crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-20 22:28:28

1438) Aaron Klug

Summary

Aaron Klug (born August 11, 1926, Želva, Lithuania—died November 20, 2018) was a Lithuanian-born British chemist who was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his investigations of the three-dimensional structure of viruses and other particles that are combinations of nucleic acids and proteins and for the development of crystallographic electron microscopy.

Klug was taken by his parents from Lithuania to South Africa when he was three years old. He entered the University of the Witwatersrand at Johannesburg intending to study medicine, but he graduated with a science degree. He then began a doctoral program in crystallography at the University of Cape Town but left with a master’s degree upon receiving a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed his doctorate in 1953.

Klug then accepted a research fellowship at Birkbeck College of the University of London, undertaking the study of the structure of tobacco mosaic virus and other viruses. His discoveries were made in conjunction with his own development of the techniques of crystallographic electron microscopy, whereby series of electron micrographs, taken of two-dimensional crystals from different angles, can be combined to produce three-dimensional images of particles. Klug’s method has been widely used to study proteins and viruses. In 1958 he became director of the Virus Structure Research Group at Birkbeck. In 1962 (at the invitation of Francis Crick, who shared a Nobel Prize that year) Klug returned to Cambridge as a staff member of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. From 1986 to 1996 he was director of the lab, and he subsequently became emeritus scientist there; he retired in 2012. During this time he also served as president of the Royal Society (1995–2000). Klug was knighted in 1988.

Details

Sir Aaron Klug (11 August 1926 – 20 November 2018) was a British biophysicist and chemist. He was a winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.

Early life and education

Klug was born in Želva, in Lithuania, to Jewish parents Lazar, a cattleman, and Bella (née Silin) Klug, with whom he emigrated to South Africa at the age of two. He was educated at Durban High School. Paul de Kruif's 1926 book, Microbe Hunters, aroused his interest in microbiology.

Klug was part of the Hashomer Hatzair Jewish Zionist youth movement in South Africa.

He started to study microbiology, but then moved into physics and maths, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. He studied physics under Reginald W. James and obtained his Master of Science degree at the University of Cape Town. He was awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, which enabled him to move to England, completing his PhD in research physics at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1953.

Career and research

Following his PhD, Klug moved to Birkbeck College in the University of London in late 1953, and started working with virologist Rosalind Franklin in the lab of crystallographer John Bernal. This experience aroused a lifelong interest in the study of viruses, and during his time there he made discoveries in the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. In 1962 he moved to the newly built Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. Over the following decade Klug used methods from X-ray diffraction, microscopy and structural modelling to develop crystallographic electron microscopy in which a sequence of two-dimensional images of crystals taken from different angles are combined to produce three-dimensional images of the target. He studied the structure of transfer RNA, and found what is known as zinc fingers as well as the neurofibrils in Alzheimer's disease.

Also in 1962, Klug became a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was later made an Honorary Fellow of the College.

Between 1986 and 1996, Klug was director of the LMB. He served on the Advisory Council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering. He also served on the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute. He and Dai Rees approached the Wellcome Trust to found the Wellcome Sanger Institute, which was a key player in the Human Genome Project.

Awards and honours

Klug was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1981. He was knighted by Elizabeth II in 1988.[11] In 1969 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), the oldest national scientific institution in the world. He was elected its President (PRS) from 1995 to 2000. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1995 – as is customary for Presidents of the Royal Society. His certificate of election to the Royal Society reads:

Mathematical physicist and crystallographer distinguished for his contributions to molecular biology, especially the structure of viruses. Development of a theory of simultaneous temperature and phase changes in steels led him to apply related mathematical methods to the problem of diffusion and chemical reactions of gases in thin layers of haemoglobin solutions and in red blood cells. Then the late Rosalind Franklin introduced him to the x-ray study of tobacco mosaic virus to which he contributed by his application and further development of Cochran and Crick's theory of diffraction from helical chain molecules. Klug's most important work is concerned with the structure of spherical viruses. Together with D. Caspar he developed a general theory of spherical shells built up of a regular array of asymmetric particles. Klug and his collaborators verified the theory by x-ray and electron microscope studies, thereby revealing new and hitherto unsuspected features of virus structure.

Klug was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

In 2000, Klug received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2005, he was awarded South Africa's Order of Mapungubwe (gold) for exceptional achievements in medical science. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci), also in 2005.

In 2013, Israel's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev dedicated their centre for structural biology in Klug's name, Aaron Klug Integrated Centre for Biomolecular Structure. He, his family and the then-British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould, were in attendance. Klug was associated with the university and the town of Be'er Sheva, having visited them numerous times.

Personal life

Klug married Liebe Bobrow in 1948; they had two sons, one of whom predeceased them in 2000. He died on 20 November 2018 in Cambridge.

Though Klug had faced discrimination in South Africa, he remained religious and according to Sydney Brenner, he became more religious in his older age.

Additional Information

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1982 was awarded to Aaron Klug "for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes".

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-21 20:40:17

1439) Sune Bergström

Gist

Prostaglandins are hormone-like substances that control several important processes in the body. They are also active when the body is attacked. In the 1950s Sune Bergström succeeded in producing pure prostaglandins and in determining the chemical structures of two important examples, PGE and PGF. He also showed that these are formed through the conversion of unsaturated fatty acids. Prostaglandins are used as medicines; for example, to trigger contractions during childbirth, induce abortions, or reduce the risk of gastric ulcers during treatment using other pharmaceuticals.

Details

Karl Sune Detlof Bergström (10 January 1916 – 15 August 2004) was a Swedish biochemist. In 1975, he was appointed to the Nobel Foundation Board of Directors in Sweden, and was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University, together with Bengt I. Samuelsson. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane in 1982, for discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related substances.

Bergström was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1965, and its President in 1983. In 1965, he was also elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1966. He was also a member of both the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Bergström was awarded the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh in 1977. In 1985, he was appointed member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the Illis quorum in 1985.

In 1943, Bergström married Maj Gernandt. He had two sons, the businessman Rurik Reenstierna, with Maj Gernandt; and the evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo (winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine). Both sons were born in 1955, and Rurik learned about the existence of his half-brother Svante only around 2004.

