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[1369] BLOCH BRAUN [1370]
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[1369] BLOCH
BRAUN [1370] over, radio astronomy rapidly gained in importance. In 1947 Reber gave his radio telescope to the National Bureau of Standards. Still later, he shifted obser vation posts to Hawaii, then to Australia. If Jansky gave birth to radio astronomy, Reber nursed it singlehanded through its infancy. With Lovell [1386] it came to maturity. [1369] BLOCH, Konrad Emil German-American biochemist Born: Neisse, Silesia (now Nysa, Poland), January 21, 1912 Bloch studied chemical engineering in Germany but in 1934 left that Nazi-con trolled land for Switzerland and then, in 1936, went to the United States, becom ing an American citizen in 1944. He did his graduate work at Columbia Univer sity, switching to biochemistry and work ing under Schoenheimer [1211]. He ob tained his Ph.D. in 1938 and, after teaching at Columbia and at the Univer sity of Chicago, joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1954 as professor of biochemistry. While still at Columbia, he began to apply isotopic techniques to the elucida tion of the manner in which cholesterol was built up in living tissue. Cholesterol is the most common member, in the ani mal body, of a family of compounds of rather complex structure. It includes a characteristic four-ring combination in its molecule, the structure of which was worked out by Wieland [1048]. Bloch made use of a two-carbon com pound, sodium acetate, which was not only labeled with a heavy isotope of car bon but with a heavy isotope of hydro gen as well. Little by little, over the years that followed, Bloch traced the fate of those isotopes and worked out the manner in which the “two-carbon frag ment” was built up into long-chain fatty acids and into cholesterol, too. The reaction required an input of en ergy and Lynen [1360] helped explain that when, in 1951, he showed that the two-carbon fragment performed its func tion in combination with coenzyme A, as Lipmann [1221] had suspected. As a re sult, Bloch and Lynen shared the 1964 Nobel Prize for medicine and physiol ogy.
[1370] BRAUN, Wemher Magnus Max imilian von German-American rocket engi neer
Born: Wirsitz, Germany (now Wyrzysk, Poland), March 23, 1912
16, 1977 The son of a baron, Von Braun was educated in Zürich, Switzerland, and in Berlin. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1934 at the University of Berlin. As an adoles cent Von Braun had grown interested in rocketry through his reading of science fiction and of a book on the subject by Oberth [1172]. In 1930 he joined a group of German enthusiasts, including Ley [1315], who were experimenting with rockets. Some eighty-five rockets were fired, one reaching an altitude of a mile. In 1932 the German army took over the program. Hitler came to power the next year and by 1936 was building a rocket research center in Peenemünde on the Baltic, a place where Von Braun’s grandfather had been accustomed to go duck hunting. In 1938 a rocket with an eleven-mile range had been built. This all became deadly serious, for World War II soon began and rocketry had a crucial military purpose. Von Braun himself joined the Nazi party in 1940 and under his leadership the first true missile, carrying its own fuel and oxygen, was shot off in 1942, reaching a height of sixty miles. In 1944 Von Braun was briefly imprisoned till Hitler was persuaded the rocket program could not continue without him. That same year, on September 7, the missile came into combat use, too late, fortunately to win the war for Hitler. The weapon was the famous V-2 (the V stood for Vergeltung, meaning “ven geance”). In all, 4,300 V-2s were fired during the war, and of these, 1,230 hit London. Von Braun’s missiles killed 841 [1371] fo x
SEABORG [1372] 2,511 English people and seriously wounded 5,869 others. At the close of the war, Von Braun and many colleagues fled westward to surrender to the Americans. In the pro cess, Von Braun’s arm was broken when his driver fell asleep at the wheel and smashed the car. Von Braun was quickly taken to the United States (he became an American citizen in 1955) and he at once placed his talents at the service of his new employer. In 1947 he was allowed to return to Germany to marry his eighteen-year-old second cousin. He was the leader of the group at Huntsville, Alabama, that placed America’s first satellite (Explorer I) into orbit on January 31, 1958, after four months of post-Sputnik American agony. He might have preceded Sputnik if he had been given the go-ahead, but he was as hindered by American policy under Eisenhower as he had been hampered by German policy under Hitler. In 1962 Von Braun’s team began construction of the Saturn 5 rocket that eventually car ried men to the moon. [1371] FOX, Sidney Walter American biochemist
March 24, 1912 Graduating from the University of California in 1933, Fox went on to earn his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1940. After 1955 he taught at institutions in Florida and was associated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration after 1960. Fox was interested in the evolution of life but from what might almost be de scribed as a biological rather than a biochemical standpoint. He departed from the usual procedure of men such as Miller [1490] and Ponnamperuma [1457] of moving from one chemical to the next a step at a time and attempted to study the development of cells. A mixture of amino acids subjected to considerable heat (as might be found on the steaming ocean and in exposed rocks of a volcanic primordial earth) becomes a protein-like polymer which Fox gave the name “proteinoid.” Dissolved in water, these form tiny spheres that share some properties with cells. Indeed, Fox’s speculation is that cells might be formed directly in this fashion from amino acids. It is not beyond the bounds of possi bility, of course, that cell formation and nucleic acid formation proceed in paral lel fashion and that the two combine at some point. [1372] SEABORG, Glenn Theodore American physicist
