Biographical encyclopedia
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792 [1265] BUTENANDT THEOEELL [1267]
1927 obtained his Ph.D. at the Univer sity of Gottingen, where he worked under Windaus [1046], Three years later he was director of the organic chemical laboratories there. Butenandt’s outstanding work lay in the isolation and identification of the structure of the sex hormones. The first such hormone to be isolated was estrone, which Butenandt obtained in 1929 from the urine of pregnant women. It is one of several substances, secreted by ovar ian cells in small quantities, that are re sponsible for the development of sexual maturity in the woman. In 1931 Butenandt isolated andros- terone, an important male sex hormone produced by cells of the testicles. It ac complishes for men in its way what es trone accomplishes for women. Bu tenandt began with but 15 milligrams (about a two-thousandth of an ounce) of androsterone; but using the microana lytical methods developed by Pregl [982], he was able to make two analyses of the elements and to prepare a modification of the compound that he could also analyze. This was enough to make it possible for Butenandt to deduce a formula for the compound. In 1934 Ruiiika [1119] synthesized a compound with Butenandt’s suggested structure from another and somewhat similar compound. The synthetic product was found to have all the properties of androsterone, so that Butenandt’s detec tive work was shown to be correct. In 1934 Butenandt isolated proges terone, another female sex hormone, one of vital importance to the chemical mechanisms involved in pregnancy. Butenandt was made director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochem istry at Berlin in 1936 and in 1939 he shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Ruzidka. As was the case with Domagk [1183], another German to win a Nobel Prize that year, and Kuhn [1233], who had won it the year before, Butenandt was forced by the Nazi government to refuse the prize. It was not until 1949, with both World War II and Hitler finished, that he could accept. After the war he taught at the University of Tubin gen and after 1956 at the University of Munich. In 1960 he succeeded Hahn [1063] as president of the Max Planck Society.
[1266] PINCUS, Gregory American biologist Born: Woodbine, New Jersey, April 9, 1903 Died: Boston, Massachusetts, Au gust 22, 1967 Pincus graduated from Cornell in 1924 and then went to Harvard, where he obtained his doctorate in 1927. He did postdoctorate work in England and Germany. From 1944 on, he was as sociated with the Worcester Foundation of Experimental Biology at Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, which was established that year by himself and Hudson Hoag- land.
Interested particularly in reproductive physiology, he contributed to the discov ery of a method of so altering female physiology by means of synthetic hor mones as to keep her infertile without al tering her capacity for sexual enjoyment. This is a situation that takes place natu rally during pregnancy and the synthetic hormone duplicates that condition. In pill form, the compound becomes an oral contraceptive that is far more convenient and less undignified than any other means of divorcing sex from im pregnation. In the first few years of its use, the pill accelerated a revolution to ward greater sexual freedom. It may also succeed in lowering the birth rate in time to prevent the absolute disaster that in creasing overpopulation will otherwise inevitably bring down upon the human race. [1267] THEORELL, Axel Hugo Teodor (tee'o-rell) Swedish biochemist Born: Linkopin, Ostergotland, July 6, 1903 Theorell, the son of a physician, ob tained a medical degree in 1930 from 793
[1268] LEAKEY
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the Caroline Institute in Stockholm, but an attack of polio forced him to aban don medical practice. In 1932 he ob tained a professorial position at Uppsala, and in that year too he was the first to isolate the muscle protein myoglobin in crystalline form. He studied enzymes catalyzing oxida tion reactions, particularly those resem bling Warburg’s [1089] yellow enzyme. For a time he worked on ultracentrifuga tion with Svedberg [1097]. In 1935 he showed that the coenzyme associated with that enzyme had a structure like riboflavin (vitamin B2), to which a phos phate group was attached. Another con nection between vitamins and coen zymes, after the fashion of Elvehjem [1240], had been established. In 1937 he was appointed director of the biochemical department of the Nobel Medical Institute in Stockholm and there he studied the oxidative protein cy tochrome c. He showed just how the iron-bearing portion was attached to the rest of the molecules. For his work on oxidation enzymes, Theorell was awarded the 1955 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. [1268] LEAKEY, Louis Seymour Bazett English anthropologist
