Stoddart, (24 May 1942 – 30 December 2024) was a British-American chemist who was Chair Professor in Chemistry at the University of Hong Kong. He was the Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry and head of the Stoddart Mechanostereochemistry Group in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University in the United States. He worked in the area of supramolecular chemistry and nanotechnology. Stoddart developed highly efficient syntheses of mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures such as molecular Borromean rings, catenanes and rotaxanes utilising molecular recognition and molecular self-assembly processes. He demonstrated that these topologies can be employed as molecular switches. His group has even applied these structures in the fabrication of nanoelectronic devices and nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). His efforts were recognized by numerous awards, including the 2007 King Faisal International Prize in Science. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Ben Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage in 2016 for the design and synthesis of molecular machines.

Early life and education

Fraser Stoddart was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 24 May 1942, the only child of Tom and Jean Stoddart. He was brought up as a tenant farmer on Edgelaw Farm, a small community consisting of three families. Sir Fraser professed a passion for jigsaw puzzles and construction toys in his formative years, which he believed was the basis for his interest in molecular construction.

Stoddart received early schooling at the local village school in Carrington, Midlothian, before going on to Melville College in Edinburgh. He started at the University of Edinburgh in 1960 where he initially studied chemistry, physics and mathematics. He was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry in 1964 followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in 1966 for research on natural gums in Acacias supervised by Sir Edmund Langley Hirst and D M W Anderson from the University of Edinburgh.

Career

In 1967, Stoddart went to Queen's University (Canada) as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow. In 1970 he moved to the University of Sheffield as an Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Research Fellow, before joining the academic staff as a lecturer in chemistry. In early 1978 he was a Science Research Council Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Later in 1978, he was transferred to the ICI Corporate Laboratory in Runcorn, England where he first started investigating the mechanically interlocked molecules that would eventually become molecular machines. At the end of the three year secondment he returned to Sheffield where he was promoted to a Readership in 1982.

Stoddart was awarded a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1980[28] for his research into stereochemistry beyond the molecule. In 1990, he moved to the Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Birmingham and was Head of the School of Chemistry there (1993–97) before moving to UCLA as the Saul Winstein Professor of Chemistry in 1997, succeeding Nobel laureate Donald Cram.

In July 2002, Stoddart became the Acting Co-Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). In May 2003, he became the Fred Kavli Chair of NanoSystems Sciences and served from then through August 2007 as the Director of the CNSI.

In 2008, Stoddart established the Mechanostereochemistry Group and was named Board of Trustees Professor in Chemistry at Northwestern University. He went on to be the Director of the Center for the Chemistry of Integrated Systems (CCIS) at Northwestern University in 2010.

In 2017, Stoddart was appointed a part-time position at the University of New South Wales to establish his New Chemistry initiative at the UNSW School of Chemistry.

In 2019, Stoddart introduced a skincare brand called Noble Panacea.

In 2021, Stoddart co-founded a startup called H2MOF, dedicated to solving the challenges associated with hydrogen storage and transportation.

In 2023, Stoddart joined the University of Hong Kong as Chair Professor of Chemistry.

During 35 years, nearly 300 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers have been trained in his laboratories.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-25 16:34:03

2174) Ben Feringa

Gist:

Life

Bernard Feringa was born in Barger-Compascuum in the Netherlands, where his family had a farm. He studied at the University of Groningen, where he received his PhD in 1978. After a few years at the Shell oil company in the Netherlands and Great Britain he has been affiliated to the university of Groningen. Bernard Feringa is married with two daughters.

Work

We can imagine that the components of the smallest machines could be molecules. For a machine to function, its parts must be able to move relative to each other. Bernard Feringa has contributed to the development of molecular machines. For example, in 1999 he constructed a molecular motor by making a molecular rotor blade continuously spin in the same direction. In the future, molecular machines could be used for new materials, sensors, and energy storage systems.

Summary

Bernard Feringa (born May 18, 1951, Barger-Compascuum, Netherlands) is a Dutch chemist who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with molecular machines. He shared the prize with French chemist Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Scottish-American chemist Sir J. Fraser Stoddart.

Feringa received his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Groningen in 1978. That year he became a research chemist for the oil company Royal Dutch Shell in Amsterdam. He was at the Shell Biosciences Laboratories in Sittingbourne, England, from 1982 to 1983. Feringa then returned to Shell in Amsterdam, and in 1984 he became a lecturer in organic chemistry at Groningen. He was appointed a professor there in 1988.

In 1999 Feringa and collaborators announced that they had created the first “molecular motor”—that is, a molecule that can be made to spin in one direction. Usually, when molecules rotate, they are as equally likely to spin one way as the other. The molecular motor was made of two “blades,” in which one blade would spin 180 degrees when exposed to ultraviolet light. This rotation would set up a “tension” in the bond that connects the two blades that would cause the other blade to rotate. Each blade had a methyl group connected to it that acted as a ratchet so rotation could only happen in one direction. The Feringa group built molecular motors that rotated faster and faster, which culminated in 2013 with the development of one that rotated with a frequency of 12 MHz.

The Feringa group used molecular motors in more ambitious projects. In 2005 they were able to spin with molecular motors a glass cylinder that was 28 micrometres long, 10,000 times larger than the motors. In 2011 they created a “nanocar,” which consisted of a “chassis” and four molecular motors for wheels and which could drive over a surface.

Details

Bernard Lucas Feringa (born 18 May 1951) is a Dutch synthetic organic chemist, specializing in molecular nanotechnology and homogeneous catalysis.

He is the Jacobus van 't Hoff Distinguished Professor of Molecular Sciences, at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry, University of Groningen, Netherlands, and an Academy Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Jean-Pierre Sauvage, "for the design and synthesis of molecular machines".

Personal life

Feringa was born as the son of farmer Geert Feringa (1918–1993) and his wife Lies Feringa née Hake (1924–2013). Feringa was the second of ten siblings in a Catholic family. He spent his youth on the family's farm, which is directly on the border with Germany, in Barger-Compascuum in the Bourtange moor. He is of Dutch and German descent. Among his ancestors is the settler Johann Gerhard Bekel. Together with his wife Betty Feringa, he has three daughters. He lives in Paterswolde near Groningen.

Career

Feringa received his MSc degree with distinction from the University of Groningen in 1974. He subsequently obtained a PhD degree at the same university in 1978, with the thesis titled "Asymmetric oxidation of phenols. Atropisomerism and optical activity". Following a short period at Shell in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, he was appointed as lecturer at the University of Groningen in 1984 and Full Professor, succeeding Prof Wijnberg, in 1988. His early career was focused on homogenous catalysis and oxidation catalysis, and especially on stereochemistry with major contributions in the field of enantioselective catalysis, including monophos ligand used in asymmetric hydrogenation, asymmetric conjugate additions of organometallic reagents, including the highly reactive organolithium reagents and organic photochemistry and stereochemistry. In the 1990s, Feringa's work in stereochemistry led to major contributions in photochemistry, resulting in the first monodirectional light driven molecular rotary motor and later a molecular car (a so-called nanocar) driven by electrical impulses.

Ben Feringa holds over 30 patents and has published over 650 peer reviewed research papers to date, cited more than 30,000 times and has an h-index in excess of 90. He has guided over 100 PhD students over his career.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-25 21:47:45

2175) Yoshinori Ohsumi

Gist:

Life

Yoshinori Ohsumi was born in Fukuoka, Japan. He studied at the University of Tokyo where he received his doctoral degree in 1974. After a few years at Rockefeller University, New York, he returned to the University of Tokyo. In 1996 he moved to the National Institute for Basic Biology in Okazaki. He has also been affiliated to the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai) in Hayama and to the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he is now working. Yoshinori Ohsumi is married to Mariko Ohsumi who is also one of his scientific collaborators.

Work

In the lysosomes of our cells its components are processed for reuse. The mechanisms of this process were mostly unknown until the early 1990s, when Yoshinori Ohsumi conducted a series of groundbreaking experiments with yeast, where he detected autophagy and identified genes important for the process. Ohsumi’s discoveries laid the foundation for a better understanding of the ability of cells to manage malnutrition and infections, the causes of certain hereditary and neurological diseases, and cancer.

Summary

Yoshinori Ohsumi (born February 9, 1945, Fukuoka, Japan) is a Japanese cell biologist known for his work in elucidating the mechanisms of autophagy, a process by which cells degrade and recycle proteins and other cellular components. Ohsumi’s research played a key role in helping to uncover the critical physiological activities of autophagy, including its function in helping cells adapt to various types of stress, in contributing to embryo development, and in eliminating damaged proteins. For his discoveries relating to autophagy, Ohsumi was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Ohsumi was interested in the natural sciences from an early age. After receiving a B.S. degree in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1974 from the University of Tokyo, he went to Rockefeller University in New York, where he studied as a postdoctoral researcher with American physical chemist Gerald Maurice Edelman. Ohsumi initially worked on a system for in vitro fertilization in mice. Unfamiliar with mammalian embryonic development, however, he later switched to the study of DNA in yeast and became interested in vacuoles (membrane-bound fluid-filled organelles), which were easily obtained from yeast cells and in which Ohsumi had observed various transport systems for moving molecules across the vacuole membrane.

In 1977 Ohsumi returned to the University of Tokyo, having accepted a position as a junior professor in the department of biology. In 1988, after establishing his own laboratory there, he returned to the subject of vacuole physiology, focusing in particular on the lytic (degradation) activities of vacuoles in yeast, about which very little was known at the time. Drastic cellular degradation processes, known as autophagy, or “self-eating,” had been described and studied extensively in animal cells, however, providing Ohsumi with a basis for investigation. Of particular significance was the observation that in animal cells, autophagy could be induced by exposing the cells to nutrient-deficient conditions. In a parallel experiment, Ohsumi engineered the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to lack vacuolar proteinase and peptidase enzymes (thereby preventing sporulation) and then deprived the yeast cells of nutrients. When he observed the yeast under a light microscope, he found that autophagic bodies had accumulated inside the vacuoles. He published the findings—the first to demonstrate the existence of autophagy in yeast—in 1992.

Shortly thereafter Ohsumi used his engineered yeast to identify genes essential to autophagy. Researchers working in his laboratory eventually found and characterized the function of 14 autophagy genes in yeast. They subsequently found that enzymes encoded by some of the genes were conjugated (joined together), providing evidence of a complete autophagic pathway in yeast. Moreover, several of the genes were homologous to mammalian genes, suggesting the existence of a corresponding pathway in human cells. In later research Ohsumi elucidated the mechanism of formation of the autophagosome (in animal cells, the vesicle that engulfs cellular components and delivers them to the lysosome, where they undergo degradation) and the role of stress in initiating autophagy.

Ohsumi’s work proved critical in explaining the mechanism by which cells eliminate worn-out protein complexes and organelles, which are otherwise too large to be degraded by other means. The abnormal accumulation of such components is highly damaging to cells and is known to play a role in certain diseases. Thus, Ohsumi’s findings had significant implications for the understanding and treatment of various conditions in which autophagy is disrupted, including cancer, Parkinson disease, and type 2 diabetes mellitus.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Ohsumi received multiple other awards and honours during his career, including the Canada Gairdner International Award (2015), the Keio Medical Science Prize (2015), and the Rosenstiel Award (2015).

Details

Yoshinori Ohsumi (Ōsumi Yoshinori, born February 9, 1945) is a Japanese cell biologist specializing in autophagy, the process that cells use to destroy and recycle cellular components. Ohsumi is a professor at Institute of Science Tokyo's Institute of Innovative Research. He received the Kyoto Prize for Basic Sciences in 2012, the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy.

Biography

Ohsumi was born on February 9, 1945, in Fukuoka. He received a B.Sci. in 1967 and a D.Sci. in 1974, both from the University of Tokyo. In 1974–77 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University in New York City.

