Biographical encyclopedia
[1187] NODDACK SEMENOV [1189]
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[1187] NODDACK
SEMENOV [1189] granted a professorial post at the Univer sity of Manchester and went on in 1929 to become a professor of mathematics at Oxford. During World War II he took leave to work on problems similar to those that had engaged him in the earlier war.
In pure science he did much work in the 1920s on the solar atmosphere. He worked out methods for determining the temperature of the sun at varying depths and showed that particles could be ejected from the sun at speeds of up to one thousand kilometers per second. This was the birth of the notion of the “solar wind,” which Rossi [1289] was to observe thirty years later. He was also the first to relate stellar explosions and stellar collapse, which was to bear fruit in the work of Chan drasekhar [1356]. In 1932 he worked out a variation of Einstein’s [1064] general relativity, which was called “kinematic relativity,” and he introduced the “cosmological principle” (now generally accepted), which stated that from any galaxy the general appearance of the universe would remain the same. [1187] NODDACK, Ida Eva Tacke German chemist Born: Wesel, Rhenish Prussia, February 25, 1896 Ida Noddack (née Tacke) obtained her doctorate in 1921 and worked with Walter Noddack [1166] at the University of Berlin. Both were engaged in the search for missing elements 43 and 75. Together they discovered the latter, which was named rhenium, after the Rhine River on whose shores Tacke was bom, and mistakenly announced the dis covery of the former as well. In 1926 the two were married and continued their work together. In 1934, when Fermi [1243] reported his first ob servations in the neutron bombardment of uranium, Ida Noddack suggested the possibility of fission. Her remark was ig nored then, but five years later it became apparent that her suggestion was valid. [1188] HENCH, Philip Showalter American physician Born: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, February 28, 1896 Died: Ocho Rios, Jamaica, March 30, 1965 Hench obtained his medical degree at the University of Pittsburgh in 1920, then went on to the University of Min nesota, from which it was an easy leap to the Mayo Clinic, which he first joined in 1921 and where he remained until his retirement in 1957. Hench was particularly interested in rheumatoid arthritis, a painful and crip pling disease. Its symptoms were relieved during pregnancy and during attacks of jaundice, so he conjectured that it was not a germ disease, but a disorder of me tabolism. He tried a number of chemi cals, including hormones, in an effort to discover something that would bring re lief. Since his colleague Kendall [1105] was so interested in the corticoids, Hench kept his eye on them. In the mid-1940s, when corticoids were synthesized and reasonable quanti ties were available for the first time, he began to experiment with Compound E, which had been given the name cor tisone. World War II, during which he served as a colonel in the Army Medical Corps, delayed matters till 1948. Then, to his pleased surprise, tests showed that cor tisone worked well, and as a result he along with Kendall and Reichstein [1201] received the 1950 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. Although cor tisone has turned out to be a tricky ma terial, to be used only with great care and judgment, it is another potent weapon in the modem armory of hor mone therapy. [1189] SEMENOV, Nikolay Nikolaevich (sih-myoh'nof) Soviet physical chemist
Semenov was educated at the Univer sity of St. Petersburg, which he entered in 1913, and from which he graduated in 751 [1190] CAROTHERS MULLIKEN
1917, by then renamed the University of Petrograd, in the midst of the disorders of war and revolution. He remained in research institutions in Leningrad (still another new name for St. Petersburg), attaining professorial rank in 1928. In 1944 he joined the staff of Moscow State University. During the 1920s he worked on chain- reaction mechanisms and on the theory of thermal explosions. He developed the theory of branched chain reactions. In 1956 he shared the Nobel Prize in chem istry with Hinshelwood [1200], He was the first Soviet citizen to win a Nobel Prize. [1190] CAROTHERS, Wallace Hume American chemist
1896
Died: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 29, 1937 Carothers’ father rose to be vice-pres ident of a small commercial college in Des Moines and in 1914 young Carothers entered that college to study accounting. He was interested in science, however, and in 1915 entered a college in which he could study that subject. The second was also a small institution and in it he was forced to teach chemistry, since the only chemistry teacher had left during World War I and it was impossi ble to get another. He did his graduate work at the Uni versity of Illinois, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1924. He tried his hand at teaching both there and at Harvard Uni versity, but teaching did not appeal to him. It was research that interested him. In 1928 the Du Pont company was planning to initiate a program in basic research and hired Carothers to run it. Carothers was interested in the study of polymers, molecules with long chain like molecules. He investigated synthetic rubbers with Nieuwland [1058], for in stance, and developed neoprene. In 1930 Carothers began work with diamines and dicarboxylic acids, joining them in link ages that were similar to those in silk and forming synthetic fibers. In the pro cess, he confirmed Staudinger’s [1074] theories of polymer structure, which held such substances to consist of long-chain molecules. In 1931 Carothers found one fiber that, after stretching, became even stronger than silk. He had discovered one variety of the type of fiber that was to be called nylon. Carothers, subject to deep depressions, particularly after the death of a beloved twin sister in 1936, died a suicide when he had just turned forty-one and did not live to see what was to come of nylon. In 1938 it began to be used for toothbrush bristles but its production for the general public was delayed by World War H, during which it was put to military use only. After the war, however, it ap peared in an almost endless variety of ways both as a fiber and as a solid mate rial, wherever toughness and strength combined with lightness was needed. The coming of nylon marked the be ginning of a new era of synthetic fibers that burst upon the world after World War II, when chemists like Ziegler [1215] and Natta [1263] learned methods for directing more accurately the detailed structure of the large mole cules being formed. In this area, infor mation concerning chemical reaction mechanisms, gathered by men such as Hinshelwood [1200] and Semenov [1189], was particularly useful. [1191] MULLIKEN, Robert Sanderson American chemist