19, 1912 Seaborg, the son of a machinist, re ceived his education at the University of California, beginning as a literature major, but changing to science in his third year, under the impact of an inspir ing teacher. He graduated in 1934 and obtained his Ph.D. in 1937 under Lewis [1037]. He joined the faculty of the uni versity in the latter year, rising through various grades until appointed chancellor of the university at Berkeley in 1958. Seaborg joined McMillan [1329] in 1940 in work on the elements beyond uranium, and helped isolate plutonium. He took over the direction of this re search after McMillan left in 1941 (and after he himself did work in connection with preparing plutonium for use in an atomic bomb at the University of Chi cago) and studied the chemistry and physics of neptunium and plutonium in detail. He and his group went on to dis cover further elements. In 1944 they identified americium (atomic number 95) and curium (atomic number 96), the former being named in honor of America, the latter for the Curies [897, 965]. In 1949 berkelium (atomic number 97) and californium (atomic number 98) were identified and named in honor of Berkeley, California, where the university is located. Seaborg and his group recognized that the transuranium elements resembled each other, much as the rare earth ele ments did. In fact, starting with actinium 842 [1372] SEABORG
TURING [1375] (atomic number 89) a second set of rare earth elements could be considered to exist. The two sets are distinguished by calling the old one, which begins with lanthanum (atomic number 57) the lanthanides, while the new set is called the actinides. Mendeleev’s [705] three- quarter-century-old periodic table thus received one more modification, one which had, by the way, been predicted by Niels Bohr [1101] some years before. As a result of his work with the trans uranium elements, Seaborg shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in chemistry with McMillan. The discovery of new actinides contin ued. In 1952 came einsteinium (atomic number 99) and in 1953 fermium (atomic number 100), commemorating Einstein [1064] and Fermi [1243] shortly after their deaths. Since then, element number 101 was discovered in 1955 and named mendele vium in honor of Mendeleev. Element number 102 was discovered in 1957 and named nobelium in honor of the Nobel Institute in Stockholm, where much of the work had been done, and therefore indirectly in honor of Nobel [703]. In 1961 element number 103 was identified and named lawrencium in honor of Lawrence [1241], who was now dead. With lawrencium the list of actinides was complete. Since then elements 104 and 105 have also been isolated and named rutherfordium and hahnium, respec tively, after Ernest Rutherford [996] and Hahn [1063]. Seaborg was also one of the group that in 1942 isolated the isotope uranium- 233, which can be prepared from thorium and which, like the better- known uranium-235, can undergo fission. It is, consequently, a valuable nu clear fuel, and the thorium reserves of the world may be added to the uranium reserves as potential fuel for mankind. In 1961 he was appointed to the chair manship of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. The increasing con sciousness of environmental pollution has made the AEC suspect among younger scientists and Seaborg therefore became a controversial figure. In 1970 he was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Sci ence but only after much opposition. [1373] BROWN, Herbert Charles English-American chemist Born: London, May 22, 1912 Brown was taken to the United States by his parents when he was only two years old. He was educated at the Uni versity of Chicago, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1938. He worked with the hydrides of boron and aluminum, discovering sodium boro- hydride, which turned out to be a useful reducing agent in chemical procedures. He explored boron-containing organic compounds, preparing new classes of these, and for this work he received a share of the 1979 Nobel Prize for chem istry. [1374] AXELROD, Julius American biochemist and pharma cologist
Born: New York, New York, May 30, 1912 Axelrod obtained his Ph.D. at George Washington University in 1955. Much of his professional life has been spent with the National Institutes of Health. He has worked on the action of drugs and hor mones, on the chemical side of the trans mission of the nerve impulse, and on the action of the pineal gland in particular. For his work he received a share, with Katz [1359], of the 1970 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine. [1375] TURING, Alan Mathison English mathematician
7, 1954
Turing attended Cambridge University and was elected a fellow of King’s Col lege. Cambridge, in 1935. Between 1936 and 1938 Turing worked at Princeton 843 [1376] w eizs
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LURIA [1377] University in New Jersey and while there dealt with the theoretical concept of the so-called Turing machine, a computer capable of the most general computa tions. He showed that there are some problems it could not solve, a conclusion reminiscent of the work of Godel [1301], During World War II he served with the British Department of Com munications, but after the war he be came interested in electronic computers and designed the first British computers of this sort, not long after the work of Mauchley [1328] and Eckert [1431]. He was particularly interested in the possi bility that computers could be designed to mimic the human process of thinking (“artificial intelligence”) and felt that that could be done. He also tried to work out the mathematical basis for the development of strongly nonsymmetric living systems from what seem to be a symmetric egg cell. He died prematurely of potassium cya nide poisoning, which was considered to have been suicide at the inquest al though it is possible that it was the result of an accident. [1376] WEIZSACKER, Carl Friedrich, Baron von (vites'ek-er) German astronomer Born: Kiel, June 28, 1912 Weizsacker, who obtained his Ph.D. in 1933 at the University of Leipzig, in 1938 evolved independently the same mechanism for the origin of stellar en ergy as Bethe [1308] had. In 1944 Weizsacker went on to make further astronomical headlines by return ing to a form of the nebular hypothesis for the origin of the solar system. It was something like that originally proposed by Kant [293] and Laplace [347] but much more sophisticated. He suggested that the original dust cloud out of which the solar system was formed did not ro tate as a single system (as was supposed in the Kant-Laplace theory) but as a sys tem of vortices. These vortices fell into gradually larger systems with increasing distance, the increase in size just match ing the law of planetary distances worked out by Bode [344], At the boundaries between sets of vortices, par ticles concentrated and fused into plane- tesimals and eventually into planets. This theory avoided the glaring difficulties of the various catastrophic theories of Jeans [1053] and others. Once World War II was over and nor mal scientific communication was re stored, Weizsacker’s ideas were brought to the attention of the rest of the world by Gamow [1278] and proved instantly popular.