He returned to the University of Tokyo in 1977 as a research associate; he was appointed Lecturer there in 1986, and promoted to Associate Professor in 1988. In 1996, he moved to the National Institute for Basic Biology, Japan in Okazaki City, where he was appointed as a professor. From 2004 to 2009, he was also professor at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Hayama. In 2009, he transitioned to a three-way appointment as an emeritus professor at the National Institute for Basic Biology and at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, and a professorship at the Advanced Research Organization, Integrated Research Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech). After his retirement in 2014, he continued to serve as Professor at Institute of Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology. Currently, he is head of the Cell Biology Research Unit, Institute of Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Christian de Duve coined the term autophagy in 1963 whereas Ohsumi began his work in 1988. Prior to that time, less than 20 papers per year were published on this subject. During the 1990s, Ohsumi's group described the morphology of autophagy in yeast, and performed mutational screening on yeast cells that identified essential genes for cells to be capable of autophagy.

In 2016, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy". He is the 25th Japanese person to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Ohsumi's spouse Mariko, a Professor of Teikyo University of Science, collaborated on his research. She is a co-author of many academic papers with him.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-26 16:27:47

2176) Rainer Weiss

Gist:

Life

Rainer Weiss was born in Berlin, where his father was a doctor and psychoanalyst and his mother an actress. His father was of Jewish descent, and the family fled Nazism to the United States. After schooling in New York, Weiss studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his doctor’s degree in 1962. After a couple of years at Tufts University and Princeton University, he returned to MIT, which he has been associated with ever since. Rainer Weiss is married and has a daughter and a son.

Work

One consequence of Einstein’s general theory of relativity is the existence of gravitational waves. These are like ripples in a four-dimensional spacetime that occur when objects with mass accelerate. The effects are very small. Beginning in the 1970s the LIGO detector was developed. In this detector laser technology is used to measure small changes in length caused by gravitational waves. Rainer Weiss has made crucial contributions to the development of the detector. In 2015 gravitational waves were detected for the first time.

Summary

Rainer Weiss (born September 29, 1932, Berlin, Germany) is a German-born American physicist who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and for the first direct detection of gravity waves. He won half the prize, with American physicists Kip S. Thorne and Barry C. Barish sharing the other half.

Weiss’s father, Frederick Weiss, was a Jewish neurologist, and his mother, Gertude Loesner, was a Christian actor. Shortly before Rainer’s birth, Frederick Weiss testified in court against a Nazi doctor who had performed a botched operation. Weiss’s father was abducted by Nazis, but Loesner managed to use her political connections to get him released. Frederick Weiss left Germany for Czechoslovakia, and Loesner joined him shortly after Rainer’s birth. After the announcement of the Munich Agreement in September 1938, which allowed Germany to invade the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, the Weiss family obtained a visa to come to the United States. They arrived in America in January 1939.

As a teenager, Weiss became interested in electronics and specifically in audio systems. He was vexed by the problem of how to suppress the hiss that dominated recordings of slow, quiet pieces of classical music. He realized that he needed more mathematical and engineering knowledge to solve the problem, so he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to major in electrical engineering. However, after his second year, he switched to physics because that major had fewer required courses. In his third year, embroiled in a love affair that ended unhappily, he flunked out of MIT.

In 1953 Weiss got a job as a technician in the lab of MIT physicist Jerrold Zacharias, who encouraged him to resume his education. He eventually received a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate from MIT, in 1955 and 1962 respectively.

From 1960 to 1962, Weiss worked at Tufts University, where he was an instructor and then an assistant professor of physics. He was a research associate at Princeton University from 1962 to 1964, where he worked with physicist Robert Dickinson and became interested in general relativity and cosmology. He returned to MIT as an assistant professor in 1964 and remained there for the rest of his career. He became a full professor in 1973 and retired in 2001.

Weiss’s career was focused mainly on two phenomena, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and gravitational radiation. Beginning in the 1970s, he worked on projects to study the CMB, the microwave radiation left over from the big bang, first using balloons and then with the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which was launched in 1989. COBE discovered the slight density fluctuations in the universe that would have allowed galaxies to form. (Two COBE scientists, John Mather and George Smoot, won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics for this work.)

Weiss’s first attempt to search for gravitational radiation was at Princeton, where he studied the normal modes of Earth’s vibration, which would be excited by gravity waves from the cosmos in the Brans-Dickinson theory of gravitation. However, the experimental measurements were dominated by vibrations from the Alaska earthquake of 1964.

American physicist Joseph Weber announced in 1969 that he detected gravity waves by measuring the change in length of two aluminum bars. Gravity waves are a disturbance in space-time and thus change distances when they pass by. However, no one could replicate Weber’s result. Weiss believed that a laser interferometer had the necessary sensitivity to make the measurement. In this instrument, a laser beam is split to travel down two perpendicular arms several kilometers long to mirrors at the end. When the laser beams return, they cancel out. However, when a gravity wave passes through the interferometer, the distance the light travels is longer in one path than the other and the light beams no longer cancel out. Weiss considered every possible noise source and in 1972 wrote a report describing how such an instrument would work. He also built a small prototype with arms only 1.5 metres long.

During the 1970s Weiss worked with physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, on a 3-metre and, later, a 30-metre prototype. He received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to do a feasibility study for a gravitational-wave observatory. In 1983 he presented the results to the NSF with Thorne and Ronald Drever of Caltech. The NSF agreed to go forward with the LIGO project as an MIT-Caltech collaboration under the leadership of Weiss, Thorne, and Drever.

The LIGO project grew and was placed under a single director in 1987. Construction on two 4-km-long interferometers at Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, began in 1994. Test observations began in 2001, and upgrades to LIGO, Advanced LIGO, were completed in 2014. In 2015, observations began, and on September 14 the instrument detected gravity waves from two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away coalescing to form a new, larger black hole.

Details

Rainer Weiss (born September 29, 1932) is a German-born American physicist, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. He is a professor of physics emeritus at MIT and an adjunct professor at LSU. He is best known for inventing the laser interferometric technique which is the basic operation of LIGO. He was Chair of the COBE Science Working Group.

In 2017, Weiss was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".

Weiss has helped realize a number of challenging experimental tests of fundamental physics. He is a member of the Fermilab Holometer experiment, which uses a 40m laser interferometer to measure properties of space and time at quantum scale and provide Planck-precision tests of quantum holographic fluctuation.

Early life and education

Rainer Weiss was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Gertrude Loesner and Frederick A. Weiss. His father, a physician, neurologist, and psychoanalyst, was forced out of Germany by Nazis because he was Jewish and an active member of the Communist Party. His mother, an actress, was Christian. His aunt was the sociologist Hilda Weiss.

The family fled first to Prague, but Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia after the 1938 Munich Agreement caused them to flee again; the philanthropic Stix family of St. Louis helped them obtain visas to enter the United States. Weiss spent his youth in New York City, where he attended Columbia Grammar School. He studied at MIT, dropped out during his junior year, but eventually returned to receive his S.B. degree in 1955 and Ph.D. degree in 1962 under Jerrold Zacharias.

He taught at Tufts University from 1960 to 1962, was a postdoctoral scholar at Princeton University from 1962 to 1964, and then joined the faculty at MIT in 1964.

In a 2022 interview given to Federal University of Pará in Brazil, Weiss talks about his life and career, the memories of his childhood and youth, his undergraduate and graduate studies at MIT, and the future of gravitational waves astronomy.

Achievements

Weiss brought two fields of fundamental physics research from birth to maturity: characterization of the cosmic background radiation, and interferometric gravitational wave observation.

In 1973 he made pioneering measurements of the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation, taken from a weather balloon, showing that the microwave background exhibited the thermal spectrum characteristic of the remnant radiation from the Big Bang. He later became co-founder and science advisor of the NASA Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which made detailed mapping of the radiation.

Weiss also pioneered the concept of using lasers for an interferometric gravitational wave detector, suggesting that the path length required for such a detector would necessitate kilometer-scale arms. He built a prototype in the 1970s, following earlier work by Robert L. Forward. He co-founded the NSF LIGO (gravitational-wave detection) project, which was based on his report "A study of a long Baseline Gravitational Wave Antenna System".

Both of these efforts couple challenges in instrument science with physics important to the understanding of the Universe.

In February 2016, he was one of the four scientists of LIGO/Virgo collaboration presenting at the press conference for the announcement that the first direct gravitational wave observation had been made in September 2015.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-27 16:33:39

2177) Barry Barish

Gist

Life

Barry Barish was born in Omaha, Nebraska. His parents came from Jewish families in Poland. The family then moved to Los Angeles. Barish studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his doctor’s degree in 1962. The following year he moved to the California Institute of Technology, where he has worked since then. Barry Barish is married and has a daughter and a son.

Work

One consequence of Einstein’s general theory of relativity is the existence of gravitational waves. These are like ripples in a four-dimensional spacetime that occur when objects with mass accelerate. The effects are very small. Beginning in the 1970s the LIGO detector was developed to record gravitational waves. Barry Barish had a leading role in the project from 1994 and made crucial contributions to the development of the detector. In 2015 gravitational waves were detected for the first time.

Details

Barry Clark Barish (born January 27, 1936) is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Laureate. He is a Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus at California Institute of Technology and a leading expert on gravitational waves.

In 2017, Barish was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves". He said, "I didn't know if I would succeed. I was afraid I would fail, but because I tried, I had a breakthrough."

In 2018, he joined the faculty at University of California, Riverside, becoming the university's second Nobel Prize winner on the faculty.

In the fall of 2023, he joined Stony Brook University as the inaugural President's Distinguished Endowed Chair in Physics.

In 2023, Barish was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Biden in a White House ceremony.

Birth and education

Barish was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Lee and Harold Barish. His parents' families were Jewish immigrants from a part of Poland that is now in Belarus. Just after World War II, the family moved to Los Feliz in Los Angeles. He attended John Marshall High School and other schools.

He earned a B.A. degree in physics (1957) and a Ph.D. degree in experimental high energy physics (1962) at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined Caltech in 1963 as part of a new experimental effort in particle physics using frontier particle accelerators at the national laboratories. From 1963 to 1966, he was a research fellow, and from 1966 to 1991 an assistant professor, associate professor, and professor of physics. From 1991 to 2005, he became Linde Professor of Physics, and after that Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus. From 1984 to 1996, he was the principal investigator of Caltech High Energy Physics Group.

Research

Firstly, Barish's experiments were performed at Fermilab using high-energy neutrino collisions to reveal the quark substructure of the nucleon. Among others, these experiments were the first to observe a current that was weak and neutral, a linchpin of the electroweak unification theories of Salam, Glashow, and Weinberg.

In the 1980s, he directed MACRO, an experiment in a cave in Gran Sasso, Italy, that searched for exotic particles called magnetic monopoles and also studied penetrating cosmic rays, including neutrino measurements that provided important confirmatory evidence that neutrinos have mass and oscillate.

In 1991, Barish was named the Maxine and Ronald Linde Professor of Physics at Caltech.

In the early 1990s, he spearheaded GEM (Gammas, Electrons, Muons), an experiment that would have run at the Superconducting Super Collider which was approved after the former project L* led by Samuel Ting (and Barish as chairman of collaboration board) was rejected by SSC director Roy Schwitters. Barish was GEM spokesperson.

Barish became the principal investigator of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in 1994 and director in 1997. He led the effort through the approval of funding by the NSF National Science Board in 1994, the construction and commissioning of the LIGO interferometers in Livingston, LA and Hanford, WA in 1997. He created the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which now numbers more than 1000 collaborators worldwide to carry out the science.