setts, June 7, 1896 Mulliken, the son of a professor of chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed in his father’s foot steps, studying chemistry and graduating from M.I.T. in 1917. He went on to the University of Chicago, where he gained his Ph.D. in 1921. His chemical interests lay in molecular structure, but with the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s it be came clear that the intimate details of the molecule would not be worked out by classical chemical methods but re quired the mathematical techniques of the new physics. Mulliken shifted from
[1192] c o m
c o m
chemistry to physics, therefore, and in 1926 was an associate professor of phys ics at New York University. In 1928 he moved on to the University of Chicago, where he remained until 1965, when he joined the Institute of Molecular Biophy sics at Florida State University. Mulliken discarded the earlier notion that electrons circled nuclei in orbits somehow analogous to those met with in astronomy. Instead, he accepted the Schrödinger [1117] view of the electron as a kind of standing wave forming a cloud of electronic matter about or be tween nuclei. The electron existed in “or bitals.”
This new view made it far easier to understand interactions between mole cules, and in 1966 Mulliken received the Nobel Prize in chemistry. [1192] CORI, Gerty Theresa Radnitz Czech-American biochemist Born: Prague, Austria-Hungary (now Czechoslovakia), August 15, 1896
ber 26, 1957 Gerty Radnitz entered the medical school of the University of Prague in 1914. There she met Carl Cori [1194] as a classmate. After both had obtained their medical degrees in 1920, they mar ried. She shared the labor of research with him, and eventually, the 1947 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. As a husband-and-wife team in research, they were equaled only by the Curies [897, 965] and the Joliot-Curies [1204, 1227], The similarity in names between the Curies and the Coris is a curious co incidence. [1193] KING, Charles Glen American biochemist Born: Entiat, Washington, Octo ber 22, 1896 King attended Washington State Col lege, graduating in 1918, and obtained his doctorate at the University of Pitts burgh in 1923. He served on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh till 1942 and, later, on that of Columbia Univer sity. The high point in King’s career came in 1932, when a long series of investi gations culminated in the isolation of vi tamin C. Its structure was quickly deter mined and it was synthesized by men like Haworth [1087] and Reichstein [1201] in 1933. [1194] CORI, Carl Ferdinand Czech-American biochemist Born: Prague, Austria-Hungary (now Czechoslovakia), December 15, 1896 Cori’s father was a zoologist and the director of the Marine Biological Station in Trieste (then, like Prague, a part of Austria-Hungary) and Cori was edu cated in that city. His medical training, however, was at the University of Prague and he obtained his medical de gree there in 1920. In the same year he married Gerty Theresa Radnitz [1192], a classmate, who became his lifelong part ner in research. During World War I, Cori served in the Austrian Sanitary Corps on the Ital ian front. After the war the Coris spent some years in a shattered Austria, then in 1922 emigrated to the United States, becoming American citizens in 1928. They worked on cancer research in Buffalo first, but in 1931 they joined the faculty of Washington University Medi cal School in St. Louis, Missouri, where Cori eventually came to head the depart ment of biological chemistry. During the 1930s the Coris investi gated how glycogen, the carbohydrate stored in liver and muscle, broke down in the body and was resynthesized. Meyerhof [1095], two decades earlier, had made it quite plain that in working muscle, glycogen was converted to lactic acid, but the Coris were after the details of the conversion. They isolated a hitherto unknown compound from muscle tissue; glucose-1- phosphate is the proper name, though it is often called Cori ester, in their honor. Glycogen, it turned out, did not break down to glucose molecules by the addi tion of water molecules at the links be 753 [1195] ENDERS
ENDERS [1195] tween the glucose units in the chainlike glycogen structure (as would seem the most direct and simplest route). Instead, inorganic phosphate was added at those links to form phosphate-containing Cori ester. If glycogen were hydrolyzed to glu cose, there would have been a pro nounced energy loss and this energy would have had to be restored for the glycogen to be re-formed from glucose. Glycogen synthesis, under those circum stances, would have been difficult. The formation of glucose-1-phosphate instead involved little energy change and the bal ance between glycogen and glucose-1- phosphate could therefore be easily shifted in either direction. The glucose-1-phosphate was changed to the allied compound glucose-6- phosphate and this in turn underwent other changes through a whole series of phosphate-containing compounds. Pains takingly the Coris detected these and fitted them into the proper niches of the breakdown course. One of the interme diates proved to be fructose-1, 6- diphosphate, the ester first discovered by Harden [947] a generation earlier. With the elucidation of the role of the high-energy phosphates by Lipmann [1221] a few years afterward, the part played by these phosphate-containing compounds in converting the chemical energy of carbohydrates into forms us able by the body was clarified. The Coris, for their work on glycogen breakdown, shared with Houssay [1115] the 1947 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. [1195] ENDERS, John Franklin American microbiologist