1903
Died: London, October 1, 1972 Leakey, the son of a missionary, was bom and brought up in Kenya, which was then one of Great Britain’s African colonies. His interest in his place of birth continued and at Cambridge he took his Ph.D. in African prehistory. He then spent the rest of his professional life ex ploring East Africa for traces of the an cestry of Homo sapiens. After World War II he and his second wife, Mary, discovered an almost com plete skull of Proconsul africanus, the earliest ape discovered up to that time. (The name is “before Consul” since Consul was a popular chimpanzee in the London zoo at the time.) Beginning in 1959, the Leakeys worked painstakingly in the Olduvai Gorge in what is now Tanzania. There is 1960 Mary Leakey found the skull of an early australopithecine, which was first called Zinjanthropus, and their son, Jonathan, discovered the first remains of Homo habilis, a hominid that was dated 1,700,000 years old, the earliest clear ex ample of the genus yet discovered. From the work of the Leakeys it seems clear that the hominids (primates more closely related to human beings than to the apes) originated in East Africa, and their fossil record has been pushed far back in time. [1269] WALTON, Ernest Thomas Sinton Irish physicist Born: Dungarvan, Waterford County, October 6, 1903 Walton, the son of a clergyman, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. As a graduate student at Cambridge from 1927, he collaborated with Cockcroft [1198] in the work that resulted in his share of the 1951 Nobel Prize in physics. In 1934 he returned to Dublin and in 1947 he was head of the physics depart ment at its university. In 1952 he was appointed chairman of the School of Cosmic Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. [1270] BEADLE, George Wells American geneticist Born: Wahoo, Nebraska, October 22, 1903 Beadle attended the University of Ne braska, graduating in 1926, and there his interest in genetics was first kindled. He went on to obtain his doctorate at Cor nell University in 1931 and then spent two years at the California Institute of Technology, doing research in genetics under Morgan [957]. Beadle taught at various institutions in the United States and abroad. He was at Stanford University from 1937 to 1946, when he joined the faculty of the Cali fornia Institute of Technology. In 1961 he took the post of chancellor at the 794
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University of Chicago and became the sixth president of the institution the fol lowing year. Beadle’s most important work began in 1941 when with Tatum [1346] he began work with an organism even simpler than Morgan’s fruit flies. This was a mold called Neurospora crassa. In the wild state, this mold will grow on a nu trient medium containing sugar as the only organic compound (except for a small quantity of biotin, which is also needed). For its supply of other ele ments such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur, Neurospora can make do with in organic salts. If the molds are subjected to X-ray ir radiation, however, mutations will form, as Muller [1145] had demonstrated in connection with other organisms fifteen years before. Some of these mutations have lost the ability to form some partic ular organic compound necessary to growth. It may not form the amino acid lysine, for instance, or arginine, and will grow, therefore, only if such an amino acid is added to the nutrient medium. Beadle found that it was not always necessary to add the missing compound itself to the medium. A different, but similar, compound might do. This meant that the similar compound could be con verted into the necessary one. By trying a variety of similar compounds and not ing which would promote growth and which would not, Beadle could deduce the sequence of chemical reactions that led to the formation within the mold of the necessary compound. He could also tell where in the se quence there came a “break,” at which point a reaction existed that the mold could no longer handle. He found that two different mutant strains, each of which could not form, let us say, ar ginine, would perhaps suffer the chemi cal “break” in the sequence of reactions at two different points. A cross between those two strains would then produce a mold that could form arginine, each member of the cross having supplied what the other had lacked. (The genetic crossing of microorganisms was studied in detail by Lederberg [1466].) Beadle concluded that the charac teristic function of the gene was to su pervise the formation of a particular enzyme; that a mutation took place when a gene was so altered that it could no longer form a normal enzyme or, per haps, any