The initial LIGO detectors reached design sensitivity and set many limits on astrophysical sources. The Advanced LIGO proposal was developed while Barish was director, and he has continued to play a leading role in LIGO and Advanced LIGO. The first detection of the merger of two 30 solar mass black holes was made on September 14, 2015. This represented the first direct detection of gravitational waves since they were predicted by Einstein in 1916 and the first ever observation of the merger of a pair of black holes. Barish delivered the first presentation on this discovery to a scientific audience at CERN on February 11, 2016, simultaneously with the public announcement.

From 2001 to 2002, Barish served as co-chair of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel subpanel that developed a long-range plan for U.S. high energy physics. He has chaired the Commission of Particles and Fields and the U.S. Liaison committee to the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). In 2002, he chaired the NRC Board of Physics and Astronomy Neutrino Facilities Assessment Committee Report, "Neutrinos and Beyond".

From 2005 to 2013, Barish was director of the Global Design Effort for the International Linear Collider (ILC). The ILC is the highest priority future project for particle physics worldwide, as it promises to complement the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in exploring the TeV energy scale. This ambitious effort is being uniquely coordinated worldwide, representing a major step in international collaborations going from conception to design to implementation for large scale projects in physics.

Honors and awards

In 2002, he received the Klopsteg Memorial Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers. Barish was honored by the University of Bologna (2006) and University of Florida ( 2007) where he received honorary doctorates. In 2007, delivered the Van Vleck lectures[27] at the University of Minnesota. The University of Glasgow honored Barish with an honorary degree of science in 2013.

Barish was honored as a Titan of Physics in the On the Shoulders of Giants[28] series at the 2016 World Science Festival.

In 2016, Barish received the Enrico Fermi Prize "for his fundamental contributions to the formation of the LIGO and LIGO-Virgo scientific collaborations and for his role in addressing challenging technological and scientific aspects whose solution led to the first detection of gravitational waves".

Barish was a recipient of the 2016 Smithsonian magazine's American Ingenuity Award in the Physical Science category.

Barish was awarded the 2017 Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences "for his visionary and pivotal leadership role, scientific guidance, and novel instrument design during the development of LIGO that were crucial for LIGO's discovery of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, thus directly validating Einstein's 100-year-old prediction of gravitational waves and ushering a new field of gravitational wave astronomy."

Barish was a recipient of the 2017 Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize of the European Physical Society for his "pioneering and leading role in the LIGO observatory that led to the direct detection of gravitational waves, opening a new window to the Universe."

Barish was a recipient of the 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for his work on gravitational waves (jointly with Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss).

Barish was a recipient of the 2017 Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award[34] for his leadership in the construction and initial operations of LIGO, the creation of the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and for the successful conversion of LIGO from small science executed by a few research groups into big science that involved large collaborations and major infrastructures, which eventually enabled gravitational-wave detection" (jointly with Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss).

In 2017, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics (jointly with Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne) "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".

In 2018, Barish was honored as the Alumnus of the year by the University of California, Berkeley.

In 2018, he received an honorary doctorate at Southern Methodist University.

In 2018, he was conferred the Honorary Degree Doctor Honoris Causa of Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski.

In 2023, he was awarded the inaugural the Copernicus Prize, bestowed by the government of Poland on "those who made exceptional contributions to the development of world science."

In 2023, he was awarded the National Medal of Science for "exemplary service to science, including groundbreaking research on sub-atomic particles. His leadership of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory led to the first detection of gravitational waves from merging black holes, confirming a key part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. He has broadened our understanding of the universe and our Nation's sense of wonder and discovery."

Jai Ganesh · 2025-02-28 16:32:34

2178) Kip Thorne

Gist

Kip Thorne (born June 1, 1940, Logan, Utah) is an American physicist who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the first direct detection of gravity waves. He shared the prize with American physicists Rainer Weiss and Barry C.

Life

Kip Thorne was born in Logan, Utah. His father was an agronomist and his mother an economist. After studies at the California Institute of Technology, he obtained his doctor’s degree at Princeton University in 1965. The following year he returned to the California Institute of Technology, and he has worked there since. He has also been associated with the University of Utah and Cornell University. In addition, Thorne served as a consultant for production of the 2014 film Interstellar. Kip Thorne is married and has two children from a previous marriage.

Work

One consequence of Einstein’s general theory of relativity is the existence of gravitational waves. These are like ripples in a four-dimensional spacetime that occur when objects with mass accelerate. The effects are very small. Beginning in the 1970s the LIGO detector was developed. In this detector laser technology is used to measure small changes in length caused by gravitational waves. Kip Thorne has made crucial contributions to the development of the detector. In 2015 gravitational waves were detected for the first time.

Summary

Kip Thorne (born June 1, 1940, Logan, Utah) is an American physicist who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the first direct detection of gravity waves. He shared the prize with American physicists Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish.

Thorne received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1962 and his masters and doctorate in the same subject from Princeton University in 1963 and 1965, respectively. He was a postdoctoral fellow in physics at Princeton from 1965 to 1966. That year he returned as a research fellow to Caltech, where he remained for the rest of his career, eventually becoming the Feynman professor of theoretical physics in 1991. In 2009 he became professor emeritus.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity allows for a wave solution. When a mass accelerates, it causes ripples in space-time. These ripples, gravity waves, are very weak, and the earliest claimed detections of gravity waves by American physicist Joseph Weber in the early 1970s were refuted. However, Thorne believed that gravity-wave astronomy was a promising field and in 1979 recruited Scottish physicist Ronald Drever to Caltech. Drever had been working on laser interferometers to detect gravity waves. The interferometer is shaped like an L. Laser beams are sent down each arm of the L to mirrors at the end. Usually, when the light returns to the corner, the two beams cancel each other out. However, if a gravity wave passes through the device, the time the light takes to travel is different in each arm, and thus the light beams are no longer canceled.

During the 1970s, Weiss had been working along similar lines at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in 1983 proposed to the National Science Foundation (NSF) a facility with two 5-km long interferometers. The NSF agreed but said MIT and Caltech should collaborate. The LIGO project was founded in 1984 under the leadership of Thorne, Weiss, and Drever.

The LIGO leadership was reorganized in 1987 under a single director, Rochus Vogt. The NSF approved the construction of two LIGO facilities with 4-km-long arms at Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, in 1990. Construction began in 1994, and test observations began in 2001. Thorne continued his theoretical work on gravity waves and the types of sources that would produce them.

LIGO was upgraded to become even more sensitive, and the Advanced LIGO began observations in 2015. On September 14 of that year, the two detectors made the first observations of gravity waves. The source was two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away that had spiraled into one another to form a new black hole.

With C.W. Misner and John Archibald Wheeler, Thorne wrote Gravitation (1973), which became the standard graduate school text on general relativity. He also wrote a popular book about the subject, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (1994). He was the science adviser and an executive producer on director Christopher Nolan’s science-fiction film Interstellar (2014) and wrote The Science of Interstellar (2014) about the science behind the movie. In 2019 Thorne appeared as himself on the TV series The Big Bang Theory.

Details

Kip Stephen Thorne (born June 1, 1940) is an American theoretical physicist and writer known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. Along with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.

A longtime friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, he was the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) until 2009[8] and speaks of the astrophysical implications of the general theory of relativity. He continues to do scientific research and scientific consulting, a notable example of which was for the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar.

Life and career

Thorne was born on June 1, 1940, in Logan, Utah. His father, D. Wynne Thorne (1908–1979), was a professor of soil chemistry at Utah State University, and his mother, Alison (née Comish; 1914–2004), was an economist and the first woman to receive a PhD in economics from Iowa State College. Raised in an academic environment, two of his four siblings also became professors. Thorne's parents were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) and raised Thorne in the LDS faith, though he now describes himself as atheist. Shortly before his mother's death, she urged Kip and his siblings to leave the LDS Church because of its discrimination against women, which they all did. Regarding his views on science and religion, Thorne has stated: "There are large numbers of my finest colleagues who are quite devout and believe in God .... There is no fundamental incompatibility between science and religion. I happen to not believe in God."

Thorne rapidly excelled at academics early in life, winning recognition in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search as a senior at Logan High School. He received his BS in physics degree from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1962, and his master and PhD in physics from Princeton University in 1964 and 1965 under the supervision of John Archibald Wheeler with a doctoral dissertation entitled "Geometrodynamics of Cylindrical Systems".

Thorne returned to Caltech as an associate professor in 1967 and became a professor of theoretical physics in 1970, becoming one of the youngest full professors in the history of Caltech at age 30. He became the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in 1981, and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1991. He was an adjunct professor at the University of Utah from 1971 to 1998 and Andrew D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University from 1986 to 1992. In June 2009, he resigned his Feynman Professorship (he is now the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus) to pursue a career of writing and movie making.[citation needed] His first film project was Interstellar, on which he worked with Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan.

Throughout the years, Thorne has served as a mentor and thesis advisor to many leading theorists who now work on observational, experimental, or astrophysical aspects of general relativity. Approximately 50 physicists have received PhDs at Caltech under Thorne's personal mentorship.

Thorne is known for his ability to convey the excitement and significance of discoveries in gravitation and astrophysics to both professional and lay audiences. His presentations on subjects such as black holes, gravitational radiation, relativity, time travel, and wormholes have been included in PBS shows in the U.S. and on the BBC in the United Kingdom.

In the 2023 book The Warped Side of Our Universe, Thorne use poetry, and illustrations by Lia Halloran, to explain scientific concepts for the reader.

Thorne and Linda Jean Peterson married in 1960. Their children are Kares Anne and Bret Carter, an architect. Thorne and Peterson divorced in 1977. Thorne was set up on a blind date with Lynda Obst, later a film producer, by physicist Carl Sagan. They dated in 1979-1980, and parted and remained friends, to the extent that they later collaborated on Interstellar. Thorne and his second wife, Carolee Joyce Winstein, a professor of biokinesiology and physical therapy at USC, married in 1984.

Research

Thorne's research has principally focused on relativistic astrophysics and gravitation physics, with emphasis on relativistic stars, black holes and especially gravitational waves. He is perhaps best known to the public for his controversial theory that wormholes can conceivably be used for time travel. However, Thorne's scientific contributions, which center on the general nature of space, time, and gravity, span the full range of topics in general relativity.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-01 16:52:59

2179) Jacques Dubochet

Gist

Life

Jacques Dubochet was born in Aigle, Switzerland. He studied physics at École Polytechnique at the University of Lausanne and subsequently molecular biology at the University of Geneva. He completed his doctoral thesis on biophysics at the University of Geneva and the University of Basel in 1973. From 1978 to 1987 he worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and later at the University of Lausanne.

Work

Fundamental processes of life are governed by a number of complicated molecules. The electron microscope, which uses electron beams instead of light, expands the possibilities to image these molecules. However, many biological molecules depend on water, which evaporates in the vacuum of an electron microscope. In the early 1980s Jean Dubochet succeeded in cooling the water so rapidly that it solidified around the molecules without the formation of distorting ice crystals. Electron microscope images provide knowledge that is important for the development of pharmaceuticals, among other things.

Summary

Jacques Dubochet (born June 8, 1942, Aigle, Switzerland) is a Swiss biophysicist who succeeded in vitrifying water around biomolecules, thereby preventing the formation of ice crystals in biological specimens. Dubochet discovered that water could retain its liquid form at freezing temperatures if it was cooled very rapidly in liquid ethane. Doing so preserved the natural shape of biomolecules in the vacuum environment necessary for biological imaging by electron microscopy. For his discoveries, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with biophysicists Richard Henderson and Joachim Frank).