Additional Information

Sune K. Bergström (born January 10, 1916, Stockholm, Sweden—died August 15, 2004, Stockholm) was a Swedish biochemist, corecipient with fellow Swede Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson and Englishman John Robert Vane of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. All three were honoured for their isolation, identification, and analysis of prostaglandins, which are biochemical compounds that influence blood pressure, body temperature, allergic reactions, and other physiological phenomena in mammals. Bergström was the first to demonstrate the existence of more than one such compound and to determine the elemental compositions of two of them.

Bergström was educated at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where he was awarded doctoral degrees in medicine and biochemistry in 1944. He held research fellowships at Columbia University and at the University of Basel and then returned to Sweden to accept a professorship of chemistry at the University of Lund.

In 1958 Bergström returned to the Karolinska Institute, where he became dean of the medical faculty in 1963 and rector in 1969. After retiring from teaching in 1981, he continued to conduct research. He was chairman of the Nobel Foundation (1975–87) and chairman of medical research at the World Health Organization (1977–82).

Bergström’s son Svante Pääbo was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research on hominin genomes and human evolution.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-23 16:35:18

1440) Bengt I. Samuelsson

Summary

Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson (born May 21, 1934, Halmstad, Sweden) is a Swedish biochemist, corecipient with fellow Swede Sune K. Bergström and Englishman John Robert Vane of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. The three scientists were honoured for their isolation, identification, and analysis of numerous prostaglandins, a family of natural compounds that influence blood pressure, body temperature, allergic reactions, and other physiological phenomena in mammals.

Samuelsson graduated from the University of Lund, where Bergström was one of his professors. He continued his studies at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, earning doctorates in biochemistry in 1960 and medicine in 1961. The following year he worked as a research fellow in the chemistry department at Harvard University, subsequently returning to the Karolinska Institute as a member of the faculty the same year. In 1967 Samuelsson taught at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of Stockholm, serving as a professor in veterinary medical chemistry until 1972, when he once again returned to the Karolinska Institute. Samuelsson was a visiting professor at Harvard in 1976 and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. The next year he succeeded Bergström as dean of the medical faculty at the Karolinska Institute, where in 1983 he was named rector, a position he held until 1995.

Samuelsson joined Bergström in research on prostaglandins, and in 1962 they became the first to determine the molecular structure of a prostaglandin. In 1964 they announced that prostaglandins are derived from arachidonic acid, an unsaturated fatty acid that is found in certain meats and vegetable oils. Samuelsson subsequently determined how arachidonic acid combines with oxygen to eventually form prostaglandins. In the 1970s he discovered several new prostaglandins, including thromboxane, which is involved in blood clotting and the contraction of blood vessels. Samuelsson’s later research explored leukotrienes, a group of lipids closely related to prostaglandins that are involved in mediating inflammation. In the 1980s and 1990s he investigated the affects of drugs on leukotriene pathways and studied novel agents capable of inhibiting the actions of leukotrienes.

Samuelsson, Bergström, and Vane received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1977. Samuelsson published numerous papers and books, among the latter of which were Leukotrienes and Other Lipoxygenase Products (1982; cowritten with Italian biochemist Rodolfo Paoletti), Prostaglandins and Related Compounds (1987), and Trends in Eicosanoid Biology (1990).

Details

Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson (born 21 May 1934) is a Swedish biochemist. He shared with Sune K. Bergström and John R. Vane the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related substances.

Education and early life

Samuelsson was born in Halmstad in southwest Sweden and studied at Stockholm University, where he became a professor in 1967.

Research and career

Discussing the role of prostaglandins in the body, Samuelsson explained, "It's a control system for the cells that participates in many biological functions. There are endless possibilities of manipulating this system in drug development."

His research interests were originally in cholesterol metabolism with importance to reaction mechanisms. Following the structural work on prostaglandins along with Sune Bergström he was interested mainly in the transformation products of arachidonic acid. This has led to the identification of endoperoxides, thromboxanes and the leukotrienes, and his group has chiefly been involved in studying the chemistry, biochemistry and biology of these compounds and their function in biological control systems. This research has implications in numerous clinical areas, especially in thrombosis, inflammation, and allergy.

This field has grown enormously since those days. Between 1981 and 1995 about three thousand papers per year were published that specifically used the expression "prostaglandins," or related terms such as "prostacyclins," "leukotrienes," and "thromboxanes," in their labels and titles.

Bengt Samuelsson has served as a director on the boards of Pharmacia AB, NicOx SA and Schering AG and is an advisor to the venture capital fund HealthCap.

Awards and honors

In 1975, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Sune K. Bergström. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1990.

Additional Information

Prostaglandins are hormone-like substances that control several important processes in the body. They are also active when the body is attacked. During the 1960s and 1970s Bengt Samuelsson showed in detail how prostaglandins form from unsaturated fatty acids and how they are converted. He also mapped different types of prostaglandins, such as endoperoxides, thromboxanes, and leukotrienes. Samuelson’s research has been important in the development of drugs used to treat many ailments, such as blood clots, inflammation, and allergies.

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Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-24 17:36:45

1441) John Vane

Summary

Sir John Robert Vane (born March 29, 1927, Tardebigg, Worcestershire, England—died November 19, 2004, Farnborough, Hampshire) was an English biochemist who, with Sune K. Bergström and Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1982 for the isolation, identification, and analysis of prostaglandins. These are biochemical compounds that influence blood pressure, body temperature, allergic reactions, and other physiological phenomena in mammals.

Vane graduated from the University of Birmingham in 1946 and earned a doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1953. He spent several years on the faculty of Yale University (1953–55) in the United States before returning to England to join the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences of the University of London. In 1973 he became research director of the Wellcome Research Laboratories in Beckenham, Kent, a post he held until 1985. In 1986 Vane founded the William Harvey Research Institute, attached to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, which funded cardiovascular research. He remained with the institute, in various positions, until his death.

As part of his Nobel Prize-winning work, Vane demonstrated that aspirin inhibits the formation of prostaglandins associated with pain, fever, and inflammation, thus providing a physiological rationale for the effectiveness of the world’s most widely used drug. He also discovered prostacyclin, an important prostaglandin that plays a vital role in the process of blood coagulation.

Vane, the recipient of numerous honours, was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982. He was knighted in 1984.

Details

Sir John Robert Vane (29 March 1927 – 19 November 2004) was a British pharmacologist who was instrumental in the understanding of how aspirin produces pain-relief and anti-inflammatory effects and his work led to new treatments for heart and blood vessel disease and introduction of ACE inhibitors. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982 along with Sune Bergström and Bengt Samuelsson for "their discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related biologically active substances".