enzyme. When this happened, some particular reaction would not take place, a sequence of chemical reactions was broken, and a radical change might occur in the physical characteristics of the organism. All the genetic studies conducted by men like Morgan and Muller were—it would seem—but the study of the visible symptoms produced by the changing en zymatic makeup. Furthermore, it seemed to Beadle that his results could best be explained by assuming that each gene su pervised the production of one and only one enzyme. The prime purpose of genetics was shifting from the qualitative study of physical characteristics and their inheri tance to the chemical study of the gene and its mode of producing enzymes. After the early 1940s it became more and more plain that the gene was a mol ecule of the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) studied by Levene [980] and Todd [1331], This meant that nucleic acids were stepping to the center of the biochemical stage. Any doubts were re moved by the work of Crick [1406] and Watson [1480] a decade later. For their work Beadle, Tatum, and Lederberg shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. He retired in 1968. [1271] LORENZ, Konrad (loh'rents) Austrian zoologist
Lorenz, the son of a surgeon, was in terested in animals from childhood, keeping numerous pets, and studying an imal behavior with considerable meticu lous detail. He kept this up even during his college days. He spent a year at Co lumbia University, then returned to Aus tria and obtained his M.D. at the Uni versity of Vienna in 1928. So much for his father’s wishes—he went on to study 795
[1272] ONSAGER
NEUMANN [1273]
zoology to suit his own and obtained a Ph.D. in that subject in 1933. He continued to study bird behavior and in 1935 described “imprinting,” the manner in which at a certain critical point in early life, soon after hatching, young birds learn to follow a parent, a foster parent, even a human being or in animate object. Once this has taken place, it affects their behavior to some extent all their life. He is considered the founder of ethology, the study of animal behavior in natural environments. He studied the inheritance of instincts and how those influenced even complex ani mal behavior. This led to the study of the evolution of behavioral patterns, in addition to and on the same basis as bodily structure and function. In 1937 he joined the faculty at Vienna and in 1940 obtained a profes sorial post. During World War II he served as a physician in the German army and was captured and held as a prisoner of war by the Soviets. He re turned to Austria in 1948 and took up his academic life once more. In 1966 he published On Aggression, in which he considered the inborn nature of human warlike behavior. In 1973 he shared in the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine. [1272] ONSAGER, Lars Norwegian-American chemist Born: Oslo, Norway, November 27, 1903 Died: Coral Gables, Florida, Oc tober 5, 1976 Onsager completed his college educa tion in Norway and in 1926 studied in Ziirich under Debye [1094]. In 1928 he went to the United States, where he taught at Johns Hopkins. He then went to Yale to earn his Ph.D. in 1935. He joined the faculty there, becoming a full professor in 1945, the year in which he became a naturalized American citizen. As a professor, Onsager occupied the J. Willard Gibbs Chair for Theoretical Chemistry and his work was worthy of Gibbs [740]. While still a graduate chemist, Onsager began working out the rather recondite relationships between heat and electrical potential in irre versible processes. He made use of his theories during World War II to work out the theoretical basis for the gaseous-diffusion method of separating uranium-235 from the more common uranium-238, a step essential to the development of nuclear bombs and nuclear power. For this work he received the 1968 Nobel Prize in chemistry. [1273] NEUMANN, John von Hungarian-American mathe matician
cember 3, 1903 Died: Washington, D.C., Febru ary 8, 1957 Von Neumann, the son of a Jewish banker, was an infant prodigy who at the age of six could divide two eight digit numbers in his head. He left Hun gary in 1919, during the disorders that followed the defeat of Austria-Hungary in World War I, and studied at various universities in Germany and Switzerland. In the mid-1920s he was at the Univer sity of Gottingen, where he met Op penheimer [1280] and in 1926 he ob tained his doctorate at the University of Hamburg. In 1930 he, along with Wigner [1260], went to the United States. He taught mathematical physics at Princeton Uni versity, where Oppenheimer was to join him after World War II. In 1933 he be came a professor at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study at Prince ton, remaining there for the rest of his life.