Dubochet was raised in southwestern Switzerland. In his youth, he was diagnosed with dyslexia. He attended the Polytechnic School of the University of Lausanne (now the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne), where he received a degree in physical engineering in 1967. He then went to the University of Geneva, earning a certificate in molecular biology in 1969. He later earned a Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of Geneva and the University of Basel. In 1978, following a period at the Biocentre of the University of Basel, Dubochet joined the faculty at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) at Heidelberg. There, he served as the head of the Electron Microscopy Applications Laboratory and developed cryo-electron microscopy. He remained at EMBL until 1987, when he became a professor of biophysics at the University of Lausanne. He retired in 2007.

In the 1970s, Dubochet developed expertise in dark-field electron microscopy and used the technique to successfully image the tobacco mosaic virus and DNA. Nonetheless, as was the experience of other researchers applying electron microscopy to biological samples, Dubochet’s images were distorted, a consequence of the natural occurrence of water in biological material, which resulted in sample dehydration and structural collapse under the vacuum conditions required for electron microscopy. From the work of others in the field, Dubochet became convinced that in order to overcome the problem, biological specimens would need to be imaged in a frozen state.

After joining the EMBL, Dubochet began to investigate methods to rapidly cool water molecules, freezing them before they could crystallize. He and colleague Alasdair McDowall eventually succeeded in transferring a biological sample to a metal mesh surface and plunging the mesh into ethane cooled by liquid nitrogen to about −190 °C, which vitrified the water around the sample. Upon cooling, the water formed a thin film across the mesh. The sample was then cooled with liquid nitrogen during imaging. Dubochet and McDowall published their groundbreaking work on the vitrification of water for electron microscopy in 1981.

Dubochet’s research was critical to the advance of cryo-electron microscopy, allowing researchers to obtain images of biological materials that more closely resembled the natural state of the material. Throughout the remainder of his career, he continued to refine techniques for structural imaging of biological materials by cryo-electron microscopy. He developed a method known as cryoEM of vitreous sections (CEMOVIS), which researchers could apply to the vitrification of cells and tissues for the visualization of very fine structural detail. He also continued to apply electron microscopy to the study of structural aspects of DNA and chromatin.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Dubochet was a recipient of the EMBL Lennart Philipson Award (2015).

Details

Jacques Dubochet (born 8 June 1942) is a retired Swiss biophysicist. He is a former researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and an honorary professor of biophysics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

In 2017, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution". He received the Royal Photographic Society Progress Medal, alongside his colleagues Professor Joachim Frank and Dr Richard Henderson, in 2018 for 'an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in the widest sense'.

Career

Dubochet started to study physics at the École polytechnique de l'Université de Lausanne (now École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) in 1962 and obtained his degree in physical engineering in 1967. He obtained a Certificate of Molecular Biology at University of Geneva in 1969 and then began to study electron microscopy of DNA. In 1973, he completed his thesis in biophysics at University of Geneva and University of Basel.

From 1978 to 1987, Dubochet was group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, then part of West Germany. From 1987 to 2007, he was professor at the University of Lausanne. In 2007, at 65 years old, he retired and became an honorary professor at the University of Lausanne.

During his career, Dubochet developed technologies in cryo-electron microscopy, cryo-electron tomography and cryo-electron microscopy of vitreous sections. These technologies are used to image individual biological structures such as protein complexes or virus particles. At Lausanne he took part in initiatives to make scientists more aware of social issues.

In 2014, Dubochet received EMBL's Lennart Philipson Award. Describing his career in 2015, Professor Gareth Griffiths, his colleague at EMBL explained: "Jacques had a vision. He found a way of freezing thin films of water so fast that crystals had no time to form [that could damage samples] [...] over time the technique has become increasingly important to life science research, and it is clear today it is Nobel Prize-worthy."

When asked by his university how he would like his Nobel Prize to be recognised by the institution he asked for a parking space for his bicycle which was duly given. He had cycled to his lab almost every day for 30 years.

At the end of November 2021, the Dubochet Center for Imaging (DCI), which bears his name, was launched by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, the University of Lausanne and the University of Geneva. Just a few weeks later, the DCI was able to make a significant contribution to deciphering the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus.

Personal life

Dubochet is married with two children. He has dyslexia.

In the 1970s, for the second meeting with his future wife, they went to protest against the Kaiseraugst nuclear power plant construction project.

Dubochet is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland, and a member of the municipal parliament of Morges, where he holds a seat on the supervisory committee. He is also part of the climate movement as a member of the Grandparents for Future and emphasized the urgency of saving our societies.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-02 15:37:34

2180) Joachim Frank

Gist:

Life

Joachim Frank was born in Siegen, Germany. After studies at the universities in Freiburg and Munich, he received his doctor’s degree at the Technical University of Munich in 1970. Frank has worked at several institutions in the U.S. and Europe, including the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, State University of New York at Albany, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Columbia University, where he has remained since 2008. Joachim Frank is married and has two children.

Work

Fundamental processes of life are governed by a number of complicated molecules. The electron microscope, which uses electron beams instead of light, expands the possibilities to image these molecules. However, electron beams destroy biological structures. Between 1975 and 1986, Joachim Frank developed a method for analyzing and merging blurry two-dimensional images of the electron microscope into a sharp three-dimensional image. Electron microscope images provide knowledge that is important for the development of pharmaceuticals, among other things.

Summary

Joachim Frank (born September 12, 1940, Siegen, Germany) is a German-born American biochemist who won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on image-processing techniques that proved essential to the development of cryo-electron microscopy. He shared the prize with Swiss biophysicist Jacques Dubochet and British molecular biologist Richard Henderson.

Frank received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Freiburg in 1963. He then received a master’s from the University of Munich in 1967 and a doctorate from the Technical University of Munich in 1970. From 1970 to 1972, he had a postdoctoral fellowship that allowed him to travel to the United States, where he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California; the University of California, Berkeley; and Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. He was a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich from 1972 to 1973 and a senior research assistant at the Cavendish Laboratory from 1973 to 1975. He then joined the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health at Albany as a senior research scientist in 1975. Beginning in 1977, he also held appointments at the State University of New York at Albany.

Frank devised a way to observe individual molecules that were only faintly visible with electron microscopy. The problem with observing a group of individual molecules with electron microscopy is that the intense electron beam destroys the specimen. Frank and his colleagues devised a method of using the poor-quality images that resulted from employing a less intense electron beam by averaging them. In 1978 Frank and his colleagues successfully used this approach to image the enzyme glutamine synthetase.

In the early 1980s, Frank and Dutch biophysicist Marin van Heel devised statistical methods to determine a particle’s three-dimensional structure from two-dimensional images. The image of a particle is represented as a vector. Similar vectors are assumed to be from particles with similar orientations, and the images of such similar particles are then averaged together. Frank and his colleagues also devised a software system, SPIDER, that was able to perform this image analysis.

In 1981 Frank, Adriana Verschoor, and Miloslav Boublik used the averaging technique to obtain high-quality electron-microscope images of ribosomes. Throughout the ’80s, Frank and his collaborators concentrated their work on ribosomes. They switched to cryo-electron microscopy, which uses frozen specimens and thus allows the ribosomes to maintain their shape.

In 2003 Frank joined Columbia University in New York as a senior lecturer. He became a professor in the department of biological sciences and of biochemistry and molecular biophysics in 2008.

Details

Joachim Frank (born September 12, 1940) is a German-American biophysicist at Columbia University and a Nobel laureate. He is regarded as the founder of single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Richard Henderson. He also made significant contributions to structure and function of the ribosome from bacteria and eukaryotes.

Life and career

Frank was born in Siegen in the borough of Weidenau. After completing his Vordiplom (B.S.) degree in physics at the University of Freiburg (1963) and his Diplom under Walter Rollwagen's mentorship at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with the thesis "Untersuchung der Sekundärelektronen-Emission von Gold am Schmelzpunkt" (Investigation of secondary electron emission of gold at its melting point) (1967), Frank obtained his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Munich for graduate studies in Walter Hoppe's lab at the Max Planck Institut für Eiweiss- und Lederforschung (now Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry) with the dissertation Untersuchungen von elektronenmikroskopischen Aufnahmen hoher Auflösung mit Bilddifferenz- und Rekonstruktionsverfahren (Investigations of high-resolution electron micrographs using image difference and reconstruction methods) (1970). The thesis explores the use of digital image processing and optical diffraction in the analysis of electron micrographs, and alignment of images using the cross-correlation function.

As a Harkness postdoctoral fellow, he had the opportunity to study for two years in the United States: with Robert Nathan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology; with Robert M. Glaeser at Donner Lab, University of California, Berkeley and with Benjamin M. Siegel at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. In the fall of 1972 he returned briefly to the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried as research assistant, working on the theory of partial coherence in electron microscopy, then, in 1973, he joined the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge as Senior Research Assistant under Vernon Ellis Cosslett.

In 1975 Frank was offered a position of senior research scientist in the Division of Laboratories and Research (now Wadsworth Center), New York State Department of Health, where he started working on single-particle approaches in electron microscopy. In 1985 he was appointed associate and then (1986) full professor at the newly formed Department of Biomedical Sciences of the University at Albany, State University of New York. In 1987 and 1994, he went on sabbaticals in Europe, one to work with Richard Henderson, Laboratory of Molecular Biology Medical Research Council in Cambridge and the other as a Humboldt Research Award winner with Kenneth C. Holmes, Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. In 1998 Frank was appointed investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Since 2003 he was also lecturer at Columbia University, and he joined Columbia University in 2008 as professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and of biological sciences.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-03 15:54:02

2181) Richard Henderson (biologist)

Gist:

Life

Richard Henderson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. After studies at the University of Edinburgh, he received his doctor’s degree at the University of Cambridge, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in 1969. After a stay in the U.S. at Yale University, New Haven, he returned to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1973. He has been working there ever since.

Work

Fundamental processes of life are governed by a number of complicated molecules. The electron microscope, which uses electron beams instead of light, expands the possibilities to image these molecules. However, electron beams destroy biological structures. Richard Henderson succeeded in finding a way to avoid by combining weaker rays and mathematical analysis. In 1990, he generated a detailed three-dimensional image of a molecule. Electron microscope images provide knowledge that is important for the development of pharmaceuticals, among other things.

Summary

Richard Henderson (born July 19, 1945, Edinburgh, Scotland) is a Scottish biophysicist and molecular biologist who was the first to successfully produce a three-dimensional image of a biological molecule at atomic resolution using a technique known as cryo-electron microscopy. Henderson’s refinement of imaging methods for cryo-electron microscopy, in which biomolecules are frozen in such a way that allows them to retain their natural shape and are then visualized with a high-resolution microscope, enabled researchers to capture images of numerous biomolecular structures that previously could not be imaged by other means. He was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with biophysicists Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank) for his work.

Henderson was raised in Edinburgh, where he attended the Boroughmuir Secondary School and later studied physics at the University of Edinburgh, completing a bachelor’s degree in 1966. He subsequently studied at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge, where he investigated the structure of an enzyme known as chymotrypsin. He graduated with a Ph.D. in 1969. In 1973, following a brief term as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, Henderson returned to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, joining the research staff there. He remained at the MRC laboratory for the duration of his career, eventually serving as Joint-Head of the Division of Structural Studies (1986–2000) and Director (1996–2006).

In the 1970s, after joining the research staff at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Henderson worked to improve electron microscopy, making it applicable for the determination of protein structure. At the time, the utility of electron microscopy for biological materials was limited by multiple factors, including the inherently low contrast of biological materials, which resulted in very little electron scattering, with electrons simply traveling through rather than colliding with specimens to produce an image. When resolution was increased, however, the electron bombardment that was necessary to produce an image destroyed biological specimens. Other researchers had developed new preparation methods, such as negative staining, to try to overcome the issues, though the resulting images offered only low-resolution structural information.

