Biographical encyclopedia
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1 9 4 4 , Was that of tissue transplantation and the conditions that affect the accep tance or rejection of the transplant by the organism receiving it. He showed that genetic factors were important, the transplant being accepted if the mice affected were of the same strain, but rejected if they were not. He located specific gene sites that were concerned in the matter of acceptance or rejection. For his work he received a share of the 1980 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine. [1276] HARTLINE, Haldan Keffer American physiologist Born: Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, December 22, 1903 Hartline graduated from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1923 and obtained his M.D. from Johns Hop kins in 1927. After travels abroad and various teaching positions within the United States, he joined the faculty of Rockefeller University in New York in 1953.
Early in his career he was interested in the metabolism of nerve cells and gradu ally zeroed in on the working of the indi vidual cells in the retina of the eye. Like Granit [1232], he wanted to study the workings of individual retinal cells. For the purpose he used tiny electrodes and managed to isolate and study individual fibers in the eyes of horseshoe crabs and frogs. Thus, the fine workings of the sense of sight began to yield to investi gation.
For this work, Hartline shared the 1967 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine with Wald [1318] and Granit. [1277] BITTNER, John Joseph American biologist
February 25, 1904 Died: Minneapolis, Minnesota, December 14, 1961 After attending St. Stephen’s College in New York state, Bittner went on to obtain his Ph.D. in 1930 from the Uni versity of Michigan. Through the 1930s Bittner worked at Bar Harbor, Maine, where carefully inbred strains of mice were kept for research on cancer. Some strains were highly resistant to cancer and rarely de veloped it, while others were so prone to it that almost every individual developed the disease. Bittner’s observations, published in 1936, established an odd fact. If the young mice of a cancer-resistant strain were transferred to the breast of a foster mother of a cancer-prone strain, the young developed cancer in the course of their lives. If, on the other hand, young mice of a cancer-prone strain were fed at the breast of a foster mother of a cancer-resistant strain, they did not usu ally develop cancer. Apparently this particular type of can cer in these particular animals was infec tious and the mother’s milk carried the infectious agent. The Bittner milk factor was isolated in 1949. At least, particles were found in the milk of cancer-prone mother mice that did not exist in the milk of cancer-resistant mother mice. These particles were virus-sized and, like viruses, contained nucleic acid. It seemed reasonable to suspect them of being viruses. This was certainly the 798
[1278] GAMOW
ELSASSER [1279]
strongest evidence that at least some can cers were virus-caused since Rous [1067] had initiated the controversy a genera tion earlier. [1278] GAMOW, George (gay'mov) Russian-American physicist Born: Odessa, Russia, March 4, 1904
Died: Boulder, Colorado, August 19, 1968 Gamow, the grandson of a tsarist general and the son of a teacher, grew interested in astronomy when his father gave him a small telescope on his thir teenth birthday. He attended the University of Lenin grad, studying under Friedmann [1125], and obtained his Ph.D. there in 1928. One of his classmates was Landau [1333], In the year of his Ph.D., Gamow worked out the theory of alpha-decay, suggesting the existence of a tunneling effect that Esaki [1464] was to make good use of three decades later. Gamow then worked at various uni versities in western Europe, including a stay with Bohr [1101] and then with Ernest Rutherford [996], meeting Lan dau, who was also on his travels, at both places. He ended up in the United States in 1934. He made this country his per manent home, teaching at George Wash ington University until 1956, when he joined the faculty of the University of Colorado. In the 1930s, Gamow collaborated with Teller [1332] in work on theoretical nuclear physics, but his best-known work elaborates the ideas of Bethe [1308] and Lemaitre [1174], In working out the consequences of the nuclear reactions postulated by Bethe as powering a star and serving as the source of its radiant energy, Gamow showed that as a star’s hydrogen (its basic fuel) is used up, the star grows hotter. For the first time the general as sumption that the sun was slowly cooling was contravened. Instead, it was very slowly heating up and life on earth would be destroyed some day, not through freezing but through baking. This marked the beginning of a new un derstanding of stellar evolution. Again, Gamow, in 1948, worked out the method by which the explosion of Lemaitre’s “cosmic egg” would lead to the formation of the various elements of the universe in a very short time, al though his is by no means the only theory of the exact mechanism of the creation of the elements. He predicted the residual background radiation that was detected by Penzias [1501] and Wilson seventeen years later. Gamow was perhaps the most articu late supporter of Lemaitre’s “big bang” theory of creation as far as the general public was concerned for he was as for midable a popularizer as was his great antagonist Hoyle [1398], In an entirely different field, biochem istry, Gamow in 1954 suggested that the nucleic acids acted as a “genetic code” in the formation of enzymes (following the path Beadle [1270] had first laid out). Gamow was the first to maintain that the code was made up of triplets of nucleo tides. His details were wrong, but the concept was proved by 1961 to be cor rect. In addition to his first-rate science, Gamow proved to be one of the most effective and consistently charming pop ularizes of science. This second career began in 1937 with his Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland. [1279] ELSASSER, Walter Maurice German-American physicist
