Posts in category: Science

Carl Wieman earned his B.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University. Following his graduation, he served as an Assistant Research Scientist at the University of Michigan, and became an Associate Professor in 1979. He moved to the University of Colorado inn1984, where he was appointed an Associate Professor then a full Professor of Physics in 1987. He served from 1993 to 1995 as a Chairman of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA), a leading center for the study of atomic and molecular physics at the same university. He was also appointed as a Distinguished Professor at the University of Colorado in 1997.

In 1995, Professor Wieman and Professor Eric Cornell made history with their stunning success in producing the first true Bose-Einstein Condensate, a new form of matter that occurs at just a few hundred billionths of the absolute zero. This discovery, which earned them worldwide recognition, was achieved by cooling rubidium-87 atoms to an incredibly low temperature, using lasers, then trapping and holding these atoms virtually motionless with the aid of magnetic traps of the right kind of field, and evaporative cooling techniques.

Professor Weiman received countless awards including the E. O. Lawrence Prize, Davisson-Germer Prize, Einstein Medal for Laser Science, Fritz-London Prize, Newcomb-Cleveland Prize (AAAS), Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award, and Bonfils-Stanton Foundation Prize. He was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Science by the University of Chicago. Professor Wieman is a Fellow of JILA, the Australian Academy of Sciences, and the American Physical Society.

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

James Rothman received his B.A. (summa cum laude) from Yale College, and a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from Harvard Medical School, followed by a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He started his academic and research career at Stanford University in 1976, and rose to full professorship in Biochemistry within 6 years. In 1988, he assumed the E.R. Squibb Chair of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. In 1991, he became the Paul A. Mark Professor and a Chairman of the Cellular Biochemistry and Biophysics Program at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York and a Vice-Chairman of the Institute.

Professor Rothman made the brilliant discovery that intracellular protein transport could be reconstituted in cell-free extracts and that vesicular transport within the Golgi apparatus could be reproduced accurately from isolated Golgi membranes, cytosol and ATP. This discovery had a profound impact on our understanding of intracellular secretory pathways, and particularly how these transport vesicles reach their correct destination in the cell and how and when to release their contents. Rothman’s dissection of a cell dynamic event as complex as this in vitro in individual steps is a milestone in biomedicine and has opened new fields in cell biology.

Professor Rothman’s distinguished research appeared in hundreds of scientific papers and invited lectures. He received numerous awards and honors for his accomplishments, including an Honorary Doctorate degree from Regensburg University. He is a Fellow of the US Academy of Sciences and Arts, a Member of the US National Science Academy, and its Medical Institute, and a Foreign Associate of the European Organization for Molecular Biology. He also served as a member of the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including Science and Cell, and President of the Gordon Conference on Molecular Membrane Biology.

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

Hugh Pelham received his bachelor’s degree (Honors) and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Cambridge University and served as a researcher at Cambridge before moving to the United Stated for a two-year fellowship at the Carnegie Institution in Washington’s Department of Embryology in Baltimore, Maryland. Following his return, he held research positions at the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Cambridge and the Molecular Biology Institute at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Between 1992-1995, he was appointed as a Co-Director of the Cell Biology Division of the MRC Molecular Biology Laboratory, where he is also currently Head of the Division of Cell Biology.

Professor Pelham conducted seminal research on the regulation of intracellular molecular traffic. Pelham also illustrated the mechanisms for the retrieval and retention of proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum of the cell. In a series of elegant experiments, he showed that a terminal four-amino acid sequence was the factor that kept a protein in the endoplasmic reticulum. He proved that the signal was required to retain rather than export the protein through its retrieval from the Golgi complex as part of the general movement of proteins within the cell. He also identified the gene that determined the specificity of this retention system in yeast cells, and isolated the human analog of that gene. Currently, Professor Pellham and his group are looking at how proteins find their right places in the cell and how mis-shaped proteins are broken down for recycling.

Professor Pelham’s outstanding contributions appeared in more than 100 scientific papers, and earned him wide recognition and several prestigious awards. He was awarded the Louis Jeantet Prize in Medicine and the Colworth Medal of the Biochemical Society. He was also elected as a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society (London) and Academia Europaea, and a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization as well as the editorial boards of several major scientific journals.

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

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.