Education and early life

Born in Tardebigge, Worcestershire, John Vane was one of three children and grew up in suburban Birmingham. His father, Maurice Vane, was the son of Jewish Russian immigrants and his mother, Frances Vane, came from a Worcestershire farming family. He attended a local state school from age 5, before moving on to King Edward's School in Edgbaston, Birmingham. An early interest in chemistry was to prove the inspiration for studying the subject at the University of Birmingham in 1944.

During his undergraduate studies, Vane became disenchanted with chemistry but still enjoyed experimentation. When Maurice Stacey, the Professor of Chemistry at Birmingham, was asked by Harold Burn to recommend a student to go to Oxford and study pharmacology, Vane jumped at the chance and moved to Burn's department in 1946. Under Burn's guidance, Vane found motivation and enthusiasm for pharmacology, writing: "[the] laboratory gradually became the most active and important centre for pharmacological research in the U.K. and the main school for training of young pharmacologists." Vane completed a Bachelor of Science degree in pharmacology and briefly went to work at the University of Sheffield, before coming back to Oxford to complete his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1953[4] supervised by Geoffrey Dawes.

Career and research

After completing his DPhil, Vane worked as an assistant professor the Department of Pharmacology at Yale University before moving back to the United Kingdom to take up a post as a senior lecturer in the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of London in 1955.

University of London

Vane held a post at the University of London for 18 years, progressing from senior lecturer to Professor of Experimental Pharmacology in 1966 (at the Royal College of Surgeons). During that time he developed certain bioassay techniques and focussed his research on both angiotensin-converting enzyme and the actions of aspirin, eventually leading to the publication with Priscilla Piper of the relationship between aspirin and the prostaglandins that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982.

Wellcome Foundation

In 1973, Vane left his academic post at the Royal College of Surgeons and took up the position as Director of Research at the Wellcome Foundation, taking a number of his colleagues with him who went on to form the Prostaglandin Research department. Under the leadership of Salvador Moncada, this group continued important research that eventually led to the discovery of prostacyclin.

Return to academia

In 1985, Vane returned to academic life and founded the William Harvey Research Institute at the Medical College of St Bartholomew's Hospital (now Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry. At the William Harvey Research Institute, Vane's work focused on selective inhibitors of COX-2, and the interplay between nitric oxide and endothelin in the regulation of vascular function.

Awards and honours

Vane was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1974. He was also awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Jagiellonian University Medical College (formerly Copernicus Academy of Medicine) in 1977, Paris Descartes University in 1978, Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1980 and the University of Aberdeen in 1983. He was awarded the Lasker Award in 1977 for the discovery of prostacyclin and was knighted in 1984 for his contributions to science. In 2000, Vane received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Personal life

John Vane married, in 1948, (Elizabeth) Daphne Page and had 2 daughters. He died on 19 November 2004 in Princess Royal University Hospital, Kent, from long-term complications arising from leg and hip fractures he sustained in May of that year. Lady Vane died in 2021.

Additional Information

Prostaglandins are hormone-like substances that govern several important processes in the body. They also come into play when the body is under attack. In 1971 John Vane showed that acetylsalicylic acid, a substance found in pain-relieving and fever-reducing medications like aspirin, works by inhibiting the formation of prostglandins. In 1976 Vane discovered the prostacyclin prostglandin, which expands the smallest blood vessels and, unlike certain other prostglandins, inhibits the formation of blood particles called platelets that cause blood to coagulate.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-25 18:17:29

1442) William Alfred Fowler

Summary

William Fowler (born August 9, 1911, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died March 14, 1995, Pasadena, California) was an American nuclear astrophysicist who, with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 for his role in formulating a widely accepted theory of element generation.

Fowler studied at the Ohio State University (B.S., 1933) and at the California Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1936), where he became an assistant professor in 1939 and a full professor in 1946. His theory of element generation, which he developed with Sir Fred Hoyle, Margaret Burbidge, and Geoffrey Burbidge in the 1950s, suggests that in stellar evolution elements are synthesized progressively from light elements to heavy ones, in nuclear reactions that also produce light and heat. With the collapse of more massive stars, the explosive rebound known as supernova occurs; according to theory, this phase makes possible the synthesis of the heaviest elements.

Fowler also worked in radio astronomy, proposing with Hoyle that the cores of radio galaxies are collapsed “superstars” emitting strong radio waves and that quasars are larger versions of these collapsed superstars.

Fowler received the National Medal of Science (1974) and the Legion of Honour (1989).

Details

William Alfred Fowler (August 9, 1911 – March 14, 1995) was an American nuclear physicist, later astrophysicist, who, with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is known for his theoretical and experimental research into nuclear reactions within stars and the energy elements produced in the process and was one of the authors of the influential B2FH paper.

Early life

On 9 August 1911, Fowler was born in Pittsburgh. Fowler's parents were John MacLeod Fowler and Jennie Summers Watson. Fowler was the eldest of his siblings, Arthur and Nelda.

The family moved to Lima, Ohio, a steam railroad town, when Fowler was two years old. Growing up near the Pennsylvania Railroad yard influenced Fowler's interest in locomotives. In 1973, he travelled to the Soviet Union just to observe the steam engine that powered the Trans-Siberian Railway plying the nearly 2,500-kilometre (1,600 mi) route that connects Khabarovsk and Moscow.

Education

In 1933, Fowler graduated from the Ohio State University, where he was a member of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity. In 1936, Fowler received a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

Career

In 1936, Fowler became a research fellow at Caltech. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1938. In 1939, Fowler became an assistant professor at Caltech.

Although an experimental nuclear physicist, Fowler's most famous paper was his collaboration with Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars" Significantly, Margaret Burbidge was first author, Geoffrey Burbidge second, Fowler third, and Cambridge cosmologist Fred Hoyle. That 1957 paper in Reviews of Modern Physics categorized most nuclear processes for origin of all but the lightest chemical elements in stars. It is widely known as the B2FH paper. Though the theory of Stellar Nucleosynthesis established in the paper was later cited by the Nobel Committee as the reason for his 1983 Nobel in Physics, Margaret Burbidge did not share in the award.

In 1942, Fowler became an associate professor at Caltech. In 1946, Fowler became a Professor at Caltech. Fowler, along with Lee A. DuBridge, Max Mason, Linus Pauling, and Bruce H. Sage, was awarded the Medal for Merit in 1948 by President Harry S. Truman.