In 1975, together with MRC colleague Nigel Unwin, Henderson described a preparation method using a glucose solution for sample preservation in the vacuum environment, which enabled thin sheets of cell membrane, containing thousands of proteins, to be spread across the microscope grid. The array, because of its relatively large size, increased the opportunity to collect visual information (diffraction patterns) before the sample was destroyed. In addition, by tilting the specimen in different directions and then calculating the Fourier transform, the three-dimensional structure of protein in the sample could be determined. In this way, Henderson and Unwin generated a three-dimensional image of a bacterial protein known as bacteriorhodopsin.

In the years that followed, Henderson continued to address technical problems that prevented the successful generation of high-resolution images of biomolecules by electron microscopy. In 1990, he made a major breakthrough, showing that such images could be obtained with cryo-electron microscopy. By averaging numerous copies of images of a specimen, Henderson was able to obtain the atomic structure of bacteriorhodopsin—the first atomic structure of an integral membrane protein. The findings enabled researchers to gain new insight into the mechanisms by which rhodopsin proteins function. His later research focused on single particle electron microscopy and the determination of atomic structures of large noncrystalline protein assemblies. His work on single particles led to new discoveries on structural aspects of biomolecules, the fundamental structures of many of which had long been beyond the reach of traditional microscopy methods.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Henderson received numerous other awards and honours during his career. He was an elected fellow of the Royal Society (1983), a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1998,) and a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, London (1998). He was a recipient of the Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research (1991) and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (2016).

Details

Richard Henderson is a British molecular biologist and biophysicist and pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules. Henderson shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank. "Thanks to his work, we can look at individual atoms of living nature, thanks to cryo-electron microscopes we can see details without destroying samples, and for this he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry."

Education

Henderson was educated at Newcastleton primary school, Hawick High School and Boroughmuir High School. His father was a baker.. He went on to study Physics at the University of Edinburgh graduating with a BSc degree in Physics, 1st Class honours in 1966. He then commenced postgraduate study at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and obtained his PhD degree from the University of Cambridge in 1969.

Career and research:

Research

Henderson worked on the structure and mechanism of chymotrypsin for his doctorate under the supervision of David Mervyn Blow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. His interest in membrane proteins led to him working on voltage-gated sodium channels as a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University. Returning to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1975, Henderson worked with Nigel Unwin to study the structure of the membrane protein bacteriorhodopsin by electron microscopy. A seminal paper in Nature by Henderson and Unwin (1975) established a low resolution structural model for bacteriorhodopsin showing the protein to consist of seven transmembrane helices. This paper was important for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that it showed that membrane proteins had well defined structures and that transmembrane alpha-helices could occur. After 1975 Henderson continued to work on the structure of bacteriorhodopsin without Unwin. In 1990 Henderson published an atomic model of bacteriorhodopsin by electron crystallography in the Journal of Molecular Biology. This model was the second ever atomic model of a membrane protein. The techniques Henderson developed for electron crystallography are still in use.

Together with Chris Tate, Henderson helped develop conformational thermostabilisation: a method that allows any protein to be made more stable while still holding a chosen conformation of interest. This method has been critical in crystallising and solving the structures of several G protein–coupled receptors (GPCRs). With help from the charity LifeArc, Henderson and Tate founded the MRC start-up company, Heptares Therapeutics Ltd (HTL) in 2007. HTL continues to develop new drugs targeting medically important GPCRs linked to a wide range of human diseases.

In the last few years, Henderson has returned to hands-on research focusing on single particle electron microscopy. Having been an early proponent of the idea that single particle electron microscopy is capable of determining atomic resolution models for proteins, explained in a 1995 paper in Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics. Henderson aims to be able to routinely obtain atomic structures without crystals. He has made seminal contributions to many of the approaches used in single particle electron microscopy, including pioneering the development of direct electron detectors that recently allowed single particle cryo-electron microscopy to achieve its goals.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-04 17:44:36

2182) Jeffrey Hall

Gist:

Life

Jeffrey Hall was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up outside of Washington, DC. After studies at Amherst College, he went on to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned his doctor’s degree in 1971. After a stay at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he began work in 1974 at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Work

In our cells an internal clock helps us to adapt our biological rhythm to the different phases of day and night. Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young studied fruit flies to figure out how this clock works. In 1984 they managed to identify a gene that encodes a protein that accumulates during the night but is degraded during the day. They also identified additional proteins that form part of a self-regulating biological clockwork in the fruit fly's cells. The same principles have been shown to apply to other animals and plants.

Summary

Jeffrey C. Hall (born May 3, 1945, Brooklyn, New York) is an American geneticist known for his investigations of courtship behaviour and biological rhythms in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. His research into molecular mechanisms underlying biological rhythm in the fruit fly helped scientists gain new insight into circadian rhythm, the self-regulating 24-hour biological clock that drives daily behavioral patterns in humans and other animals. For his discoveries, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (shared with American scientists Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young).

Hall grew up in Washington, D.C. He attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, with the intent of later studying medicine. Partway through his undergraduate studies, however, his interests turned to basic science and genetic mechanisms in Drosophila. Hall studied genetics at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1971. He subsequently carried out his postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology.

In 1974 Hall became an assistant professor of biology at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and he was made a full professor in 1986. At Brandeis, he investigated nervous system function and behaviour in Drosophila, focusing specifically on the neurogenetics of courtship and biological rhythms. While researching nervous system regions that help regulate courtship singing behaviour in Drosophila, a postdoctoral fellow in Hall’s laboratory observed that the flies’ songs occurred periodically, at regular intervals. Hall and his team subsequently observed altered courtship singing in mutant Drosophila with abnormal daily sleep-wake cycles. The mutations underlying the sleep-wake disturbances were in an unknown gene that had been named the period gene owing to its apparent influence on circadian rhythm.

In 1984, having endured criticism for applying molecular genetics to studies of biological rhythms, Hall, collaborating with Rosbash, who was also at Brandeis, successfully isolated the period gene. About the same time, Young, who was at Rockefeller University in New York, independently isolated the same gene. Hall and Rosbash later found that levels of the period gene product, PER, fluctuated in the fruit fly brain, with PER building up at night and declining during the day. The oscillations, they discovered, were the result of a negative feedback loop, whereby PER was produced until it reached a specific level, at which point it then turned off its own synthesis. In this way, the protein’s production was regulated in a continuous 24-hour cycle. Hall, Rosbash, and Young later discovered additional rhythm-regulating genes and further elucidated the mechanisms by which light and other factors influence timing in the circadian clock.

In 2004, after being named Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brandeis, Hall joined the University of Maine as an adjunct professor, later becoming Libra Professor of Neurogenetics. He taught for the university until 2012. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Hall was the recipient of various other honours during his career, including the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience (2009) and the Canada Gairdner International Award (2012), both shared with Rosbash and Young. Hall also served as an editor for several scientific journals and was an elected member of multiple scientific organizations, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001) and the National Academy of Sciences (2003).

Details

Jeffrey Connor Hall (born May 3, 1945) is an American geneticist and chronobiologist. Hall is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brandeis University and currently resides in Cambridge, Maine.

Hall spent his career examining the neurological component of fly courtship and behavioral rhythms. Through his research on the neurology and behavior of Drosophila melanogaster, Hall uncovered essential mechanisms of the circadian clocks and shed light on the foundations for sexual differentiation in the nervous system. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences for his revolutionary work in the field of chronobiology, and nominated for the T. Washington Fellows.

In 2017, along with Michael W. Young and Michael Rosbash, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm".

Life:

Early life and education

Jeffrey Hall was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in the suburbs of Washington D.C., while his father worked as a reporter for the Associated Press, covering the U.S. Senate. Hall's father, Joseph W. Hall, greatly influenced him especially by encouraging Hall to stay updated on recent events in the daily newspaper. Hall attended Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland, graduating in 1963. As a good high school student, Hall planned to pursue a career in medicine. Hall began pursuing a bachelor's degree at Amherst College in 1963. However, during his time as an undergraduate student, Hall found his passion in biology. For his senior project, to gain experience in formal research, Hall began working with Philip Ives. Hall reported that Ives was one of the most influential people he encountered during his formative years.[8] Hall became fascinated with the study of Drosophila while working in Ives' lab, a passion that has permeated his research. Under the supervision of Ives, Hall studied recombination and translocation induction in Drosophila. The success of Hall's research pursuits prompted department faculty to recommend that Hall pursue graduate school at University of Washington in Seattle, where an entire department was devoted to genetics.

Early academic career

Hall began working in Lawrence Sandler's laboratory during graduate school in 1967. Hall worked with Sandler on analyzing age-dependent enzyme changes in Drosophila, with a concentration on the genetic control of chromosome behavior in meiosis. Hershel Roman encouraged Hall to pursue postdoctoral work with Seymour Benzer, a pioneer in forward genetics, at the California Institute of Technology. In an interview, Hall regarded Roman as an influential figure in his early career for Roman fostered camaraderie in the laboratory and guided nascent professionals. Upon completing his doctoral work, Hall joined Benzer's laboratory in 1971. In Benzer's lab, Hall worked with Doug Kankel who taught Hall about Drosophila neuroanatomy and neurochemistry. Although Hall and Kankel made great progress on two projects, Hall left Benzer's laboratory before publishing results. In Hall's third year as a postdoctoral researcher, Roman contacted Hall regarding faculty positions that Roman had advocated for Hall. Hall joined Brandeis University as an Assistant Professor of Biology in 1974. He is known for his eccentric lecturing style.

Academic adversities

During his time working in the field of chronobiology, Hall faced many challenges when attempting to establish his findings. Specifically, his genetic approach to biological clocks (see period gene section) was not easily accepted by more traditional chronobiologists. When conducting his research on this particular topic, Hall faced skepticism when trying to establish the importance of a sequence of amino acids he isolated. While working on this project the only other researcher working on a similar project was Michael Young.

Hall not only faced hurdles when attempting to establish his own work, but also found the politics of research funding frustrating. In fact these challenges are one of the primary reasons why he left the field. He felt that the hierarchy and entry expectations of biology are preventing researchers from pursuing the research they desire. Hall believed the focus should be on the individual's research; funding should not be a limiting factor on the scientist, but instead give them the flexibility to pursue new interests and hypotheses. Hall expressed that he loves his research and flies, yet feels that the bureaucracy involved in the process prevented him from excelling and making new strides in the field.

Drosophila courtship behavior

Hall's work with Drosophila courtship behavior began as a collaborative work with Kankel to correlate courtship behaviors with genetic gender in various regions of the nervous systems using fruit fly gender mosaics during the last months of his postdoctoral years in Benzer's laboratory. This work triggered his interest in the neurogenetics of Drosophila courtship and led him to the subsequent career path of investigation into Drosophila courtship.

Discovery of period connection

In the late 1970s, through a collaborative work with Florian von Schilcher, Hall successfully identified the nervous system regions in Drosophila that contributed to the regulation of male's courtship songs. Hall realized from this study that courtship singing behavior was one of the elegantly quantifiable features of courtship and decided to study this topic further. In the subsequent research with a postdoctoral fellow in his lab, Bambos Kyriacou, Hall discovered that Drosophila courtship song was produced rhythmically with a normal period of about one minute.

Suspecting the period mutation for abnormal sleep-wake cycles—generated by Ron Konopka in the late 1960s—might also alter courtship song cycles, Hall and Kyriacou tested the effect of mutations in the period on courtship song. They found that period mutations affected the courtship song in the same way they changed the circadian rhythms. pers allele produced a shorter (approximately 40 second) oscillation, perl allele produced a longer (approximately 76 second) oscillation, and pero produced a song that had no regular oscillation.