icut, February 10, 1897 Ender’s education at Yale was inter rupted by World War I, during which he served as a flying instructor. He gradu ated in 1920. Though his father was a successful and wealthy businessman, Enders had no talent for business him self, and after a halfhearted attempt in real estate he entered Harvard University for graduate work. He nearly obtained a doctorate in English, but contact with medical students helped him find that he preferred the medical sciences to litera ture and it was in bacteriology that he finally obtained his doctorate in 1930. After that he served on the faculty of Harvard University Medical School. Enders grew interested in viruses, and like other virologists he recognized that many difficulties originated from the fact that one could not culture viruses outside an organism. Bacteria could be cultured in test tubes on nutrient broths; by ratio nalizing the methods of such culture, Koch [767] and his followers had done great things. Viruses, however, could not be treated so conveniently, though an important advance came when it was found they could be grown in live chick embryos. (Remove a small section of the shell of a fertilized hen’s egg and you have your “nutrient broth.”) Enders realized, however, that the liv ing cells in which viruses might grow need not necessarily be parts of intact organisms, embryonic or otherwise, or even intact organs. With his co-workers, Weller [1397] and Robbins [1410], Enders in 1948 grew mumps virus in mashed-up chick embryos, bathed in blood. This sort of thing had been tried before but had failed because bacteria also grew in the tissues and made the preparation impossible to work with. However, Enders had the key, now. Fleming’s [1077] penicillin was available, thanks to the work of Florey [1213] and Chain [1306], and by the addition of penicillin to the mashed tissue, bacterial growth was stopped while viral growth remained unaffected. The group then turned to poliomy elitis, the dreaded crippling disease that destroyed nerves and left bodies para lyzed for life. Research in polio had been hampered by the fact that the virus could only be grown in living nerve tis sue of men or monkeys. Enders had some polio virus on hand and thought it would be interesting to see if this virus, like that of mumps, could be made to grow on embryonic tis sue scraps laced with antibiotic. In 1949 he obtained tissue from human embryos (stillborn) and successfully grew polio virus upon it. The virus was made to
[1196] LYOT
COCKCROFT [1198] grow on other types of tissue scraps as well. Once this was done, polio virus could be studied easily and in quantity. The way was opened for the type of research that led to the development of antipolio vaccines by Salk [1393] and Sabin [1311] in the 1950s. For their work on virus cultures, Enders, Weller, and Robbins shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in medicine and physi ology. [1196] LYOT, Bernard Ferdinand (lee-oh') French astronomer Born: Paris, February 27, 1897 Died: on a train near Cairo, Egypt, April 2, 1952 Lyot, the son of a surgeon, obtained his doctorate at the University of Paris. His specialty was instrumentation. He devised techniques for taking pictures in rapid succession and blending them in such a way as to minimize the effect of the emulsion grain and in this way pho tographed Mars with unprecedented clarity. In 1924 he improved methods for de tecting and studying polarized light and showed that the polarization charac teristics of moonlight could arise from a surface coating of volcanic ash; by 1929 similar studies of Venus convinced him that its cloud layer was composed of water. His most remarkable instrumental vic tory, however, was his invention, in 1930, of the coronagraph. This focused the light of the sun on an opaque disc and cut out all scattered light from the atmosphere and from the lens itself. Mounting a telescope in the clear air of the Pyrénées, Lyot managed to observe the inner corona, at least, in broad day light. Astronomers no longer had to wait for total eclipse to study the coronal spectral lines. By 1937 Lyot’s photographs showed the corona to be rotating at about the same speed as the solar disc itself. Close attention to its spectral lines showed that the postulated unknown element “coro- nium” did not exist and that the lines at tributed to it were produced by highly ionized atoms of such metals as iron. In fact, in 1942 it was shown that coronal temperatures were in the range of 1,000,000°C, and still later rocket obser vations showed that the high-temperature corona emitted X rays. He died of a heart attack on his way back from Khartoum, Sudan, where he had been observing a solar eclipse. [1197] HASSEL, Odd Norwegian physical chemist
Hassel obtained his Ph.D. at the Uni versity of Berlin in 1924 and joined the faculty of the University of Oslo in 1925. In 1930 he began studies on the three dimensional shape of cyclohexane and its derivatives, compounds with a ring of six carbon atoms. He showed that the ring could exist in two three-dimensional shapes (called “boat” and “chair”) and that this affected the nature of the reac tions of such compounds. Once the Germans occupied Norway in 1940, Hassel stopped publishing in German journals but used Scandinavian journals instead, so that his work was not widely read. He suffered two years of imprisonment by the Germans from 1943 to 1945, along with other faculty members of the University of Oslo. After World War II his work on three dimensional structures (“conformational analysis”) became known. By this time Barton [1427] was working on the sub ject independently. Hassel and Barton shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for chemis try.
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