Fowler succeeded Charles Lauritsen as director of the W. K. Kellogg Radiation Laboratory at Caltech, and was himself later succeeded by Steven E. Koonin. Fowler was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Gerald Ford.

Fowler was Guggenheim Fellow at St John's College, Cambridge in 1962–63. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1962, won the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society in 1963, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965, won the Vetlesen Prize in 1973, the Eddington Medal in 1978, the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1979, and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 (shared with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar) for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe .

Fowler's doctoral students at Caltech included Donald D. Clayton.

Personal life

A lifelong fan of steam locomotives, Fowler owned several working models of various sizes.

Fowler's first wife was Adriane Fay (née Olmsted) Fowler (1912–1988). They had two daughters, Mary Emily and Martha.

In December 1989, Fowler married Mary Dutcher (1919–2019), an artist, in Pasadena, California. On 11 March 1995, Fowler died from kidney failure in Pasadena, California. He was 83.

Additional Information

Stars in the universe form from clouds of gas and dust. When these clouds are pulled together by gravitational force, energy is released in the form of heat. And when a high enough temperature is reached, reactions among the atomic nuclei in the star’s interior begin. These reactions are what causes radiation from stars. In the 1950s William Fowler showed how these nuclear reactions also account for how various elements are formed. These processes have created the elements that make up our earth and other heavenly bodies in the universe.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-26 20:24:16

1443) Henry Taube

Gist

Most atoms can absorb or emit electrons and become electrically charged ions. Several metals can form ions with different charges. For example, chromium and cobalt can emit two or three electrons. In a water solution metallic ions can link up with other ions and molecules and form complexes. In these complexes, electrons can change from a metallic atom of one type to another. Around 1950 Henry Taube showed that this does not happen through a direct transition; instead a molecule serves as a bridge between the metallic atoms.

Summary

Henry Taube (born Nov. 30, 1915, Neudorf, Sask., Can.—died Nov. 16, 2005, Stanford, Calif., U.S.) was a Canadian-born American chemist, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1983 for his extensive research into the properties and reactions of dissolved inorganic substances, particularly oxidation-reduction processes involving the ions of metallic elements.

Taube was educated at the University of Saskatchewan (B.S., 1935; M.S., 1937) and the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., 1940). He later taught at Cornell University (1941–46) and the University of Chicago (1946–61) before joining the faculty of Stanford University in 1962; he was named professor emeritus in 1986. Taube became a U.S. citizen in 1942.

In the late 1940s Taube carried out experiments with isotopes to show that in water solution the ions of metals form chemical bonds with several molecules of water and that the stability and geometric arrangement of the resulting hydrates, or coordination compounds, vary widely, depending on the identity and oxidation state of the ion. He also helped develop other techniques for studying such substances, and he devised an interpretation of their properties in terms of their electronic configurations. Analogous coordination compounds form in the presence of ammonia, chloride ions, or numerous other chemical species, which are called ligands when they engage in these reactions.

The oxidation or reduction of one metal ion by another involves their exchange of one or more electrons. Many such reactions occur rapidly in aqueous solution despite the fact that the stable shells of water molecules or other ligands should keep the two ions from getting close enough for electron exchange to occur directly. Taube showed that, in an intermediate stage of the reaction, a chemical bond must form between one of the ions and a ligand that is still bonded to the other. This ligand acts as a temporary bridge between the two ions, and its bond to the original ion can later break in such a way as to effect—indirectly—the electron transfer that completes the reaction. Taube’s findings have been applied in selecting metallic compounds for use as catalysts, pigments, and superconductors and in understanding the function of metal ions as constituents of certain enzymes.

Taube was the recipient of numerous honours, including two Guggenheim fellowships (1949, 1955) and the National Medal of Science (1976). In 1959 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Details

Henry Taube, (November 30, 1915 – November 16, 2005) was a Canadian-born American chemist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his work in the mechanisms of electron-transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes." He was the second Canadian-born chemist to win the Nobel Prize, and remains the only Saskatchewanian-born Nobel laureate. Taube completed his undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Saskatchewan, and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. After finishing graduate school, Taube worked at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and Stanford University.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Taube also received many other major scientific awards, including the Priestley Medal in 1985 and two Guggenheim Fellowships early in his career (1949 and 1955), as well as numerous honorary doctorates. His research focused on redox reactions, transition metals and the use of isotopically labeled compounds to follow reactions. He had over 600 publications including one book, and had mentored over 200 students during his career. Taube and his wife Mary had three children; his son Karl is an anthropologist at the University of California Riverside.

Education

At 12, Taube left his hometown and moved to Regina to attend Luther College where he completed high school. After graduating, Taube stayed at Luther College and worked as laboratory assistant for Paul Liefeld, allowing him to take first year university classes. Taube attended the University of Saskatchewan, receiving his BSc in 1935 and his MSc in 1937. His thesis advisor at the University of Saskatchewan was John Spinks. While at the University of Saskatchewan, Taube studied with Gerhard Herzberg, who would be awarded the 1971 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He moved to University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his PhD studies in 1940. His PhD mentor was William C. Bray. Taube's graduate research focused on the photodecomposition of chlorine dioxide and hydrogen peroxide in solution.

Research and academic career:

Academic posts

After completing his education, Taube remained in the United States, becoming an instructor in chemistry at Berkeley until 1941. He initially wanted to return to Canada to work, but did not receive a response when he applied for jobs at the major Canadian universities. From Berkeley, he served as an instructor and assistant professor at Cornell University until 1946. During World War II, Taube served on the National Defense Research Committee. Taube spent time at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor, associate professor and as a full professor from 1946 to 1961. He served as chair of the chemistry department in Chicago from 1956 to 1959, but did not enjoy administrative work. After leaving Chicago, Taube worked as a professor at Stanford University until 1986, a position that allowed him to focus on research, while also teaching classes at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He became a Professor Emeritus at Stanford in 1986, but he continued to perform research until 2001, and visited his labs every day until his death in 2005. In addition to his academic duties, Taube also served as a consultant at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1956 until the 1970s.

Research interests

Taube's initial research at Cornell University focused on the same areas he studied as a graduate student, oxidizing agents containing oxygen and halogens, and redox reactions featuring these species. He used isotopically labeled oxygen-18 and radioactive chlorine to study these reactions. He was recognized by the American Chemical Society in 1955 for his isotope studies.