Germany, March 20, 1904 Elsasser obtained his Ph.D. at the Uni versity of Gottingen in 1927 and then joined the faculty of the University of Frankfurt. Like so many other scientists, he left Germany in 1933 with the advent of Hitler and after three years in Paris went to the United States in 1936, joined the staff of the California Institute of Technology, and became an American citizen in 1940. He worked on radar during World War II and served with several universi ties afterward. In 1960 he joined the 799
[1280] OPPENHEIMER OPPENHEIMER [1280]
University of New Mexico as chairman of the department of physics. Elsasser has concerned himself with the origin of the earth’s magnetic field. Since the days of Gilbert [155] the earth has been considered a magnet and the presence of an iron core would make it seem that it actually contained a per manent iron magnet. However, the iron core is liquid and above the Curie [897] point, so that it cannot really be an ordi nary magnet. Elsasser suggested in 1939 that the earth’s rotation sets up eddy currents in the liquid core, which thus becomes an electromagnet if not an ordinary one. Latest rocket research seems to bear this out, at least indirectly. The moon, which probably lacks an iron core, was shown by the Soviet Lunik satellites to have no magnetic field. According to data from the Venus probe Mariner II obtained in December 1962, Venus, which probably does have an iron core, rotates so slowly that it does not set up eddy currents and, in consequence, lacks a magnetic field. In 1962 Elsasser accepted a post as professor of geophysics at Princeton University. [1280] OPPENHEIMER, J. Robert American physicist
April 22, 1904 Died: Princeton, New Jersey, February 18, 1967 Oppenheimer, the son of a German- Jewish immigrant, was bom into a fam ily of wealth and culture and early showed a precocious intelligence. He was educated at the Ethical Culture School in New York and graduated at the top of his class. In 1922 he entered Harvard, where he studied under Bridgman [1080] and graduated in three years with record grades. He did postgraduate work in England, where he met Thomson [869], Ernest Rutherford [996], and Born [1084], He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Gottingen, where he met Neumann [1273], in 1927. In 1928 he joined the faculty of the California Insti tute of Technology. In 1930 he showed that the proton could not be Dirac’s [1256] “antielec tron” and paved the way for the discov ery, two years later, of the true antielec tron, the positron, by Anderson [1292]. In 1935 Oppenheimer explained how a speeding deuteron (the nucleus of a heavy hydrogen atom, consisting of a proton and neutron in close association) splits up as it approaches a positively charged atomic nucleus. The proton por tion, also positively charged, is repelled and veers off. The uncharged neutron continues onward. In this way deuteron bombardment is often the equivalent of neutron bombardment, with this differ ence: Deuterons, being charged, can be accelerated to high energies in electric fields, while neutrons, being uncharged, cannot. Oppenheimer also contributed to an understanding of the “cascade process” in which a cosmic ray particle produced secondary particles, each of which produced still more, and so on, to form a “cosmic ray shower.” In 1943 Oppenheimer was placed in charge of the laboratories at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was designed and con structed, and near which it was ex ploded. From 1947 to 1953 he was chairman of the general advisory com mittee to the Atomic Energy Commis sion, and in 1947 he joined the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton Uni versity, a post he held until his retire ment in 1966. After World War II Oppenheimer fought hard for international control of the bomb and was reluctant indeed to press onward to the still further horrors of the hydrogen bomb (though he had approved the use of the fission bomb against Japan). His view was overruled by President Truman in 1949. In 1954, at the very height of that period in American history marked by the influence of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Oppenheimer was labeled “a loyal citizen but not a good security risk” by the Atomic Energy Commission. The equivocal testimony of Teller [1332], who had been ardently in favor of developing the H-bomb, seems to have been the crucial factor in convict 800
[1281] CHERENKOV STANLEY [1282]
ing Oppenheimer of this charge, and Op penheimer was therefore denied access to classified information. Henry Smyth, one of the commissioners, dissented strongly. The Atomic Energy Commis sion pursued an ambivalent attitude by giving him the 1963 Fermi award for his contribution to nuclear research. Presi dent Kennedy intended to award it per sonally, but he was assassinated and President Johnson made the award. In the inevitable controversy that fol lowed, Congress reduced the cash award from $50,000 to $25,000 thereafter. [1281] CHERENKOV, Pavel Alekseye vich
Soviet physicist Born: Voronezh, July 15, 1904 Cherenkov, bom of a peasant family, graduated from Voronezh University in 1928 and after 1930 worked at the Insti tute of Physics of the Soviet Academy of Science.
