Biographical encyclopedia
[1407] FRIEDMAN ROBBINS [1410]
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[1407] FRIEDMAN
ROBBINS [1410] considerable and heartening progress was being made. Crick spent 1959 and 1960 in the United States, lecturing at Harvard, Rockefeller, and at Johns Hopkins uni versities. In 1980, Crick advanced notions of the seeding of life on planets, including possibly Earth, that are reminiscent of Arrhenius’ [894] earlier theories. [1407] FRIEDMAN, Herbert American astronomer
June 21, 1916 The son of an art dealer, Friedman graduated from Brooklyn College in 1936. He went on to Johns Hopkins University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1940. He has been working in govern ment centers since. Immediately after World War II, when captured V-2 rockets were made avail able for American research, Friedman began to occupy himself with the study of X rays in outer space. This was virgin territory, for X rays produced by heav enly bodies cannot penetrate earth’s at mosphere. In 1949 he demonstrated that the sun emits X rays and by 1956 had showed that the solar flares were one source. In 1958, during rocket observations while an eclipse was in progress, he showed that X rays were being produced by the sun’s corona, which was not surprising in view of the high temperature of the corona. By 1960 he had actually taken an X-ray photograph of the sun. In 1963, rocket experiments by Rossi [1289] indicated the presence of X-ray sources other than the sun, and Fried man at once began to search the heavens intensively for “X-ray stars.” Many have been discovered and this roused interest in their possible identity as “neutron stars,” super-dense objects made up of neutrons in contact so that all the mass of a star like our sun would be con densed into a body a few miles across. Zwicky [1209] had predicted their possi ble existence. [1408] SHKLOVSKII, Iosif Samuilovich Soviet astrophysicist
Shklovskii graduated from Moscow University in 1938 and has served on its faculty since. He is best known for his synchrotron-emission theory of radio sources. He first proposed this in 1953 in connection with the Crab nebula, suggesting that high-energy particles emitted by it, caught in the magnetic field and following curved pathways, emitted radio waves. He applied this in general fashion to other radio sources. Shklovskii, along with Sagan [1504] and Drake [1491], has been interested in the search for extraterrestrial intelli gence.
[1409] PROKHOROV, Alexander Mik hailovich Soviet physicist
ents), July 11, 1916 Prokhorov graduated from Leningrad University in 1939. As was true of al most all Russians in the terrible decade that followed, his career was interrupted by the war with Germany. He served in the Red Army from 1941 to 1944. With the war victoriously concluded, he went on to get his doctorate in 1946. About the time Townes [1400] was working out the principle of the maser, Prokhorov and Basov [1452] were doing the same in the Soviet Union. Townes was the first actually to build such a de vice but the Soviet accomplishment in theory was significant. In 1959 Prokhorov was awarded the Lenin Prize for his work on the maser and in 1964 he and Basov shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Townes. [1410] ROBBINS, Frederick Chapman American microbiologist
25, 1916 Robbins, the son of a plant physiol ogist, graduated from the University of 861
[1411] DAUSSET
o ’ k e e f e [1412] Missouri in 1936, and then like Weller [1397] obtained his medical degree from Harvard University Medical School in 1940. Again like Weller he served as a medical officer during World War II (in the Mediterranean area rather than the Caribbean). After the war, he too joined Enders’ [1195] group. In 1948 he married the daughter of Nobel Prize winner John Howard Northrop [1148], It isn’t every son-in law of a Nobel laureate who can match the feat. But Joliot-Curie [1227] did it, and Robbins did it too, when he shared with Enders and Weller the 1954 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. In 1952 he joined the faculty of Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. [1411] DAUSSET, Jean (doh-say') French physician
October 10, 1916 Dausset received his M.D. from the University of Paris in 1945. Once the war was over he did postgraduate work at Harvard Medical School, then re turned to France, where he was placed in charge of the national blood transfu sion center. In 1952 Dausset discovered that the blood serum from patients who had re ceived many blood transfusions could cause the white cells and the platelets (but not the red blood corpuscles) of other individuals to agglutinate. In other words, patients develop antibodies to the blood they accept eventually. The nature and amount of these antibodies could be used to predict the compatibility of tis sues intended for grafting and was useful in organ transplantation. For this, Dausset shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine with Snell [1275] and Benacerraf [1442]. [1412] O’KEEFE, John Aloysius American physicist Born: Lynn, Massachusetts, Octo ber 13, 1916 O’Keefe attended Harvard University, graduating in 1937, then went on for graduate work at the University of Chi cago, from which he obtained his Ph.D. in 1941. He has been with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) since 1958. O’Keefe’s greatest achievement came in connection with Project Vanguard. This was the United States’ first satellite program, one which, for a variety of reasons, was not successful. On March 17, 1958, however, it did succeed in placing a small three-pound satellite (Vanguard I) in orbit. This was small even for an American satellite and the Soviets (who had succeeded in placing large satellites in orbit) were amused. However, the satellite was sent high enough to avoid atmospheric friction and to secure an orbit that would persist for centuries. Its small radio transmitter (the only instrument it carried) was powered by solar battery and was expected to last for years. Its orbit, followed over many revolutions, yielded considerable infor mation concerning the fine details of earth’s shape. For instance, the pull of the earth’s equatorial bulge seemed to be not quite symmetrical, and it varied a bit depend ing on whether the satellite was north or south of the equator. O’Keefe analyzed the motions of the satellite and showed that the southern half of the equatorial bulge was up to fifty feet farther from the earth’s center than the northern part. (To detect fifty feet in four thousand miles is indeed an achievement.) At the same time, the North Pole, counting from sea level, is one hundred feet far ther from the center than the South Pole (sea level) is. The earth has, in consequence, been termed pear-shaped, though actually its pear-shapedness is not sufficient to be de tected by any but the most refined tech niques. O’Keefe points out that this asymmetry could not be maintained against the smoothing-out effect of earth’s gravitational field, unless the un derlying rock of earth’s mantle was con siderably more rigid than had earlier been supposed. This may have an impor tant effect on theories of how mountain ranges originate. 8 6 2