Taube's interest in coordination chemistry was sparked when he was chosen to develop a course on advanced inorganic chemistry while at the University of Chicago. He was unable to find much information in the textbooks available at the time. Taube realized that his work on the substitution of carbon in organic reactions could be related to inorganic complexes. In 1952, Taube published a key paper relating the rates of chemical reactions to electronic structure in Chemical Reviews. This research was the first to recognize the correlation between the rate of ligand substitution and the d-electron configuration of the metal. Taube's key discovery was the way molecules build a type of "chemical bridge" rather than simply exchanging electrons, as previously thought. Identifying this intermediate step explained why reactions between similar metals and ions occurred at different rates. His paper in Chemical Reviews was developed while on sabbatical in the late 1940s. An article in Science called this paper "one of the true classics in inorganic chemistry" after his Nobel Prize was announced. Taube researched ruthenium and osmium, both elements have a high capacity for back bonding. This type of electron donation was key when studying the way electrons are transferred between molecules in a chemical reaction.

When looking back on his research, Taube explained that he sometimes had difficulty finding graduate students willing to work on electron transfer reactions, as they preferred to work on more "exciting" projects in his laboratory focusing on the effects of isotopic tracers and kinetics. Taube felt that a "primary flaw" with his correlation between electron configuration and ligand substitution was that it was described mainly in terms of valence bond theory, as crystal field theory and ligand field theory were not well established when he published his work in 1952.

Awards and honors:

Nobel Prize

Taube was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on the mechanisms of electron transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes." He received his award on December 8, 1983, with the presentation speech being delivered by Ingvar Lindqvist of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. Taube's Nobel Lecture was entitled "Electron Transfer between Metal Complexes – Retrospective." His Nobel Prize was the second awarded to a Canadian-born chemist (the first one was William Giauque). His initial paper in Chemical Reviews was 30 years old at the time of his Nobel Prize victory, but the correlation he described between the rate of ligand substitution and electronic configuration for transition metal coordination complexes was still the predominant theory about the reaction chemistry of these compounds. After being awarded the Nobel Prize, Taube noticed a side benefit to the prestigious award – his students paid better attention in class.

Other awards

Taube was accepted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1959. In 1961, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. President Jimmy Carter presented Taube with the 1976 President's National Medal of Science "in recognition of contributions to the understanding of reactivity and reaction mechanisms in inorganic chemistry." He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1981. In 1985, Taube received the American Chemical Society's highest honor, the Priestley Medal, which is awarded to recognize "distinguished services to chemistry". He was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1949 and 1955. In 1965, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. Taube was made an honorary member of the College of Chemists of Catalonia and Beleares (1984), the Canadian Society of Chemists (1986), and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1988). He was also awarded an honorary fellowship in the Royal Society of Chemistry (1989) and the Indian Chemical Society (1989) and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1988. Taube received honorary degrees from many institutions, including the University of Saskatchewan (1973), the University of Chicago (1983), the Polytechnic Institute of New York (1984), the State University of New York Stony Brook (1985), the University of Guelph (1987), Seton Hall University (1988), the Lajos Kossuth University of Debrecen in Hungary (1988) and Northwestern University (1990). A Nobel Laureate Plaza on the University of Saskatchewan's campus in honor of Taube and Gerhard Herzberg was dedicated in 1997.

Personal life

Taube was born November 30, 1915, in Neudorf, Saskatchewan, as the youngest of four boys. His parents were ethnic Germans from Ukraine who had immigrated to Saskatchewan from Ukraine in 1911. Growing up, his first language was Low German. In the 18th century, Catherine the Great encouraged Central European farmers to settle in Russia. As the rights afforded to these settlers by Catherine were gradually diminished, many of the settlers headed to North America, with Saskatchewan offering good farmland, and other incentives for immigrants. Taube reflected fondly on his experiences growing up in Saskatchewan, noting: "Certainly, there is nothing about my first 21 years in Saskatchewan, taken in the context of those times that I would wish to be changed. The advantages that I enjoyed include: the marvelous experience of growing up on a farm, which taught me an appreciation of nature, and taught me also to discipline myself to get necessary jobs done..."

After completing his graduate studies, Taube became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1942. Taube married his wife Mary in 1952. They had three children, Karl, Heinrich, and Linda. His stepdaughter Marianna died of cancer in 1998. When he stopped his active research projects in 2001, Taube continued to be available as a reviewer and consultant, but his main goal was "enjoying life". Away from chemistry, Taube had varied interests including gardening and classical music, mainly opera. In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.

Taube died at his home in Palo Alto, California on November 16, 2005, at the age of 89.

Jai Ganesh · 2024-04-27 17:13:33

1444) Barbara McClintock

Gist

Life

Barbara McClintock grew up in Connecticut and New York in the United States. Her family had little money, so her interest in research was viewed with skepticism. It was more important for her to marry, her family thought. Despite this, with her father's support, McClintock began studying at Cornell's College of Agriculture in 1919, and her studies are where her interest remained. She never married, choosing to devote her life to research instead. She was shy and anything but a careerist, but at the same time she also realized the importance of what she had achieved, not least of all in her role as an example for other women.

Work

Many characteristics of organisms are determined by heredity– that is, by their genes–which are stored in the chromosomes inside their cells' nuclei. Barbara McClintock studied corn's hereditary characteristics, for example the different colors of its kernels. She studied how these characteristics are passed down through generations and linked this to changes in the plants' chromosomes. During the 1940s and 1950s McClintock proved that genetic elements can sometimes change position on a chromosome and that this causes nearby genes to become active or inactive.

Summary

Barbara McClintock (born June 16, 1902, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.—died September 2, 1992, Huntington, New York) was an American scientist whose discovery in the 1940s and ’50s of mobile genetic elements, or “jumping genes,” won her the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983.

McClintock, whose father was a physician, took great pleasure in science as a child and evidenced early the independence of mind and action that she would exhibit throughout the rest of her life. After attending high school, she enrolled as a biology major at Cornell University in 1919. She received a B.S. in 1923, a master’s degree two years later, and, having specialized in cytology, genetics, and zoology, a Ph.D. in 1927. During graduate school she began the work that would occupy her entire professional life: the chromosomal analysis of corn (maize). She used a microscope and a staining technique that allowed her to examine, identify, and describe individual corn chromosomes.