Neurogenetics

In his research, Hall mainly focused on flies with the fruitless gene, which he began studying during his postdoctoral years. The fruitless (fru) mutant was behaviorally sterile. Furthermore, they indiscriminately courted both females and males, but did not try to mate with either. This behavior was identified in the 1960s, but it had been neglected until Hall's group began to investigate the topic further. In the mid-1990s, through collaborative work with Bruce Baker at Stanford University and Barbara Taylor at Oregon State University, Hall successfully cloned fruitless. Through subsequent research with the cloned fruitless, Hall confirmed the previously suspected role of fruitless as the master regulator gene for courtship. By examining several fru mutations, Hall discovered that males performed little to no courtship toward females, failed to produce the pulse song component of courtship song, never attempted copulation, and exhibited increased inter-male courtship in the absence of FruM proteins.

Circadian rhythm of period gene and protein

Hall worked primarily with Drosophila to study the mechanism of circadian rhythms. Rather than using the more traditional method of measuring eclosion, Hall measured locomotor activity of Drosophila to observe circadian rhythms.

Discovery of PER protein self regulation

In 1990, while in collaboration with Michael Rosbash and Paul Hardin, Hall discovered that the Period protein (PER) played a role in suppressing its own transcription. While the exact role of PER was unknown, Hall, Rosbash, and Hardin were able to develop a negative transcription-translation feedback loop model (TTFL) that serves as a central mechanism of the circadian clock in Drosophila. In this original model, per expression led to an increase of PER. After a certain concentration of PER, the expression of per decreased, causing PER levels to decrease, once again allowing per to be expressed.

Discovery of synchronization between cells

In 1997, Hall was a part of group with Susan Renn, Jae Park, Michael Rosbash, and Paul Taghert that discovered genes that are a part of the TTFL are expressed in cells throughout the body. Despite these genes being identified as necessary genes to the circadian clock, there was a variety of levels of expressions in various parts of the body; this variation was observed on the cellular level. Hall succeeded in entraining separate tissues to different light-dark cycles at the same time. Hall didn't discover the element that synchronizes cells until 2003. He found that the pigment dispersing factor protein (PDF) helps control the circadian rhythms, and in turn locomotor activity, of these genes in cells. This was localized to small ventral lateral neurons (sLNvs) in the Drosophila brain. From this data, Hall concluded the sLNvs serve as the primary oscillator in Drosophila and PDF allows for synchrony between cells. He was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology.

Refining the transcription-translation negative feedback loop model

In 1998, Hall contributed to two discoveries in Drosophila that refined the TTFL model. The first discovery involved the role Cryptochrome (CRY) plays in entrainment. Hall found that CRY is a key photoreceptor for both entrainment and regulation of locomotor activity. He hypothesized CRY may not be just an input to the circadian system, but also a role as a pacemaker itself. In the same year, Hall discovered how the Drosophila per and timeless (tim) circadian genes were regulated. Hall discovered that CLOCK and Cycle (CYC) proteins form a heterodimer via the PAS domain. Upon dimerizing, the two proteins bind to the E box promoter element of the two genes via the bHLH domain to induce expression of per and tim mRNA.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-05 15:47:03

2183) Michael Rosbash

Gist:

Life

Michael Rosbash was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents were of Jewish descent and had fled from Nazi Germany in 1938. He studied at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and at Biologie Physico-Chimique in Paris and then obtained a doctor’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. After spending three years at the University of Edinburgh in United Kingdom, he began work in 1974 at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Michael Rosbash is married and has a stepdaughter and a daughter.

Work

In our cells an internal clock helps us to adapt our biological rhythm to the different phases of day and night. Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young studied fruit flies to figure out how this clock works. In 1984 they managed to identify a gene that encodes a protein that accumulates during the night but is degraded during the day. They also identified additional proteins that form part of a self-regulating biological clockwork in the fruit fly's cells. The same principles have been shown to apply to other animals and plants.

Summary

Michael Rosbash (born March 7, 1944, Kansas City, Missouri) is an American geneticist known for his discoveries concerning circadian rhythm, the cyclical 24-hour period of biological activity that drives daily behavioral patterns. Rosbash worked extensively with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, and he contributed to the discovery of genes and molecular mechanisms involved in the regulation of biological rhythms. The work had far-reaching implications, particularly for understanding the influence of genetic cues on daily physiological processes in humans. For his discoveries, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (shared with Jeffrey C. Hall and Michael W. Young).

Rosbash was raised in Boston, where his mother worked in cytology and his father was a cantor. He studied chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1965, and biophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), graduating with a Ph.D. in 1971. He joined the faculty at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, as an assistant professor in 1974.

In the 1970s Rosbash became interested in the influence of genetics on behaviour and began a productive collaboration with Hall, a friend and colleague at Brandeis. Rosbash and Hall were interested in the so-called period gene, a gene that had been discovered a decade earlier to play a role in the regulation of circadian rhythm in Drosophila but that had not yet been isolated from the fruit fly genome. In 1984, at about the same time as Young, who was working independently at Rockefeller University in New York, Rosbash and Hall successfully isolated and sequenced the period gene.

In the 1990s Rosbash and Hall shed light on the mechanistic role of the period gene, showing that levels of the protein product, PER, oscillated during the circadian cycle, accumulating in cell nuclei overnight and being degraded through the day. Their findings led them to propose a model whereby PER was self-regulating, inhibiting its own transcription (synthesis of RNA from DNA) when its protein levels reached a critical point. Rosbash and Hall subsequently discovered additional genes involved in the regulation of the circadian rhythm. Their later work, along with that of Young and other researchers in the field, helped confirm the idea that a self-regulating clocklike mechanism governs circadian rhythm. A significant number of human genes were subsequently found to be regulated by a mechanism homologous to that described in Drosophila, leading to new insights into human physiology.

Rosbash received numerous honours throughout his career, including the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience (2009), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry (2011), and the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences (2013), all shared with Hall and Young. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1997) and the National Academy of Sciences (2003).

Details

Michael Morris Rosbash (born March 7, 1944) is an American geneticist and chronobiologist. Rosbash is a professor and researcher at Brandeis University and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Rosbash's research group cloned the Drosophila period gene in 1984 and proposed the Transcription Translation Negative Feedback Loop for circadian clocks in 1990. In 1998, they discovered the cycle gene, clock gene, and cryptochrome photoreceptor in Drosophila through the use of forward genetics, by first identifying the phenotype of a mutant and then determining the genetics behind the mutation. Rosbash was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. Along with Michael W. Young and Jeffrey C. Hall, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm".

Life

Michael Rosbash was born in Kansas City, Missouri. His parents, Hilde and Alfred Rosbash, were Jewish refugees who left Nazi Germany in 1938.[5] His father was a cantor, which, in Judaism, is a person who chants worship services. Rosbash's family moved to Boston when he was two years old, and he has been an avid Red Sox fan ever since.

Initially, Rosbash was interested in mathematics but an undergraduate biology course at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and a summer of working in Norman Davidson's lab steered him towards biological research. Rosbash graduated from Caltech in 1965 with a degree in chemistry, spent a year at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique in Paris on the Fulbright Scholarship, and obtained a doctoral degree in biophysics in 1970 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Sheldon Penman. After spending three years on a postdoctoral fellowship in genetics at the University of Edinburgh, Rosbash joined the Brandeis University faculty in 1974.

Rosbash is married to fellow scientist Nadja Abovich and he has a stepdaughter named Paula and daughter named Tanya.[6]

Research

Rosbash's research initially focused on the metabolism and processing of mRNA; mRNA is the molecular link between DNA and protein. After arriving at Brandeis, Rosbash collaborated with co-worker Jeffrey Hall and investigated the genetic influences on circadian rhythms of the internal biological clock. They used Drosophila melanogaster to study patterns of activity and rest. In 1984, Rosbash and Hall cloned the first Drosophila clock gene, period. Following work done by post-doctoral fellow, Paul Hardin, in discovering that period mRNA and its associated protein (PER) had fluctuating levels during the circadian cycle, in 1990 they proposed a Transcription Translation Negative Feedback Loop (TTFL) model as the basis of the circadian clock. Following this proposal, they looked into the elements that make up other parts of the clock. In May 1998, Rosbash et al. found a homolog for mammalian Clock that performed the same function of activating the transcription of per and tim that they proceeded to call dClock. Also in May 1998, Rosbash et al. discovered in Drosophila the clock gene cycle, a homolog of the mammalian bmal1 gene. In November 1998, Rosbash et al. discovered the cryb Drosophila mutant, which led to the conclusion that cryptochrome protein is involved in circadian photoreception.

Chronology of major discoveries

1984: Cloned the Drosophila period gene
1990: Proposed the Transcription Translation Negative Feedback Loop for circadian clocks
1998: Identified the Drosophila Clock Gene
1998: Identified the Drosophila Cycle Gene
1998: Identified cryptochrome as a Drosophila Circadian Photoreceptor
1999: Identified LNV Neurons as the Principal Drosophila Circadian Pacemaker

mRNA research

Rosbash began studying mRNA processing as a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work in the Saccharomyces cerevisiae has revealed the enzymes, proteins, and subcellular organelles and their convergence upon mRNA in a specific order in order to translate mRNA into proteins. Missteps in this process have been linked to diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, so this work is essential for better understanding and treatment of diseases.

Discovery of circadian TTFL in Drosophila

In 1990, Rosbash, Hall, and Hardin discovered the role of the period gene (per) in the Drosophila' circadian oscillator. They found that PER protein levels fluctuate in light dark cycles, and these fluctuations persist in constant darkness. Similarly, per mRNA abundance also has rhythmic expression that entrains to light dark cycles. In the fly head, per mRNA levels oscillate in both 12-hour light, 12-hour dark cycles as well as in constant darkness. Per mRNA levels peaked at the beginning of the subjective night followed by a peak in PER protein levels about 6 hours later. Mutated per genes affected the cycling of per mRNA. From this experimental data, Rosbash, Hall, and Hardin hypothesized that PER protein is involved in a negative feedback loop that controls per mRNA levels, and that this transcription-translation feedback loop is a central feature of the Drosophila circadian clock.

They also looked at two other single missense period mutations, perS and perL1. These mutations cause the peak of the evening activity to occur earlier and later, respectively, compared to wildtype per+ flies. They found that RNA levels for perS and perL1 also display clear rhythmicity. Like locomotor activity the peak expression is shifted earlier for perS and later for perL1.

They transformed the period0 null mutation flies with a 7.2-kb piece of functional per DNA, and measured per mRNA levels at the per0 locus and new locus. Following transformation, per mRNA levels were rhythmic at both the original and new locus. The per0 locus was able to transcribe normal per mRNA and translate normal PER protein, meaning that rhythmicity was rescued by functional PER protein transcribed and translated from the 7.2-kb piece of per DNA. There is a feedback loop at play in which cycling of PER protein levels at the new locus feeds back to dictate cycling of per mRNA levels at the original per0 locus.[8] In 1992, Rosbash again collaborated with Jeffrey Hall and Paul Hardin to more closely examine the mechanisms of the TTFL. They wondered specifically about the regulation of period mRNA level fluctuations, and found that per mRNA levels were transcriptionally regulated. This was supported by the evidence that per precursor RNA cycles with the same phase as mature transcripts, and oscillate with respect to Zeitgeber Time (ZT). Other evidence for transcriptional regulation is that per gene promoter is sufficient to confer cycling to heterologous mRNA.

Challenges to the TTFL model in Drosophila

The Akhilesh Reddy group has shown, using a range of unbiased -omics techniques (RNA-sequencing, proteomics, metabolomics) that Drosophila S2 cells display circadian molecular rhythms. These cells do not express known "clock genes" including per and tim. Introduction of PER and TIM proteins into the cells does not cause rhythmicity of these cells as read out by abundance or phosphorylation of PER and TIM proteins. These cells were thus regarded as "clock-less" by the fly field until now. These findings substantiate the work above in demonstrating the TTFL model of the fly clockwork cannot explain the generation of circadian rhythms.