[1413] WILKINS
KENDREW [1415] [1413] WILKINS, Maurice Hugh Fred erick New Zealand-British physicist Born: Pongaroa, New Zealand, December 15, 1916 Wilkins, the son of a physician, was taken to England when he was six. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham in 1940 and was early interested in astronomy and in the his tory of the telescope. During World War II he was one of the British scientists cooperating with the Americans in their work on the development of the atomic bomb. In those years he worked at the University of California. After the war he turned away from nuclear physics, partly out of a revulsion against the bomb, a revulsion that struck other physicists too, notably Urey [1164]. A book by Schrodinger [1117] on the nature of life turned his attention to biological problems and he developed the desire to attack them by physical methods.
Laue [1068] and the Braggs [922, 1141] had shown, a generation earlier, that X rays could be diffracted by the regular spacing of atoms in a crystal and that from the manner of the diffraction the positioning of the atoms within a crystal could be deduced. The same (in more complicated fashion) could be done for a large fibrous molecule built up of repetitions of chemical units. (Fi brous molecules generally are built up of such repetitions.) From the details of the diffraction can be determined the size of the units, the spacing between them, and other facts. Wilkins prepared DNA fibers from a viscous solution of that compound and subjected them to X-ray diffraction. From the data so obtained, Crick [1406] and James Dewey Watson [1480] were able to deduce their celebrated Watson- Crick model of DNA structure and all three shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. [1414] PRIGOGENTE, Ilya Russian-Belgian physical chemist Born: Moscow, January 25, 1917 Prigogine was born just before the Russian Revolution broke out. When he was a child, he was taken by his family, who were fleeing the disorders that fol lowed, to Western Europe. Eventually, they settled in Belgium. He studied at the Free University of Brussels where he eventually became a professor of physi cal chemistry. Prigogine applied himself to the prob lem of the second law of thermo dynamics, first enunciated in its full form by Clausius [633] nearly a century before. The second law asserts that the spontaneous change is in the direction of increasing disorder. And yet there are phenomena that seem to move sponta neously toward increasing order—the phenomenon of life particularly. To be sure, life cannot be considered by itself, and as part of a larger entity including energy supply from the sun particularly, overall change is in the direction in dicated by the second law. Nevertheless, there is a problem as to how life main tains order within this total entity and Prigogine produced mathematical models to show how this could be done within the requirements of the second law. For this he received the 1977 Nobel Prize for chemistry. [1415] KENDREW, John Cowdery English biochemist Born: Oxford, March 24, 1917 Kendrew was educated at Cambridge University, graduating in 1939, and after work with the Ministry of Aircraft Pro duction during World War II returned to that university to obtain his Ph.D. in 1949. There he came under the aegis of Perutz [1389], who was building a team of molecular biologists that also included Crick [1406], The problem in which Perutz and Kendrew were interested was the fine structure of the protein molecule. Emil Fischer [833] had worked out the basic amino acid skeleton of the molecule half a century before, and during the 1950s Sanger [1426] was working out his methods of determining the order of the 863 [1416] WOODWARD
WOODWARD [1416]
amino acids in the skeleton. It remained, however, to see how the amino acid chain was arranged within the protein molecule as it actually existed. For this purpose the most suitable technique seemed to be X-ray diffrac tion, which could be used to detect over all regularities in a large molecule, as Wilkins [1413] was doing in the case of nucleic acid. Here, however, something more was required: the exact position of each atom. Perutz took hemoglobin as his own prey and handed the simpler molecule of myoglobin (rather like hemoglobin but only a quarter the size) to Kendrew. The hemoglobin molecule contains some thing like 12,000 atoms, but half of these are hydrogen atoms, small enough not to affect the X rays. This still leaves 6,000 atoms, each capable of affecting the X rays, a tremendously complicated situation. The smaller molecule of myo globin still disposes of 1,200 such atoms; not as bad, but bad enough. For several years the X-ray diffraction pictures were studied and analyzed. The complicated patterns could be analyzed only by high-speed computers of types that only became available in the late 1950s. Kendrew’s simpler molecule of myoglobin fell into place by 1960. Every atom could then be pinpointed, and a three-dimensional picture of the myoglo bin molecule could be drawn accurately. Pauling [1236] had shown a decade ear lier that fibrous proteins possessed a heli cal chain. Now Kendrew could show that globular proteins as represented by myoglobin, which did not tend to form fibers, nevertheless had molecules in which the helix was the basic structure. Perutz’s hemoglobin quickly followed and Perutz and Kendrew consequently shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in chemis try.