His important discovery involved the velocity of high-energy particles. The greater the energy of a subatomic parti cle, the more rapidly it travels; never theless it can never move more rapidly than the velocity of light in a vacuum. However, light traveling through a transparent medium, like water, travels more slowly than in a vacuum. A high- energy particle passing through such a medium may well exceed the velocity of light in that medium. When it does, it throws back a “wake” of light, which is termed Cherenkov radiation. Cherenkov observed the radiation first in 1934, and Frank [1340] and Tamm [1180] explained the cause of it in 1937. The Cherenkov radiation has been used to activate a counter so that very high-energy particles can be detected while other particles are allowed to pass unnoticed. These devices are known as Cherenkov counters. The volocity of the particle can be calculated from the direc tion in which the light is given off. Such counters have been useful, for instance, in the discovery of the antiproton by Segrè [1287]. For this discovery, Cherenkov, Frank, and Tamm shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in physics. [1282] STANLEY, Wendell Meredith American biochemist
16, 1904 Died: Salamanca, Spain, June 15, 1971
In Earlham College Stanley played football and looked upon that as his great interest. He planned to be a foot ball coach, in fact. However, while visit ing the University of Illinois, he was so incautious as to get into a discussion with a professor of chemistry. This opened his eyes to a new interest and he went to Illinois for graduate work in chemistry. He never became a football coach. Stanley obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1929. After post doctorate studies in Germany with Wie land [1048], he went to work for the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Re search (now Rockefeller University) in 1931, and in 1946 he joined the faculty of the University of California where he remained for the rest of his life. In the early 1930s Northrop [1148] excited the chemical world by substan tiating the work of Sumner [1120] through the crystallization of pepsin and other enzymes. That mysterious entity the enzyme was thus reduced to some thing palpable and known—a protein molecule. What about that equally mys terious entity, the virus? It had first been detected by Beijerinck [817] a generation before, but had remained an impalpable something in solution ever since. Stanley set about preparing a large quantity of tobacco mosaic virus by growing tobacco and infecting it. He mashed up the infected leaves and then put the mash through the usual proce dures used by chemists to crystallize pro teins, since he was reasonably certain the virus was a protein molecule. In 1935 he obtained fine needlelike crystals which he isolated and found to possess all the 801
[1283] FORSSMANN NÉEL [1285]
infective properties of the virus, and in high concentration. This was hard for many to accept. A crystalline enzyme was one thing, for an enzyme was an incontrovertibly nonliv ing substance. A virus, however, can reproduce itself within cells and that is at least one important criterion of life, perhaps even the key criterion. To crys tallize an object that possessed some of these criteria seemed truly to poise the virus on the boundary between life and nonlife. There was a tendency to argue that the virus was one or the other, and considerable heat was generated. Many other viruses have since been crystallized and all have been found to be nucleoproteins. The work of men like Fraenkel-Conrat [1355] has clearly shown that the nucleic acid portion of the nucleoprotein and not the protein portion is the key to virus activity. For this reason the problem of viruses has merged with that of genes (also nucleo protein in nature) and, beginning with the work of Crick [1406] and Watson [1480], with that of nucleic acids in gen eral.