In 1931 she and a colleague, Harriet Creighton, published “A Correlation of Cytological and Genetical Crossing-over in Zea mays,” a paper that established that chromosomes formed the basis of genetics. Based on her experiments and publications during the 1930s, McClintock was elected vice president of the Genetics Society of America in 1939 and president of the Genetics Society in 1944. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1933 to study in Germany, but she left early because of the rise of Nazism. When she returned to Cornell, her alma mater, she found that the university would not hire a female professor. The Rockefeller Foundation funded her research at Cornell (1934–36) until she was hired by the University of Missouri (1936–41).

In 1941 McClintock moved to Long Island, New York, to work at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she spent the rest of her professional life. In the 1940s, by observing and experimenting with variations in the coloration of kernels of corn, she discovered that genetic information is not stationary. By tracing pigmentation changes in corn and using a microscope to examine that plant’s large chromosomes, she isolated two genes that she called “controlling elements.” These genes controlled the genes that were actually responsible for pigmentation. McClintock found that the controlling elements could move along the chromosome to a different site, and that these changes affected the behaviour of neighbouring genes. She suggested that these transposable elements were responsible for new mutations in pigmentation or other characteristics.

McClintock’s work was ahead of its time and was for many years considered too radical—or was simply ignored—by her fellow scientists. Deeply disappointed with her colleagues, she stopped publishing the results of her work and ceased giving lectures, though she continued doing research. Not until the late 1960s and ’70s, after biologists had determined that the genetic material was DNA, did members of the scientific community begin to verify her early findings. When recognition finally came, McClintock was inundated with awards and honours, most notably the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. She was the first woman to be the sole winner of this award.

Details

Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992) was an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927. There she started her career as the leader of the development of maize cytogenetics, the focus of her research for the rest of her life. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. She developed the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas. One of those ideas was the notion of genetic recombination by crossing-over during meiosis—a mechanism by which chromosomes exchange information. She produced the first genetic map for maize, linking regions of the chromosome to physical traits. She demonstrated the role of the telomere and centromere, regions of the chromosome that are important in the conservation of genetic information. She was recognized as among the best in the field, awarded prestigious fellowships, and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.

During the 1940s and 1950s, McClintock discovered transposons and used it to demonstrate that genes are responsible for turning physical characteristics on and off. She developed theories to explain the suppression and expression of genetic information from one generation of maize plants to the next. Due to skepticism of her research and its implications, she stopped publishing her data in 1953.

Later, she made an extensive study of the cytogenetics and ethnobotany of maize races from South America. McClintock's research became well understood in the 1960s and 1970s, as other scientists confirmed the mechanisms of genetic change and protein expression that she had demonstrated in her maize research in the 1940s and 1950s. Awards and recognition for her contributions to the field followed, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to her in 1983 for the discovery of genetic transposition; as of 2023, she remains the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.

Early life

Barbara McClintock was born Eleanor McClintock on June 16, 1902, in Hartford, Connecticut, the third of four children born to homeopathic physician Thomas Henry McClintock and Sara Handy McClintock. Thomas McClintock was the child of British immigrants. Marjorie, the oldest child, was born in October 1898; Mignon, the second daughter, was born in November 1900. The youngest, Malcolm Rider (called Tom), was born 18 months after Barbara. When she was a young girl, her parents determined that Eleanor, a "feminine" and "delicate" name, was not appropriate for her, and chose Barbara instead. McClintock was an independent child beginning at a very young age, a trait she later identified as her "capacity to be alone". From the age of three until she began school, McClintock lived with an aunt and uncle in Brooklyn, New York, in order to reduce the financial burden on her parents while her father established his medical practice. She was described as a solitary and independent child. She was close to her father, but had a difficult relationship with her mother, tension that began when she was young.

The McClintock family moved to Brooklyn in 1908 and McClintock completed her secondary education there at Erasmus Hall High School; she graduated early in 1919. She discovered her love of science and reaffirmed her solitary personality during high school. She wanted to continue her studies at Cornell University's College of Agriculture. Her mother resisted sending McClintock to college for fear that she would be unmarriageable, a common attitude at the time. McClintock was almost prevented from starting college, but her father allowed her to just before registration began, and she matriculated at Cornell in 1919.

Education and research at Cornell

McClintock began her studies at Cornell's College of Agriculture in 1919. There, she participated in student government and was invited to join a sorority, though she soon realized that she preferred not to join formal organizations. Instead, McClintock took up music, specifically jazz. She studied botany, receiving a BSc in 1923. Her interest in genetics began when she took her first course in that field in 1921. The course was based on a similar one offered at Harvard University, and was taught by C. B. Hutchison, a plant breeder and geneticist. Hutchison was impressed by McClintock's interest, and telephoned to invite her to participate in the graduate genetics course at Cornell in 1922. McClintock pointed to Hutchison's invitation as a catalyst for her interest in genetics: "Obviously, this telephone call cast the die for my future. I remained with genetics thereafter." Although it has been reported that women could not major in genetics at Cornell, and therefore her MS and PhD—earned in 1925 and 1927, respectively—were officially awarded in botany, recent research has revealed that women were permitted to earn graduate degrees in Cornell's Plant Breeding Department during the time that McClintock was a student at Cornell.

During her graduate studies and postgraduate appointment as a botany instructor, McClintock was instrumental in assembling a group that studied the new field of cytogenetics in maize. This group brought together plant breeders and cytologists, and included Marcus Rhoades, future Nobel laureate George Beadle, and Harriet Creighton. Rollins A. Emerson, head of the Plant Breeding Department, supported these efforts, although he was not a cytologist himself.

She also worked as a research assistant for Lowell Fitz Randolph and then for Lester W. Sharp, both Cornell botanists.

McClintock's cytogenetic research focused on developing ways to visualize and characterize maize chromosomes. This particular part of her work influenced a generation of students, as it was included in most textbooks. She also developed a technique using carmine staining to visualize maize chromosomes, and showed for the first time the morphology of the 10 maize chromosomes. This discovery was made because she observed cells from the microspore as opposed to the root tip. By studying the morphology of the chromosomes, McClintock was able to link specific chromosome groups of traits that were inherited together. Marcus Rhoades noted that McClintock's 1929 Genetics paper on the characterization of triploid maize chromosomes triggered scientific interest in maize cytogenetics, and attributed to her 10 of the 17 significant advances in the field that were made by Cornell scientists between 1929 and 1935.

