Monthly Archives: July 2013

Günter Blobel studied in Frankfurt and Munich and obtained his MD from the University of Tubingen before moving to the United States, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Oncology from the University of Wisconsin in 1967. A naturalized U.S. citizen, Blobel had been working since the 1960’s at Rockefeller University and was the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Professor of Cell Biology as well as an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in New York. He also served on the board of directors for Nestle and the Board of Scientific Governors at the Scripps Institute and was a Co-Founder and a Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for Chromocell Corporation.

His work showed that newly synthesized proteins (averaging a billion per cell) have “signals” or “address tags,” which direct them to their location within the cell. This groundbreaking discovery helped unlock the secrets of certain hereditary diseases that were caused by errors in these signals and transport mechanisms e.g., cystic fibrosis, and hypercholesterolemia. It could also help in the development of more effective use of cells as “protein factories” for the production of important drugs. Blobel’s work also showed that cellular mechanisms are highly conserved among species and even among phyla and kingdoms of living organisms.

Professor Blobel’s achievements were recognized by numerous awards and honors, which include the U.S. Steel Award, the Richard Lounsbery Award, the Gairdner Foundation International Award, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, the Albert Lasker Award. He was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Mt. Sinai Medical Center, and was the recipient of several professorships and fellowships of major scientific Academies and societies across the United States and Europe. He also served on the editorial boards of numerous journals including The Journal of Cell Biology and Hepatology, and the Journal of Protein Chemistry.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Karl Barry Sharpless received his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and Ph.D. in Chemistry from Stanford University. Following post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard and Stanford universities, he pursued an academic and research career and became a Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. In 1990, he was appointed as the William M. Keck Chair of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

Professor Sharpless’s research interest centers on asymmetric catalysis involving both early and late transition metal-mediated processes. His landmark research led to the development of chiral catalysts for organic oxidation, resulting in the production of enantiomerically-pure compounds with new properties. His technique is dubbed “mirror image chemistry.” Today, the results of his prodigious work are used in the industrial syntheses of pharmaceutical products, including certain antibiotics, heart medicines, anti-inflammatory drugs and antidepressants. Among his many earlier contributions are the synthesis of malabaricane diol, the elucidation of mechanisms of allylic oxidation of olefins by selenium dioxide and the discovery of the first organoselenium reagents for use in organic synthesis.

Professor Sharpless published more than 200 papers. His remarkable achievements in chemistry were punctuated by numerous prestigious awards and honors including the Tetrahedron Prize, the Arthur C. Cope Award, the Prelog Medal (Switzerland), and the Paul Janssen Prize (Belgium). He was also awarded honorary doctorates from Dartmouth College, the Royal Swedish Institute of Technology, Technical University of Munich.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Dennis Sullivan received his B.A. from Rice University in 1963 and Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1965. His academic and research career spans over forty years, during which he taught at Princeton University, University of California at Berkeley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was also a Visiting Professor at Colorado State University and a Professor at Large at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies) in Paris. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at New York State University in Stony Brook.

Professor Sullivan’s research interests revolve mainly around differential geometry, topology, and dynamical systems. He worked for many years to bring the field of complex dynamics back to life after decades of relative obscurity. By successfully combining analytical and geometric methods, he was able to develop sound mathematical foundations for the study of complex dynamic systems, which relate to some of the most intractable and important problems in the field. Sullivan’s work had been extremely valuable not only for its own sake but also for the vision that had given direction to much exciting current research. His powerful geometric intuition influenced many mathematicians, and his ideas played a key role in contemporary seminal work in this field. He published numerous papers and gave many named lectures.

Professor Sullivan was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize and the Elie Cartan Prize in Geometry from the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a Member of the US National Academy of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the New York Academy of Sciences, and a former Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Steven Chu earned his A.B. in mathematics, a B.S. in physics from the University of Rochester, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a postdoctoral fellow for two years. He joined Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, in 1978 and became the head of the quantum electronics research department at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel in 1983. In 1987, he became Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the Physics and Applied Physics Departments at Stanford University.

Professor Chu is best known for his work on cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light. He used an array of intersecting laser beams to create an effect in which the speed of target atoms was reduced from about 4,000 kilometers per hour to about one kilometer per hour, as if the atoms were moving through thick molasses. The temperature of the slowed atoms closely approached the lowest temperature theoretically attainable (just one thousandth of a degree Celsius above the absolute zero). These techniques eventually made it possible for scientists to improve the accuracy of atomic clocks used in space navigation, to construct atomic interferometers that can precisely measure gravitational forces, and to design atomic lasers that can be used to manipulate electronic circuits at an extremely fine scale.