Discovery of Drosophila Clock Gene

A likely homolog of the previously discovered mouse gene Clock was identified by Rosbash et al. by cloning of the Drosophila gene defined by the Jrk mutation. This gene was given the name Drosophila Clock. dClock has been shown to interact directly with the per and tim E-boxes and contributes to the circadian transcription of these genes. The Jrk mutation disrupts the transcription cycling of per and tim. It also results in completely arrhythmic behavior in constant darkness for homozygous mutants and about half demonstrated arrhythmic behavior in heterozygotes. The Jrk homozygotes expressed low, non-cycling levels of per and tim mRNA as well as PER and TIM protein. From this, it was concluded that the behavioral arrhythmicity in Jrk was due to a defect in the transcription of the per and tim. This indicated that dClock was involved in the transcriptional activation of per and tim.

Discovery of Drosophila Cycle Gene

In 1998, Rosbash et al. discovered the novel clock gene cycle, a homolog of the mammalian Bmal1 gene. Homozygous cycle0 mutants are arrhythmic in locomotor activity and heterozygous cycle0/+ flies have robust rhythms with an altered period of rhythmicity. Western blot analysis shows that homozygous cycle0 mutants have very little PER and TIM protein as well as low per and tim mRNA levels. This indicates that lack of cycle leads to decreased transcription of per and tim genes. Meiotic mapping placed cyc on the third chromosome. They discovered bHLH-PAS domains in cyc, indicating protein binding and DNA binding functions.

Discovery of cryptochrome as a Drosophila circadian photoreceptor

In 1998, Rosbash et al. discovered a Drosophila mutant exhibiting flat, non-oscillating levels of per and tim mRNA, due to a null mutation in the cryptochrome gene. This mutation was dubbed crybaby, or cryb. The failure of cryb mutants to synchronize to light dark cycles indicates that cryptochrome’s normal function involves circadian photoreception.

LNV neurons as principal Drosophila circadian pacemaker

In Drosophila, certain lateral neurons (LNs) have been shown to be important for circadian rhythms, including dorsal (LNd) and ventral (LNV) neurons. LNV neurons express PDF (pigment dispersion factor), which was initially hypothesized to be a clock output signal. Mutants for the pdf neuropeptide gene (pdf01) as well as flies selectively ablated for LNV produced similar behavioral responses. Both entrained to external light cues, but were largely arrhythmic in constant conditions. Some flies in each cases showed weak free-running rhythmicity. These results led the researchers to believe that LNV neurons were the critical circadian pacemaker neurons and that PDF was the principal circadian transmitter.

Current research

In more recent years, Rosbash has been working on the brain-neuronal aspects of circadian rhythms. Seven anatomically distinct neuronal groups have been identified that all express the core clock genes. However, the mRNAs appear to be expressed in a circadian and neuron-specific manner, for which his lab has taken interest in determining whether this provides a link to the distinct functions of certain neuronal groups. He has also researched the effects of light on certain neuronal groups and has found that one subgroup is light-sensitive to lights on (dawn) and another is light-sensitive to lights off (dusk). The dawn cells have been shown to promote arousal while the dusk cells promote sleep.

Today, Rosbash continues to research mRNA processing and the genetic mechanisms underlying circadian rhythms. He has also published an amusing reflection on his life in science.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-06 16:23:46

2184) Michael W. Young

Gist:

Life

Michael W. Young was born in Miami, Florida, and his family later moved to Dallas, Texas. He studied at the University of Texas and received his doctor’s degree there in 1975. After a stay at the Stanford University School of Medicine, in 1978 he moved to Rockefeller University in New York, which he has been associated with since then. Michael Young is married and has two daughters.

Work

In our cells an internal clock helps us to adapt our biological rhythm to the different phases of day and night. Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young studied fruit flies to figure out how this clock works. In 1984 they managed to identify a gene that encodes a protein that accumulates during the night but is degraded during the day. They also identified additional proteins that form part of a self-regulating biological clockwork in the fruit fly's cells. The same principles have been shown to apply to other animals and plants.

Summary

Michael W. Young (born March 28, 1949, Miami, Florida) is an American geneticist who contributed to the discovery of molecular mechanisms that regulate circadian rhythm, the 24-hour period of biological activity in humans and other organisms. Young’s elucidation of the relationships between genes and behavior in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster offered new insight into recurring, daily physiological processes in humans, including metabolism and sleep. For his discoveries, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (shared with American geneticists Jeffrey C. Hall and Michael Rosbash).

Young was raised in Miami, Florida. He attended the University of Texas at Austin for undergraduate and graduate studies, receiving a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1971 and a doctorate in genetics in 1975. In 1978, after completing postdoctoral studies (1975–77) at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Young joined the faculty at Rockefeller University as an assistant professor. He was made a full professor there in 1988 and from 2004 served as the university’s Vice President for Academic Affairs. From 1987 to 1996 he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator.

In the 1980s, Young’s research on genetic mechanisms in Drosophila became increasingly focused on elucidating the molecular basis of circadian rhythm. He was especially interested in the so-called period gene, which a decade earlier had been proposed by other scientists to play a key role in the regulation of biological rhythms. In 1984 Young successfully isolated and sequenced the period gene, a feat also achieved that year by Rosbash and Hall. Young further showed that introducing a fragment of DNA from the period gene locus into the genome of period-mutant flies restored circadian rhythm, thereby demonstrating the functional significance of the gene.

In the 1990s, working independently and collaborating with Hall and Rosbash, Young helped elucidate the molecular mechanism by which period controls the circadian clock. He discovered a second key gene, timeless, RNA levels of which oscillate on a 24-hour cycle, and found that the timeless protein, TIM, could bind to PER, the protein produced by period, enabling PER to enter the cell nucleus to inhibit its own transcription (synthesis of RNA from DNA). Young’s discoveries supported the idea that PER functions in a self-regulating negative feedback loop—it accumulates in the cell nucleus at night, its levels declining during the day, when the TIM protein degrades via a light-dependent mechanism. Young subsequently identified a gene called doubletime, which encodes a protein that helps control the frequency of PER protein oscillations in the cell nucleus on a 24-hour cycle. Young’s later research included the investigation of molecular changes in circadian rhythm that underlie sleep disorders in humans.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Young was recognized with numerous other awards during his career, including the Gruber Foundation Neuroscience Prize (2009), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (2011), and the Canada Gairdner International Award (2012), all shared with Hall and Rosbash. He was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2007).

Details

Michael Warren Young (born March 28, 1949) is an American biologist and geneticist. He has dedicated over three decades to research studying genetically controlled patterns of sleep and wakefulness within Drosophila melanogaster.

At Rockefeller University, his lab has made significant contributions in the field of chronobiology by identifying key genes associated with regulation of the internal clock responsible for circadian rhythms. He was able to elucidate the function of the period gene, which is necessary for the fly to exhibit normal sleep cycles. Young's lab is also attributed with the discovery of the timeless and doubletime genes, which makes proteins that are also necessary for circadian rhythm. He was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Jeffrey C. Hall and Michael Rosbash "for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm".

Life:

Early life

Michael W. Young was born in Miami, Florida, on March 28, 1949. His father worked for Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation managing aluminum ingot sales for the south eastern United States. His mother worked for a law firm as a secretary. Despite no history of science or medicine in either of their backgrounds, Young’s parents were supportive of his interest in science and provided the means of scientific exploration through microscopes and telescopes. They lived in an environment close to private zoos, where occasionally some of the animals would escape into their backyard and spark Young's scientific interest.

Michael Young grew up in and around Miami, Florida. Then, his family moved near Dallas, Texas, where he graduated from L. D. Bell High School. In his early teens, Michael’s parents gifted him one of Darwin’s books on evolution and biological mysteries. The book described biological clocks as the reason why a strange plant he had seen years earlier produced flowers that closed during the day and opened at night. The location and composition of these clocks were unknown, and this sparked Michael Young’s interest at an early age.

Family life

While working as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, Michael Young met his future wife Laurel Eckhardt. Later, both moved to Stanford University, where Michael worked as a postdoctoral fellow and Laurel pursued her PhD with Len Herzenberg. Today, she is a Professor of Biology at Hunter College. Michael and Laurel still work close to each other. Together, they have two daughters, Natalie and Arissa.

Academic career

Young earned his undergraduate degree in biology from University of Texas at Austin in 1971. After a summer of research with Burke Judd on the Drosophila genome, Young stayed at the UT to complete a Ph.D. in genetics in 1975. It was during his time here that Young became fascinated with research focused on Drosophila. During his graduate work, he learned of Ron Konopka and Seymour Benzer’s work with Drosophila circadian mutants, which led to his future work in cloning the period gene.

Michael Young continued his studies through postdoctoral training at Stanford University School of Medicine with an interest in molecular genetics and particular focus on transposable elements. He worked in Dave Hogness’ lab and became familiar with the methods of recombinant DNA. Two years later, he joined Rockefeller University as an assistant professor. From 1978 on he was involved in the University, serving as associate professor in 1984 and later named professor in 1988. In 2004, Young was appointed Vice President for Academic Affairs and was also granted the Richard and Jeanne Fisher Chair.

Scientific career:

Discovery of PER

At The Rockefeller University in the early 1980s, Young and his two lab members, Ted Bargiello and Rob Jackson, further investigated the circadian period gene in Drosophila. They constructed segments of recombinant Drosophila DNA, amplified them in bacteria, and injected them in per mutant animals. A locomotor behavior monitor was used to assay behavioral activity. The team watched and recorded fly activity through the day and night to show that the fly restored circadian behavioral rhythms by transferring a functional per gene. Later, by determining the sequence of the gene on the X chromosome, they found that the arrhythmic mutation produced a functionless protein, while long-period and short-period mutants of per changed the amino acid sequence of a still functional protein.

Period and Timeless proteins bind together to form a stabilized dimer, which allows the two to enter the nucleus. Phosphorylation of period by double-time initiates degradation.

Discovery of timeless

Following the discovery of per, the Young lab looked for additional circadian genes. In late 1980s, Amita Sehgal, Jeff Price, Bernice Man helped Young use forward genetics to screen for additional mutations that altered fly rhythms. A new gene located on chromosome 2 was named timeless (tim) and was successfully cloned and sequenced. They found strong functional connections between tim and per. Tim mutants interfered with per mRNA cycling. In 1994, Leslie Vosshall, a graduate student in Young's lab, discovered that if PER proteins were protected from degradation, they would accumulate without TIM, but could not move to the nuclei. Later Young and others found that TIM proteins did not accumulate in nuclei in per mutants. They concluded that PER and TIM worked together. Another lab member Lino Saez, saw that PER and TIM associate with each other to stabilize each other and to allow their nuclear accumulation. Later studies by the Young, Sehgal, and Edery labs revealed that light causes the rapid degradation of TIM and resets of the phase of the circadian rhythm.

Doubletime phosphorylation

In 1998, Jeff Price from the Young lab discovered a kinase called doubletime (Casein kinase 1) that phosphorylates PER on certain serine residues. This signal marks it for degradation. When PER and TIM are bound, doubletime does not seem to be able to phosphorylate PER, allowing it to accumulate. Young’s discovery of doubletime mutants in 1998 was soon followed by the 2001 discovery of a form of Familial Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome (FASPS) in humans, which is linked to an hPer2 polymorphism that removes a serine normally phosphorylated by Casein kinase 1. Other forms of FASPS are caused by mutations that alter the Casein kinase 1 gene. Doubletime mutations in Drosophila alter the phosphorylation and degradation of PER protein. This affects the regularity in period of the organism. This discovery solidified doubletime as a necessary part of the circadian clock.

Jai Ganesh · Yesterday 00:04:01

2185) Arthur Ashkin

Gist:

Arthur Ashkin (born September 2, 1922, New York City, New York—died September 21, 2020, Rumson, New Jersey) was an American physicist who was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of optical tweezers, which use laser beams to capture and manipulate very small objects.