For his feat Stanley shared the 1946 Nobel Prize in chemistry with those other crystallizers Sumner and Northrop. During World War II Stanley worked on the influenza virus and on the prepara tion of vaccines against the disease. In 1948 he established a virus labora tory at the University of California, serv ing as its head till his retirement in 1969. He died while attending a virus conference in Salamanca. [1283] FORSSMANN, Werner German surgeon
many, June 1, 1979 Forssmann was captured by American forces during World War II and spent some time in a prison camp. He was a surgeon before that episode, however, and he continued his surgical work after he was released. He was the first to work out a practi cal system for cardiac catheterization. He inserted a catheter in a vein in the elbow (his own elbow), a catheter that was opaque to radiation so that its course could be followed by an X ray, and maneuvered it safely along the vein till it reached the heart. This made it possible, in theory, to study the structure and function of an ailing heart and make more accurate diagnoses without surgery. The technique was ignored, however, till Cournand [1181] and D. W. Richards [1184] further improved it. All three then shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in consequence. [1284] FRISCH, Otto Robert Austrian-British physicist Born: Vienna, Austria, October 1, 1904
Died: September 22, 1979 Frisch, a nephew of Lise Meitner [1060], obtained his Ph.D. at the Univer sity of Vienna in 1926. He went on to teach at Berlin and at Hamburg, but as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933, he made his way to England. From 1934 to 1939 he was at Bohr’s [1101] laboratory in Copenhagen, and when his aunt fled Germany and evolved the suggestion that uranium was under going fission under neutron bombard ment, Frisch collaborated in the paper that resulted. He hastened to bring the matter to Bohr’s attention even before publication. Bohr took the news to the United States and the rest is history. After World War II, Frisch made a name for himself as a science writer for the layman on atomic physics. [1285] NÉEL, Louis Eugène Félix (nay- ellO
French physicist Born: Lyon, November 22, 1904 Néel obtained his doctorate at the University of Strasbourg in 1932, then remained on the faculty of the university till 1945, after which he moved on to the University of Grenoble. He interested himself primarily in the magnetic properties of solids. Where fer romagnetic substances (such as iron, no toriously) have all the atoms with their 802
[1286] HERZBERG
SEGRÈ [1287]
north magnetic poles pointing in the same direction if the temperatures are not too high, he pointed out, there are also “antiferromagnetic” substances, where alternate rows of atoms have op posite magnetic orientation so that there is no overall magnetism. In some cases, though, the alternation is stronger in one direction than the other, so that there is a net magnetism which he called “fer- rimagnetism.” In this way, he was able to explain some of the magnetic properties of the rocks of the earth’s crust, and synthetic ferrites could be prepared with proper ties suitable for use in computer memo ries. Neel, as a result, shared the 1970 Nobel Prize for physics with Alfven [1335], whose studies of magnetism were in space, as Neel’s were of the earth’s crust.
[1286] HERZBERG, Gerhard German-Canadian physical chem ist
cember 25, 1904 Herzberg obtained his doctoral degree at the Darmstadt Institute of Technology in 1928. In 1935 he fled Germany, which had fallen under the brutal tyr anny of Hitler, and went to Canada. He studied with great care the spectra of gases, especially the simple two-atom molecules of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide. He showed the relationship of the details of the spectra to their structure and could detect the presence of evanescent atom groupings that are intermediates in chemical reac tions. He could also identify the spectra of certain atom combinations in inter stellar gas. For his work he received the 1971 Nobel Prize for chemistry. [1287] SEGRE, Emilio (say-gray') Italian-American physicist
1905
Segre, the son of an industrialist, ob tained his Ph.D. at the University of Rome under Fermi [1243] in 1928. He had originally planned to be an engineer but Fermi’s influence drew him to phys ics and in 1932 he had a professorial post at the University of Rome. He was soon involved in Fermi’s work on the neutron bombardment of uranium and in 1936 he accepted a post at the University of Palermo. There he grew particularly interested in the element with atomic number 43. In the 1930s this was the lightest element still undis covered. Ten years earlier, Noddack [1166] had claimed the discovery but that claim remained unconfirmed. To Segrè it seemed that if element 43 could not be found, it could be made through neutron bombardment. He vis ited the University of California and in 1937 Lawrence [1241] gave him a sam ple of molybdenum (element number 42) that