Professor Chu’s groundbreaking achievements earned him numerous other prestigious prizes and several honorary degrees. He is also a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Herbert Walther received his undergraduate degree in Physics in 1960 and a Ph.D. degree in the same field in 1962 from the University of Heidelberg. Then, he pursued his post-doctoral research at Heidelburgh and the Technological University in Hannover. He served as a guest lecturer at the University of Hannover in 1968 and subsequently held established positions at Aime Cotton Laboratories in Orsay (France), the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colorado (USA), and the universities of Bonn and Cologne in Germany. He reached the pinnacle of his career as a Professor of Physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and a founding Director of the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching.

Professor Walther was an internationally acclaimed authority in the fields of quantum optics and laser physics. He made seminal contributions to the advancement of quantum optics as a result of his one-atom maser and ion-trapping experiments, which significantly advanced cavity quantum electrodynamics. Walther and his teams successfully used an ion trap to precisely position and permanently keep a single ion in an optical field. In that manner, they were able to measure the spatial distribution of the field with unprecedented accuracy on a nanometer scale and free of perturbations. Such precise control of the interaction between an atom and electromagnetic radiation was a scientific breakthrough, not only for the accurate measurement of optical fields, but also for future applications such as the generation of light with exotic quantum properties and the realization of efficient gates in a quantum computer.

Professor Walther published more than 300 papers in leading physics journals and edited many books. He was a fellow and a member of major scientific academies and professional societies, and a recipient of numerous illustrious awards and honors.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Sydney Brenner received bachelor’s degrees in Biochemistry, Medicine, and Surgery, an M.Sc. in cell genetics at Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and a Ph.D. at Oxford University, U.K. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal College of Physicians, and the Royal College of Pathologists.

He spent most of his career working with the Medical Research Council (MRC) and became a Director of the MRC Molecular Genetics Laboratory in Cambridge, England, an Honorary Professor of Medical Genetics at Cambridge University, and a Visiting Professor at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in London.

Professor Brenner was a giant of molecular biology. His distinguished scientific achievements over the past 40 years were pivotal in the development of modern concepts of molecular genetics and biology. His early work includes pioneering research on the structural identity of complex bacteriophages, mechanisms of chemical mutagenesis, characterization of chain-termination triplets and demonstration of the colinearity between a gene and its protein. However, his most significant earlier achievement was the establishment in the 1960s of the existence of messenger RNA and the proof that new mRNA molecules programmed pre-existing ribosomes to make new proteins. With the advent of cloning and sequencing of DNA, Brenner turned his attention to the direct study of genes and genomes, and initiated important molecular research based on the analysis of muscle genes of multicellular organisms. Using the tiny nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a novel experimental model organism, he was able to link genetic analysis to cell division, differentiation, organ development and programmed cell death.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Raymond U. Lemieux obtained a B.Sc. (Honors) in chemistry from the University of Alberta and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from McGill University, followed by a postdoctoral scholarship at Ohio State University, where he conducted research on the structure of streptomycin.

After his return to Canada, he briefly held a research position at the University of Saskatchewan before moving to the National Research Council’s Prairie Regional Laboratory in Saskatoon as a senior research officer in 1949, where he completed the first chemical synthesis of sucrose. In 1954, he joined the University of Ottawa, where he established the Department of Chemistry and helped establish the Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences. During his tenure in Ottawa, he pioneered the application of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to the structure elucidation of natural products. In 1961, he moved to the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where his research focused on the special bonding properties termed “anomeric effects” and how these controlled the chemical reactions and shapes of carbohydrate molecules. This work led to the first chemical syntheses of the complex carbohydrates found on human cell surfaces (e.g., antigenic determinants of blood groups and subgroups) and to an understanding of how the shapes of these molecules control their function. He also developed ways to produce semi-synthetic antibodies, rubber-related compounds and heavy water. Upon his retirement in 1985, he became a Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta.

He received numerous awards, including the Izaak Walton Killam Award, Canadian Medical Association Medal of Honor, and the Gairdner Foundation International Award.

In 1990, the American Chemical Society published his memoirs titled: Explorations with Sugars: How Sweet it Was.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Mustafa Amr El-Sayed received his B.Sc. from Ain Shams University in Cairo in 1953 and a Ph.D. from Florida State University in 1959. After completing his doctorate degree, he held fellowships at Harvard and Yale Universities and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) before joining the University of California, Los Angeles (1961-1994), where he became a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry. He was a Visiting Professor at the American University in Beirut and the University of Southern France. He is also currently a Member at Large, Vice-Chairman, and Chairman of the Physical Chemistry Division of the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry.