Von Neumann did important work in many branches of advanced mathe matics. For one thing, he made a thor ough study of quantum mechanics and showed in 1944 that Schrodinger’s . [1117] wave mechanics and Heisenberg’s [1245] matrix mechanics were mathe matically equivalent. Even more important was his develop ment of a new branch of mathematics called game theory. He had written on 796
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the subject as early as 1928, but his complete book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior did not appear until 1944. This branch of mathematics is called game theory because it works out the best strategies to follow in simple games, such as coin-matching. However, the principles will apply to far more complicated games such as business and war, where an attempt is made to work out the best strategy to beat a competitor or an enemy. Even scientific research may be considered a game in which man pits his wits against the impersonal uni verse. Von Neumann also applied his mathe matical abilities to directing the con struction of giant computers, which in turn performed high speed calculations that helped in the production of the H-bomb and in reducing it to a size small enough to be fired by missile. (Some visualize a future in which war is fought not only by the pressing of but tons, but by means of a computer work ing out the equations of game theory and itself pushing the buttons.) When Oppenheimer, who had opposed the development of the H-bomb, was being investigated in 1954, during the years when much American thinking was dominated by the views of Senator Jo seph R. McCarthy, Von Neumann testified to his old friend’s loyalty and in tegrity (though disagreeing with his views). Von Neumann’s countryman Teller [1332] testified against Oppen heimer.
In 1955 he was appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission and in 1956 he received the Fermi award. [1274] POWELL, Cecil Frank English physicist
ber 5, 1903 Died: near Bellano, Italy, August 9, 1969
Attending Cambridge on a scholarship, Powell, the son of a gunsmith, obtained his Ph.D. in 1927, second in his class in physics. He went on to do research under C.T.R. Wilson [979] and Ernest Rutherford [996], Powell’s center of interest was Wil son’s cloud chamber and he spent years studying the mobility of ions in gases. The connection here is that it is about ions that water droplets condense, mak ing visible tracks in the cloud chamber. However, Powell finally helped de velop a method that sidetracked the cloud chamber altogether. The difficulty of the cloud chamber is that the only time that tracks form is when the chamber is ex panded. This expansion may be made automatic when certain events occur, as Blackett [1207] had arranged. Never theless, there are always events going on when the chamber is not being expanded and which are therefore not recorded. Powell arranged for particles to strike a photographic emulsion, producing a line of dark specks. Instead of making tracks in a cloud chamber and photo graphing them, he skipped the first step and the particles photographed them selves directly. The method had been used before, not very successfully, but Powell during the 1930s made it worth while, particularly as new and more sen sitive emulsions were prepared. After World War II, still better emul sions came into use and Powell decided to put them to the test by taking some to mountain heights and sending others up in balloons to see how they would be affected by cosmic ray particles. In 1947 rather startling results were obtained from photographic plates exposed on the Bolivian Andes. Particles with curvatures indicating an intermediate size were re corded. One such particle, discovered by An derson [1292] a decade earlier and named a meson, had first been consid ered a proof of the theories of Yukawa [1323] concerning the structure of the atomic nucleus. However, Anderson’s meson on further study, proved not to fit the role. The new meson discovered by Powell was somewhat heavier than Anderson’s meson, so the two were given different names. Powell’s was called a pi-meson or pion, while Anderson’s was named a mu- meson or muon. 797
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BITTNER [1277]
The pi-meson was found to represent in all respects the particle that had been predicted by Yukawa, and for this Pow ell was awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize in physics. He taught at the University of Bristol beginning in 1948. After World War II he was active in movements for peace and for scientific cooperation among all nations. He was the founder of the Pugwash Movement, which had this for its aim. [1275] SNELL, George Davis American geneticist
December 19, 1903 Snell graduated from Dartmouth in 1926 and obtained a doctoral degree in genetics from Harvard in 1930. He joined the Jackson Laboratory in 1935. His field of interest, beginning in
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