In 1930, McClintock was the first person to describe the cross-shaped interaction of homologous chromosomes during meiosis. The following year, McClintock and Creighton proved the link between chromosomal crossover during meiosis and the recombination of genetic traits. They observed how the recombination of chromosomes seen under a microscope correlated with new traits. Until this point, it had only been hypothesized that genetic recombination could occur during meiosis, although it had not been shown genetically. McClintock published the first genetic map for maize in 1931, showing the order of three genes on maize chromosome 9. This information provided necessary data for the crossing-over study she published with Creighton; they also showed that crossing-over occurs in sister chromatids as well as homologous chromosomes. In 1938, she produced a cytogenetic analysis of the centromere, describing the organization and function of the centromere, as well as the fact that it can divide.

McClintock's breakthrough publications, and support from her colleagues, led to her being awarded several postdoctoral fellowships from the National Research Council. This funding allowed her to continue to study genetics at Cornell, the University of Missouri, and the California Institute of Technology, where she worked with E. G. Anderson. During the summers of 1931 and 1932, she worked at the University of Missouri with geneticist Lewis Stadler, who introduced her to the use of X-rays as a mutagen. Exposure to X-rays can increase the rate of mutation above the natural background level, making it a powerful research tool for genetics. Through her work with X-ray-mutagenized maize, she identified ring chromosomes, which form when the ends of a single chromosome fuse together after radiation damage. From this evidence, McClintock hypothesized that there must be a structure on the chromosome tip that would normally ensure stability. She showed that the loss of ring-chromosomes at meiosis caused variegation in maize foliage in generations subsequent to irradiation resulting from chromosomal deletion. During this period, she demonstrated the presence of the nucleolus organizer region on a region on maize chromosome 6, which is required for the assembly of the nucleolus. In 1933, she established that cells can be damaged when nonhomologous recombination occurs. During this same period, McClintock hypothesized that the tips of chromosomes are protected by telomeres.

McClintock received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation that made possible six months of training in Germany during 1933 and 1934. She had planned to work with Curt Stern, who had demonstrated crossing-over in Drosophila just weeks after McClintock and Creighton had done so; however, Stern emigrated to the United States. Instead, she worked with geneticist Richard B. Goldschmidt, who was a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin. She left Germany early amidst mounting political tension in Europe, returned to Cornell, but found that the university would not hire a woman professor. In 1936, she accepted an Assistant Professorship offered to her by Lewis Stadler in the Department of Botany at the University of Missouri in Columbia. While still at Cornell, she was supported by a two-year Rockefeller Foundation grant obtained for her through Emerson's efforts.

Later years

McClintock spent her later years, post Nobel Prize, as a key leader and researcher in the field at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. McClintock died of natural causes in Huntington, New York, on September 2, 1992, at the age of 90; she never married or had children.

Jai Ganesh · Yesterday 17:13:51

1445) Carlo Rubbia

Gist

Life

Carlo Rubbia was born in Gorizia, Italy. His father was an engineer at the local telephone company and his mother was a teacher. After World War II, the area was annexed by Yugoslavia, after which Rubbia's family fled to Venice and later moved to Udine. After studying in Pisa, Rubbia spent a couple of years at Columbia University in New York. In 1960 he began working at the newly inaugurated European particle physics laboratory, CERN, with which he has been affiliated ever since. Rubbia has also worked at Harvard University. He is married with two children.

Work

According to modern physics, four fundamental forces are at work in nature. Weak interaction, which, for example, causes beta decay in atomic nuclei, is one of these. In theory, these forces are conveyed by particles—the weak interaction by W and Z particles. Carlo Rubbia proposed and led experiments that, by allowing protons and antiprotons to collide at very high speeds, would prove the existence of these particles. In this way, the existence of W and Z particles was verified in 1983.

Summary

Carlo Rubbia (born March 31, 1934, Gorizia, Italy) is an Italian physicist who in 1984 shared with Simon van der Meer the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of the massive, short-lived subatomic W particle and Z particle. These particles are the carriers of the so-called weak force involved in the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei. Their existence strongly confirms the validity of the electroweak theory, proposed in the 1970s, that the weak force and electromagnetism are different manifestations of a single basic kind of physical interaction.

Rubbia was educated at the Normal School of Pisa and the University of Pisa, earning a doctorate from the latter in 1957. He taught there for two years before moving to Columbia University as a research fellow. He joined the faculty of the University of Rome in 1960 and was appointed senior physicist at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN; now the European Organization for Nuclear Research), in Geneva, in 1962. In 1970 he was appointed professor of physics at Harvard University, and he subsequently divided his time between Harvard and CERN. In 1988 he left Harvard, and from 1989 to 1994 he served as director general of CERN. He subsequently held postings at various scientific institutes, and in 2013 he was declared senator for life in Italy.

In 1973 a research group under Rubbia’s direction provided one of the experimental clues that led to the formulation of the electroweak theory by observing neutral weak currents (weak interactions in which electrical charge is not transferred between the particles involved). These interactions differ from those previously observed and are direct analogues of electromagnetic interactions. The electroweak theory embodied the idea that the weak force can be transmitted by any of three particles called intermediate vector bosons.

Rubbia then proposed that the large synchrotron at CERN be modified so that beams of accelerated protons and antiprotons could be made to collide head-on, releasing energies great enough for the weak bosons to materialize. In 1983 experiments with the colliding-beam apparatus gave proof that the W and Z particles are indeed produced and have properties that agree with the theoretical predictions.

Further analysis of the results obtained in 1983 led Rubbia to conclude that in some decays of the W+ particle, the first firm evidence for the sixth quark, called top, had been found. The discovery of this quark confirmed an earlier prediction that three pairs of these particles should exist.

Details

Carlo Rubbia (born 31 March 1934) is an Italian particle physicist and inventor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Simon van der Meer for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN.

Early life and education

Rubbia was born in 1934 in Gorizia, an Italian town on the border with Slovenia. His family moved to Venice then Udine because of wartime disruption. His father was an electrical engineer and encouraged him to study the same, though he stated his wish to study physics. In the local countryside, he collected and experimented with abandoned military communications equipment. After taking an entrance exam for the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa to study physics, he failed to get into the required top ten (coming eleventh), so began an engineering course in Milan in 1953. Soon after, a Pisa student dropped out, presenting Rubbia with his opportunity. He gained a degree and doctorate in a relatively short time with a thesis on cosmic ray experimentation; his adviser was Marcello Conversi. At Pisa, he met his future wife, Marisa, also a Physics student.