Professor El-Sayed is a leading nano-scientist and physical chemist, and also known for the spectroscopy rule named after him, the “El-Sayed Rule.” His group made seminal contributions to physical and material chemistry research, including the use of steady and ultra-fast laser spectroscopy to elucidate reaction kinetics and specificities in complex chemical systems relevant to life processes, such as energy conversion and transfer, photosynthesis, photochemistry, and physico-chemical cycles undergone by the bacteriorhodopsin. They also developed several new spectroscopic techniques and are currently focusing on studying the physical and chemical properties of noble metal nanoparticles and their applications in nanocatalysis, nanophotonic and nanomedicine. El-Sayed’s laboratory is known for developing the gold nanorod technology. He published more than 500 scientific papers and supervised the research of over 35 Ph.D. students, 26 postdoctoral fellows and 13 visiting professors.

He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the US Academy of Science, the Third World Academy of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, and the Advisory Committee for the Chemistry Division of the National Science Foundation. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Physical Chemistry and the International Reviews of Physical Chemistry.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Frank Albert Cotton received his BA in Chemistry from Temple University in 1951 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1955. He began teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955 and became full professor within merely six years. In 1972, he moved to Texas A&M University as the Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry and was later appointed as a Doherty-Welsh Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in 1984. He was also the Director of the Laboratory for Molecular Structure and Bonding at Texas A&M.

Professor Cotton was one of the world’s pre-eminent chemists. Both the quantity and the significance of his research were prodigious. He demonstrated an exceptional mastery of preparative chemistry, particularly in the fields of inorganic and organometallic chemistry. He discovered many new classes of compounds and the methods for preparing them. He also made seminal research on metal metal bonds, particularly quadruple and other multiple bonds; his work in this field is asserted to have “transformed our understanding of how the chemistry of about half the periodic table really works.” Cotton’s research resulted in more than 1000 scientific articles, authorship of many popular books that were translated into several other languages and the training of 80 Ph.D. students and 120 postdoctoral associates. Two of his books, Advanced Inorganic Chemistry and Chemical Applications of Group Theory, became some of the most widely used books in the field. The former book, which was co-authored with Sir Goeffrey Wilkinson, was first published in 1961 and is now in its 6th edition (with two additional co-authors); it incorporates more than 4000 references to literature and is considered like a bible of inorganic chemistry. The second book, first published in 1963, did the magic of introducing generations of chemists to group theory and its applications in the analysis of bonding and spectroscopy. Professor Cotton also founded the important annual series Progress in Inorganic Chemistry and edited its first 10 volumes. He also chronicled metal-metal bonding in his book, Multiple Bonds Between Metal Atoms (jointly with R. A. Watson).

Professor Cotton was honored with many prestigious medals, awards, honorary doctorate degrees, fellowships and editorships. Among his most distinguished awards was the United States’ highest scientific award, the National Medal of Science.

Professor Cotton was a world leader in the area of organometallic chemistry, metal carbonyl chemistry and metal atom cluster species. Through his pioneering work on multiple bonds between metal atoms, he has opened a new chapter in inorganic chemistry.

He had also been one of the most prolific contributors to scientific literature with over 1000 publications and several textbooks to his name.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Theodor Wolfgang Hansch received a Diploma in Physics in 1966 and a Doctorate degree in the same field in 1969 from the University of Heidelberg, where he served as an assistant professor from 1969 to 1970. Then, he moved to the USA and served as a Professor of Physics at Stanford University(1975-1986), where he became increasingly involved in laser physics research. Following his return to Germany in 1986, he was appointed as a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and a Professor of Experimental Physics and Laser Spectroscopy at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He was also a visiting professor at several international universities.

Professor Hansch is a distinguished researcher in laser physics. He developed methods to exploit the unique properties of laser light to eliminate the Doppler broadening of spectral lines. He was able to make widely tunable dye lasers (one of which is known as the Hansch laser) so monochromatic that Doppler–Free saturation spectroscopy could be applied at any wavelength from the near infrared to the near ultraviolet. Using an optical frequency comb generator which he and his group invented in the 1990s, he was able to measure Lyman lines of atomic hydrogen to an extraordinary precision of 1 part in a hundred trillion. Hansch’s studies revised the laws governing atoms, molecules, liquids and solids and led to major breakthroughs in the microscopic world. Professor Hansch authored and co-authored over 150 scientific papers and mentored numerous Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows, including the King Faisal Prize and Nobel laureate Carl Weiman.

Professor Hansch’s ground-breaking achievements in the development of laser-based, ultraprecise spectroscopy earned him the respect of the international scientific community and a long list of prestigious prizes, honorary degrees, lectureships, and fellowships of major scientific academies and societies. He also serves on the editorial boards of several physics journals.

Dr. Hansch produced a most important work in laser physics. Before his work, attempts to study the details at atomic and molecular structure were confounded by the Doppler broadening of their spectral signatures. When the Doppler broadening was thus drawn away a bewildering complexity was revealed in the spectra of heavier molecules.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.