To be sure, the theory had numerous difficulties and has been modified by tak ing magnetic forces into account in an attempt to remove them. As a result, the weight of astronomic thought has swung away from catastrophe and toward neb ula. If Weizsacker’s theory, or anything like it, is correct, then the formation of a set of planets is a normal part of the ev olution of stars and the universe is rich in planetary systems. Van de Kamp’s [1247] observations do, indeed, tend to confirm this. This raises the strong possi bility that there may be myriad inhabited planets and even intelligent life forms (other than ourselves) in the universe. [1377] LURIA, Salvador Edward (lu- ree'ah) Italian-American microbiologist Born: Turin, Italy, August 13, 1912
Luria obtained his medical degree at the University of Turin in 1935. He went to the United States in 1940 and was naturalized in 1947. In the United States, he met Delbriick [1313], and since Luria had already been working on bacteriophages at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, they struck up a close relationship. In 1942 Luria obtained the first good electron micrograph of a bac teriophage, showing clearly that it consisted of a round head and a thin tail, rather like an extremely small sperm cell. In 1945 he showed the occurrence of spontaneous mutations both in bac
[1378] PURCELL
PALADE [1380] teriophages and the bacterial cells on which they preyed, something that Her- shey [1341] showed independently. For their work, Luna, Hershey, and Delbrück shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine. [1378] PURCELL, Edward Mills American physicist
30, 1912 Purcell graduated from Purdue Uni versity in 1933. After further studies in Germany he entered Harvard University, where he attained his Ph.D. in 1938. He served on the Harvard faculty thereafter, becoming professor of physics there in 1949. Purcell shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in physics with F. Bloch [1296] for his de termination of the nuclear magnetic mo ments of substances in the liquid and solid state. This made the extremely deli cate technique of nuclear magnetic reso nance (NMR) possible. By that time, however, he had also done significant work in radio astron omy. In 1951 he was one of those who detected the 21-centimeter microwave emission of neutral hydrogen atoms in interstellar space, the radiation of which Oort’s [1229] group had predicted, from theoretical considerations, during World War II. [1379] MOORE, Stanford American biochemist Born: Chicago, Illinois, Septem ber 4, 1913 Moore graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1935 and obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin in 1938. In 1939 he joined the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University), where he worked with Stein [1365] on the chromatographic analysis of amino acids and peptides and the determination of protein and enzyme structure. As a result of this work, he and Moore shared the 1972 Nobel Prize for chemistry. [1380] PALADE, George Emil (pah- lah'dee) Romanian-American physiologist Born: Ia§i, Romania, November 19, 1912 Palade received his medical degree at the University of Bucharest in 1940. He held a professorial post there during World War II. After the war, with Soviet forces occupying Romania, Palade left. He arrived in the United States in 1946 and was naturalized in 1952. At the Rockefeller Institute for Medi cal Research (now Rockefeller Univer sity) in New York City, Palade has spent his time peering into the cell with a finer probe than has ever before been used. The ordinary microscope in the hands of men like Robert Brown [403] and Flemming [762] had revealed first the nucleus within the cell and then the chromosomes within the nucleus. The coming of Zworykin’s [1134] electron microscope had made it possible to study the fine structure of the organelles (little bodies of definite structure and function) within the cell. The relatively large mitochondria at tracted the first attention and proved to be organized batteries of enzymes that brought about the oxidation of fat and sugar molecules, with consequent pro duction of energy. They were the “pow erhouses” of the cell. Also present were far smaller bodies usually referred to as microsomes (meaning, simply, “small bodies”), which were thought of at first as merely mitochondria fragments. Palade’s studies of intact cells by electron microscope, however, showed they were more than that. They were independent bodies with chemical compositions quite different from the mitochondria. By 1956 he had shown that the micro somes were rich in ribonucleic acid (RNA) and they were therefore re named ribosomes. Quickly it was realized that the ribosomes were the site of pro tein manufacture and cellular physiology thus merged with the eclectic science of molecular biology. For his electron-microscopic work, Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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