[1416] WOODWARD, Robert Burns American chemist Born: Boston, Massachusetts, April 10, 1917 Died: Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 8, 1979 Woodward was a chemist from boy hood. Like Perkin [734] and Hall [933], he had a chemistry laboratory at home as a teenager. He entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology at sixteen and would have flunked out at seventeen had the faculty not recognized what they had. They organized a special program for him and allowed him complete free dom. In 1936, when his class was gradu ating with bachelor’s degrees, Wood ward, at twenty, had earned his Ph.D. He entered Harvard University immedi ately afterward as a postdoctoral fellow and accepted a position on the faculty in 1938 (when he was still only twenty- one). He remained at Harvard thereaf ter, becoming a full professor in 1950. The early promise of his school years bore its first remarkable fruit when in 1944 he and William von Eggers Doer ing succeeded in synthesizing quinine. It was total synthesis, meaning that they had started with compounds that could in turn be synthesized from the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. At no stage in the synthesis was it neces sary to make use of some intermediate that could be obtained only from living or once-living organisms. It was the synthesis of quinine that Perkin had been attempting to bring about, nearly a century before, when he stumbled upon the aniline dyes. Woodward continued to perform amazing feats of synthesis in the decades that followed. The most complicated nonpolymeric molecules (those not built up of numbers of simple units joined into long chains) fell before him. In 1951 he synthesized such steroids as cho lesterol (a fatty substance found, use fully, in the myelin coating of nerves and, most dangerously, on the interior surface of atherosclerotic arteries), and cortisone, the steroid hormone whose im portance in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis had been discovered by Hench [1188] a few years earlier. In 1954 he synthesized strychnine, a fearfully complicated (and poisonous) alkaloid with a molecule built up of seven intricately related rings of atoms. In the same year he synthesized lysergic acid, a compound that had recently been
[1417] CORNFORTH RAINWATER
found to influence mental function. In 1956 he synthesized reserpine, the first of the tranquilizing drugs, which R. W. Wilkins [1320] had introduced to West ern medicine a few years before. In 1960 Woodward synthesized chlo rophyll, the plant pigment whose work ings Calvin [1361] had pieced out over the previous decade and in 1962 he headed a group who, after three years of labor, synthesized a tetracycline antibi otic. Woodward’s accomplishment was a contemporary climax to the long trail of organic syntheses begun by Wohler [515] a century and a half before, and for this reason he was granted a National Medal of Science Award in 1964 and the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1965. [1417] CORNFORTH, Sir John Warcup Australian-British chemist Bom: Sydney, Australia, Septem ber 7, 1917 Cornforth studied at the University of Sydney, then went to Oxford University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1941. He worked thereafter with Robinson [1107] and went on to study the structure of en zyme-substrate complexes. Enzymes cat alyze the chemical changes of particular compounds (substrates) and in doing so temporarily combine with those sub strates. When the union is broken, the substrate has undergone its chemical change. Cornforth, making use of hydro gen isotopes, determined such structures and for this received a share of the 1975 Nobel Prize for chemistry. He was knighted in 1977. [1418] DE DUVE, Christian René Belgian cytologist Born: Thames Ditton, England, October 2, 1917 De Duve was bom of Belgian parents who had escaped to England when the German army invaded Belgium in World War I, and he maintained his Belgian citizenship. He graduated from the Uni versity of Louvain in 1941, when Bel gium was once more occupied by the Germans.
He worked both in Belgium and in the United States and probed the cellular in terior with the electron microscope, dis covering the “lysozymes,” organelles that handle the cell’s ingested nutrients, breaking down the larger particles. As a result he shared the 1974 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine with his fellow electron-microscopists, Claude [1222] and Palade [1380]. [1419] HUXLEY, Andrew Fielding English physiologist Bom: London, November 22, 1917
Huxley, a grandson of T. H. Huxley [659], graduated from Cambridge Uni versity in 1938 and obtained his master’s degree there in 1941. He collaborated with A. L. Hodgkin [1387] in working out the “sodium pump” mechanism of nerve impulse transmission and shared with him and with Eccles [1262] in the 1963 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine. Since 1960 he has been a professor of physiology at University College in Lon don. [1420] RAINWATER, Leo James American physicist Bom: Council, Idaho, December 9, 1917
Rainwater received his college educa tion at the California Institute of Tech nology, then went on to Columbia Uni versity, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1946. He remained there on the faculty and by 1952 was a full professor. In 1949 he heard Townes [1400] spec ulate on the possibility that the assump tion that the nucleus was spherical in shape might be an oversimplication. Rainwater therefore began to consider the possibility that the protons and neu trons on the outer rim of the nucleus might be subjected to centrifugal effects that might create nuclear asymmetries. Aage Bohr [1450] was then at Colum- 865
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