Life

Arthur Ashkin was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a family with a Ukrainian-Jewish background. He studied physics at Columbia University in New York City and continued his education at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, obtaining his PhD in 1952. He then started working at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, where he remained the rest of his career and did his Nobel Prize awarded work.

Work

The sharp beams of laser light have given us new opportunities for deepening our knowledge about the world and shaping it. Arthur Ashkin invented optical tweezers that grab particles, atoms, molecules, and living cells with their laser beam fingers. The tweezers use laser light to push small particles towards the center of the beam and to hold them there. In 1987, Ashkin succeeded in capturing living bacteria without harming them. Optical tweezers are now widely used to investigate biological systems.

Summary

Arthur Ashkin (born September 2, 1922, New York City, New York—died September 21, 2020, Rumson, New Jersey) was an American physicist who was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of optical tweezers, which use laser beams to capture and manipulate very small objects. He shared the prize with Canadian physicist Donna Strickland and French physicist Gérard Mourou. At the time of his award, Ashkin was the oldest person to receive the Nobel Prize; however, the next year, he was surpassed by American physicist John B. Goodenough, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Chemistry at the age of 97.

Ashkin received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Columbia University in New York City in 1947 and a doctorate in nuclear physics from Cornell University in 1952. He then joined Bell Laboratories, first at Murray Hill, New Jersey, and then at Holmdel, New Jersey, where he spent the last part of his career until he retired in 1992.

In 1970 Ashkin used laser beams to trap and move small transparent beads. These beads ranged in size from 0.59 to 2.68 microns (1 micron = {10}^{-6} metre). When Ashkin shone a laser beam on such beads that were suspended in water, he found that the beads were both drawn into the centre of the beam and pushed along by the beam. By using two beams of equal intensity aimed at each other, he could trap a bead.

Ashkin and colleagues in 1986 invented optical tweezers, which used a single laser that was focused by a lens to trap particles. Ashkin’s coworker, Steven Chu, who also worked at Bell Laboratories, used this technique to trap single atoms. (Chu was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics for this work.)

Ashkin, however, was interested in using the optical tweezers to study cells, viruses, and bacteria. He switched from a green to an infrared laser, which had a less intense beam and thus would not damage the life he was studying. He used his optical tweezers to study the force that molecules used to move organelles in cells. Optical tweezers have become a widely used method to study microscopic life and its molecular systems without damaging them.

Details

Arthur Ashkin (September 2, 1922 – September 21, 2020) was an American scientist and Nobel laureate who worked at Bell Labs. Ashkin has been considered by many as the father of optical tweezers, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 at age 96, becoming the oldest Nobel laureate until 2019 when John B. Goodenough was awarded at 97. He resided in Rumson, New Jersey.

Ashkin started his work on manipulation of microparticles with laser light in the late 1960s which resulted in the invention of optical tweezers in 1986. He also pioneered the optical trapping process that eventually was used to manipulate atoms, molecules, and biological cells. The key phenomenon is the radiation pressure of light; this pressure can be dissected down into optical gradient and scattering forces.

Early life and family

Arthur Ashkin was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1922, to a family of Ukrainian-Jewish background. His parents were Isadore and Anna Ashkin. He had two siblings, a brother, Julius, also a physicist, and a sister, Ruth. One older sibling, Gertrude, died while young. The family home was in Brooklyn, New York, at 983 E 27 Street. Isadore (né Aschkinase) had emigrated to the United States from Odessa (then Russian Empire, now Ukraine), at the age of 18. Anna, five years younger, also came from today's Ukraine, then Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire. Within a decade of his landing in New York, Isadore had become a U.S. citizen and was running a dental laboratory at 139 Delancey Street in Manhattan.

Ashkin met his wife, Aline, at Cornell University, and they were married for over 60 years with three children and five grandchildren. She was a chemistry teacher at Holmdel High School, and their son Michael Ashkin, is an art professor at Cornell University.

Education

Ashkin graduated from Brooklyn's James Madison High School in 1940. He then attended Columbia University and was also a technician for Columbia's Radiation Lab tasked with building magnetrons for U.S. military radar systems. He joined the U.S. Army reserves on July 31, 1945. He continued working in the Columbia University lab. During this period, by Ashkin's own account, three Nobel laureates were in attendance.

Ashkin finished his course work and obtained his BS degree in physics at Columbia University in 1947. He then attended Cornell University, where he studied nuclear physics. This was during the era of the Manhattan Project, and Ashkin's brother, Julius Ashkin, was successfully part of it. This led to Arthur Ashkin's introduction to Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman and others who were at Cornell at the time.

He received his PhD degree at Cornell University in 1952, and then went to work for Bell Labs at the request and recommendation of Sidney Millman, who was Ashkin's supervisor at Columbia University.

Career

At Bell Labs, Ashkin worked in the microwave field until about 1960 to 1961, and then switched to laser research. His research and published articles at that time pertained to nonlinear optics, optical fibers, parametric oscillators and parametric amplifiers. Also, at Bell Labs during the 1960s, he was the co-discoverer of the photorefractive effect in the piezoelectric crystal.

Within various professional society memberships, Ashkin attained the rating of fellow in the Optical Society of America (OSA), the American Physical Society (APS), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Ashkin received the Charles Hard Townes Medal in 1988 and the Frederic Ives Medal in 1998, both from The Optical Society. He was later named an Honorary Member of the organization. He retired from Bell Labs in 1992 after a 40-year career during which he contributed to many areas of experimental physics. He authored many research papers over the years and held 47 patents. He was recipient of the Joseph F. Keithley Award For Advances in Measurement Science in 2003 and the Harvey Prize in 2004. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1984 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 1996. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2013. He continued to work in his home lab.

Besides optical tweezers, Ashkin is also known for his studies in photorefraction, second harmonic generation, and non-linear optics in fibers.

Recent advances in physics and biology using optical micromanipulation include achievement of Bose–Einstein condensation in atomic vapors at submillikelvin temperatures, demonstration of atom lasers, and detailed measurements on individual motor molecules.

Ashkin's work formed the basis for Steven Chu's work on cooling and trapping atoms, which earned Chu the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics.

Nobel Prize

On October 2, 2018, Arthur Ashkin was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on optical trapping. Ashkin "was honoured for his invention of 'optical tweezers' that grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells with their laser beam fingers. With this he was able to use the radiation pressure of light to move physical objects, 'an old dream of science fiction', the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said." He was awarded half of the Prize while the other half was shared between Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland for their work on chirped-pulse amplification, a technique "now used in laser machining [that] enables doctors to perform millions of corrective laser eye surgeries every year".

At 96, Ashkin was the oldest Nobel Prize laureate to be awarded the prize, until John B. Goodenough received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 at the age of 97. He died on September 21, 2020, at the age of 98.

Jai Ganesh · Yesterday 16:22:34

2186) Gérard Mourou

Gist:

Life

Gérard Mourou was born in Albertville, France. He studied physics at the University of Grenoble and then at the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in Paris, where he earned his PhD in 1973. He later moved to the United States and became a professor at the University of Rochester, where he did his Nobel Prize awarded work along with Donna Strickland. He subsequently worked at the University of Michigan and the École Polytechnique in Paris.

Work

The sharp beams of laser light have given us new opportunities for deepening our knowledge about the world and shaping it. In 1985, Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou succeeded in creating ultrashort high-intensity laser pulses without destroying the amplifying material. First they stretched the laser pulses in time to reduce their peak power, then amplified them, and finally compressed them. The intensity of the pulse then increases dramatically. Chirped pulse amplification has many uses, including corrective eye surgeries.

Summary

Gérard Mourou (born June 22, 1944, Albertville, France) is a French physicist who was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of chirped pulse amplification (CPA), a method of making pulses of laser light of high power and short duration. He shared the prize with American physicist Arthur Ashkin and Canadian physicist Donna Strickland.

Mourou received a diploma in physics from the University of Grenoble Alpes in 1967. He then worked on his doctoral thesis at Laval University in Quebec City, and he received his doctorate from Pierre and Marie Curie University (now Sorbonne University) in Paris in 1973.

Mourou had a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at San Diego and spent three years at the École Polytechnique in Paris. He then joined the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester.

In the 1970s the peak power that could be delivered in a short pulse of laser light reached a limit beyond which further amplification of the pulse would damage the instrument. In 1985 Mourou and Strickland, who was his graduate student, devised CPA, a method to generate short powerful laser pulses. The pulse was stretched to reduce its peak power. (When the pulse was stretched, its frequency changed into a pattern called a chirp, hence the name of the method.) That pulse was then safely amplified. The pulse was then compressed, amplifying it still more. CPA has come to be used throughout science, industry, and medicine, where it is the basis of LASIK eye surgery.

In 1988 Mourou joined the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he founded the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. He returned to France in 2005 and was director of the Laboratory of Applied Optics at the École Polytechnique until 2008. He advanced laser science in Europe through his proposal of the Extreme Light Infrastructure, which consists of three facilities with extremely powerful lasers in the Czech Republic, Romania, and Hungary.

Details

Gérard Albert Mourou (born 22 June 1944) is a French scientist and pioneer in the field of electrical engineering and lasers. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, along with Donna Strickland, for the invention of chirped pulse amplification, a technique later used to create ultrashort-pulse, very high-intensity (petawatt) laser pulses.

In 1994, Mourou and his team at the University of Michigan discovered that the balance between the self-focusing refraction (see Kerr effect) and self-attenuating diffraction by ionization and rarefaction of a laser beam of terawatt intensities in the atmosphere creates "filaments" that act as waveguides for the beam, thus preventing divergence.

Career

Mourou has been director of the Laboratoire d'optique appliquée at the ENSTA from 2005 to 2009. He is a professor and member of Haut Collège at the École polytechnique and A. D. Moore Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan where he has taught for over 16 years. He was the founding director of the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science at the University of Michigan in 1990. He had previously led a research group on ultrafast sciences at Laboratoire d'optique appliquée of ENSTA and École polytechnique, after obtaining a PhD degree from Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1973. He then went to the United States and became a professor at the University of Rochester in 1977, where he and his then student Donna Strickland produced their Nobel prize-winning work in the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the university. The pair co-invented chirped pulse amplification, a "method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses". Strickland's doctoral thesis was on "development of an ultra-bright laser and an application to multi-photon ionization".

In the 2000s, Mourou was featured by a French film company in a publicity video for the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI).

Nobel Prize

On 2 October 2018, Mourou and Strickland were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, for their joint work on chirped pulse amplification.[9] They shared half of the Prize, while the other half was awarded to Arthur Ashkin for his invention of "optical tweezers that grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells with their laser beam fingers".

Mourou and Strickland found that stretching a laser out reduced its peak power, which could then be greatly amplified using normal instruments. It could then be compressed to create the short-lived, highly powerful lasers they were after. The technique, which was described in Strickland's first scientific publication, came to be known as chirped pulse amplification (CPA). They were probably unaware at the time that their tools would make it possible to study natural phenomena in unprecedented ways. CPA could also per definition be used to create a laser pulse that only lasts one attosecond, one-billionth of a billionth of a second. At those timescales, it became possible not only to study chemical reactions, but what happens inside individual atoms.

The Guardian and Scientific American provided simplified summaries of the work of Strickland and Mourou: it "paved the way for the shortest, most intense laser beams ever created". "The ultrabrief, ultrasharp beams can be used to make extremely precise cuts so their technique is now used in laser machining and enables doctors to perform millions of corrective" laser eye surgeries. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged the achievements of Mourou and Strickland: "Their innovative work can be found in applications including corrective eye surgery, and is expected to have a significant impact on cancer therapy and other physics research in the future".

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