had been bombarded by deu terons, a process that, as Oppenheimer [1280] showed, was equivalent to neu tron bombardment. Such bombardment might be expected to produce small quantities of an element with an atomic number one higher than that of molyb denum—that is, element number 43. Segrè took the sample back to Italy and subjected the bombarded molyb denum to chemical analysis, tracing the fate of the radioactivity that had been induced in it. In this way he located small quantities of element number 43. The element was named technetium, from the Greek word for “artificial,” be cause it was the first new element artificially produced. In 1938 Segrè, during another visit to the United States, was removed from his Palermo post by Italy’s Fascist govern ment. Segrè shrugged and remained in the United States, becoming a citizen in 1944. He continued his work at the Univer sity of California and in 1940 was one of those who first synthesized another undiscovered element, atomic number 85. It was named astatine, from a Greek word meaning “unstable.” Both techne tium and astatine are radioactive ele ments with no stable isotopes. Techne tium is the lightest element lacking stable nuclei. 803
[1288] VON EULER ro ssi
After World War II, Segrè became professor of physics at the University of California in 1946 and took part in the search for the antiproton. Dirac [1256] had predicted the existence of antiparti cles. The positron, which is the antiparti cle of the electron, was discovered early in the game by Anderson [1292], for it required energies in the gamma-ray range for its manufacture. Over twenty years had passed and the antiproton re mained undiscovered. However, the an tiproton was 1836 times as massive as the positron and required for its forma tion particles with energies 1836 times as great as that of the typical gamma ray. There were cosmic rays that were en ergetic enough but these were few and far between. It was only when the beva- tron (a large and powerful descendant of Lawrence’s cyclotron) was con structed at the University of California that sufficiently energetic particles were obtainable in quantity. In 1955 Segrè, in collaboration with Owen Chamberlain [1439], reported the formation of an tiprotons through the impact of very high-energy protons on copper atoms. For this feat Segrè and Chamberlain were awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in physics. [1288] YON EULER, Ulf Svante Swedish physiologist
1905
Von Euler obtained his M.D. at Karo- linska Institute in 1930 and remained on its faculty thereafter. He discovered noradrenalin and showed that it served as the chemical intermediary for neuro transmission in the sympathetic nervous system. As a result, he shared the 1970 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine with Axelrod [1374] and Katz [1359]. [1289] ROSSI, Bruno Benedetto Italian-American physicist
Rossi, the son of an electrical engi neer, studied at the universities of Padua and Bologna, obtaining his Ph.D. at the latter institution in 1927. He then taught at Italian universities until 1938. In that year the Mussolini regime had fallen under Hitler’s thumb and Rossi was forced to leave Italy. He traveled first to Bohr’s laboratory in Copenhagen, the Mecca of all physi cists, then to England and finally, in 1939, to the United States, where he worked at the University of Chicago. During World War II he was at Los Alamos engaged in the atomic bomb project, and after the war he moved on to the Massachusetts Institute of Tech nology. In 1930, while he was still in Italy, he took up the problem of the nature of cosmic rays. Compton [1159] had shown they consisted of particles, but what was the nature of those particles? What kind of electric charge did they carry? Rossi pointed out that the earth’s magnetic field ought to deflect them to the east if they were positively charged, but to the west if they were negatively charged. Studies of east-west distribution made it plain that the cosmic ray particles were positively charged; and this led, in turn, to their recognition as high-energy pro tons (and more complicated atomic nu clei). Indeed, it was also Rossi who, in 1931, showed the enormous energies of cosmic ray particles by demonstrating that they could penetrate a yard or more into solid lead.
When the age of rocketry dawned, Rossi eagerly took advantage of the chance of studying cosmic rays in their primary manifestation, before they struck earth’s atmosphere and were ob scured by the production of secondary particles through collisions with air mol ecules. His rocket experiments helped make astronomers aware of the constant stream of particles flowing out from the sun in all directions, up to and past the earth’s orbit—the so-called solar wind. In addition, he was interested to see if the X rays emitted by the sun’s super-hot corona were reflected from the moon. In the search for such reflected X rays, de tectors borne by rockets recorded X rays 804
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