Career and research:

Columbia University

Following his degree, he went to the United States to do postdoctoral research, where he spent about one and a half years at Columbia University performing experiments on the decay and the nuclear capture of muons. This was the first of a long series of experiments that Rubbia has performed in the field of weak interactions and which culminated in the Nobel Prize-winning work at CERN.

CERN

He moved back to Europe for a placement at the University of Rome before joining the newly founded CERN in 1960, where he worked on experiments on the structure of weak interactions. CERN had just commissioned a new type of accelerator, the Intersecting Storage Rings, using counter-rotating beams of protons colliding against each other. Rubbia and his collaborators conducted experiments there, again studying the weak force. The main results in this field were the observation of the structure in the elastic scattering process and the first observation of the charmed baryons. These experiments were crucial in order to perfect the techniques needed later for the discovery of more exotic particles in a different type of particle collider.

In 1976, he suggested adapting CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) to collide protons and antiprotons in the same ring – the Proton-Antiproton Collider. Using Simon van der Meers technology of stochastic cooling, the Antiproton Accumulator was also built. The collider started running in 1981 and, in early 1983, an international team of more than 100 physicists headed by Rubbia and known as the UA1 Collaboration, detected the intermediate vector bosons, the W and Z bosons, which had become a cornerstone of modern theories of elementary particle physics long before this direct observation. They carry the weak force that causes radioactive decay in the atomic nucleus and controls the combustion of the Sun, just as photons, massless particles of light, carry the electromagnetic force which causes most physical and biochemical reactions. The weak force also plays a fundamental role in the nucleosynthesis of the elements, as studied in theories of stars evolution. These particles have a mass almost 100 times greater than the proton. In 1984 Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer were awarded the Nobel Prize "for their decisive contributions to the large project, which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction".

To achieve energies high enough to create these particles, Rubbia, together with David Cline and Peter McIntyre, proposed a radically new particle accelerator design. They proposed to use a beam of protons and a beam of antiprotons, their antimatter twins, counter rotating in the vacuum pipe of the accelerator and colliding head-on. The idea of creating particles by colliding beams of more "ordinary" particles was not new: electron-positron and proton-proton colliders were already in use. However, by the late 1970s / early 1980s those could not approach the needed energies in the centre of mass to explore the W/Z region predicted by theory. At those energies, protons colliding with anti-protons were the best candidates, but how to obtain sufficiently intense (and well-collimated) beams of anti-protons, which are normally produced impinging a beam of protons on a fixed target? Van den Meer had in the meantime developed the concept of "stochastic cooling", in which particles, like anti-protons could be kept in a circular array, and their beam divergence reduced progressively by sending signals to bending magnets downstream. Since decreasing the divergence of the beam meant to reduce transverse velocity or energy components, the suggestive term "stochastic cooling" was given to the scheme. The scheme could then be used to "cool" (to collimate) the anti-protons, which could thus be forced into a well-focused beam, suitable for acceleration to high energies, without losing too many anti-protons to collisions with the structure. Stochastic expresses the fact that signals to be taken resemble random noise, which was called "Schottky noise" when first encountered in vacuum tubes. Without van der Meer's technique, UA1 would never have had the sufficient high-intensity anti-protons it needed. Without Rubbia's realisation of its usefulness, stochastic cooling would have been the subject of a few publications and nothing else. Simon van de Meer developed and tested the technology in the proton Intersecting Storage Rings at CERN, but it is most effective on rather low intensity beams, such as the anti-protons which were prepared for use in the SPS when configured as a collider.

Harvard University

In 1970, Rubbia was appointed Higgins Professor of Physics at Harvard University, where he spent one semester per year for 18 years, while continuing his research activities at CERN. In 1989, he was appointed Director-General of the CERN Laboratory. During his mandate, in 1993, "CERN agreed to allow anybody to use the Web protocol and code free of charge … without any royalty or other constraint".

Gran Sasso Laboratory

Rubbia has also been one of the leaders in a collaboration effort deep in the Gran Sasso Laboratory, designed to detect any sign of decay of the proton. The experiment seeks evidence that would disprove the conventional belief that matter is stable. The most widely accepted version of the unified field theories predicts that protons do not last forever, but gradually decay into energy after an average lifetime of at least {10}^{32} years. The same experiment, known as ICARUS and based on a new technique of electronic detection of ionizing events in ultra-pure liquid argon, is aiming at the direct detection of the neutrinos emitted from the Sun, a first rudimentary neutrino telescope to explore neutrino signals of cosmic nature.

Rubbia further proposed the concept of an energy amplifier, a novel and safe way of producing nuclear energy exploiting present-day accelerator technologies, which is actively being studied worldwide in order to incinerate high activity waste from nuclear reactors, and produce energy from natural thorium and depleted uranium. In 2013 he proposed building a large number of small-scale thorium power plants.

Other organisational affiliations

Rubbia was principal Scientific Adviser of CIEMAT (Spain), a member of the high-level Advisory Group on global warming set up by EU's President Barroso in 2007 and of the board of trustees at the IMDEA Energy Institute. In 2009–2010, he was Special Adviser for Energy to the Secretary General of ECLAC, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, based in Santiago (Chile). In June 2010, Rubbia has been appointed Scientific Director of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam (Germany). He is a member of the Italy-USA Foundation. During his term as President of ENEA (1999–2005) he has promoted a novel method for concentrating solar power at high temperatures for energy production, known as the Archimede Project, which is being developed by industry for commercial use.

Personal life

Marisa and Carlo Rubbia have two children.

Awards and honors

In December 1984, Rubbia was nominated Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI.

On 30 August 2013, Rubbia was appointed to the Senate of Italy as a Senator for Life by President Giorgio Napolitano.

Asteroid 8398 Rubbia is named in his honor. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1984.

In 1984, Rubbia received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Math Is Fun Forum

#1476 2024-04-20 22:28:28

Re: crème de la crème

#1477 2024-04-21 20:40:17

Re: crème de la crème

#1478 2024-04-23 16:35:18

Re: crème de la crème

#1479 2024-04-24 17:36:45

Re: crème de la crème

#1480 2024-04-25 18:17:29

Re: crème de la crème

#1481 2024-04-26 20:24:16

Re: crème de la crème

#1482 2024-04-27 17:13:33

Re: crème de la crème

#1483 Yesterday 17:13:51

Re: crème de la crème

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