Monthly Archives: July 2013

Ahmed Hassan Zewail received his bachelor’s degree in 1967, and an M.Sc. degree in 1969 from the University of Alexandria, prior to traveling to the USA, where he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, followed by postdoctoral work at the University of California in Berkeley. Zewail pursued a remarkable successful career from the time of his graduation, until his appointment as the Linus Pauling Chair of Chemistry and a Professor of Physics.

Professor Zewail is the world’s pioneer in introducing and developing the technique known as ultra-fast laser molecular beam spectroscopy. This has opened the field of real-time (femtosecond) molecular dynamics with sub-Angstrom resolution. His brilliant work unraveled some of the mysteries of molecules and made it possible to observe and study their motion in a femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second or 10 -15 of a second), thereby enabling scientists for the first time to record the instant of a molecule’s creation. In addition to inventing the new field of femto science, Professor Zewail also founded the Center of Physical Biology at Caltech with the aim of deciphering the fundamental physics of chemical and biological behavior. Over the past few years, Professor Zewail and his group made seminal contributions to this new field, creating novel ways for better understanding the functional behavior of biological systems by directly visualizing them in the four dimensions of space.

Professor Zewail’s astounding scholarship earned him numerous honors; he was awarded several international prizes and medals, honorary doctorate degrees from ivy league universities, fellowships of major scientific academies and societies worldwide, visiting professorships, editorships and hundreds of invited lectureships. He published hundreds of scientific papers, and several books on the applications of lasers. He also supervised a large number of graduate and postdoctoral students and presented more than 300 named Plenary and keynote lectures.

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

Ricardo Miledi received his B.Sc. and M.D. at the Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Autonoma de Mexico), where he served at its National Institute of Cardiology. He held a fellowship at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, Massachusetts (USA) and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in the University of Canberra, Australia. Following this, he joined the University College London from 1958 to 1985, and took on several positions, including an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Biophysics, a Professor of Biophysics, a Foulerton Research Professor of the Royal Society, and a Head of the Department. In 1985, he moved to the University of California, Irvin, where he served as a Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior.

Professor Miledi was a world authority in neurophysiology, particularly the physiology of synapses. His fundamental studies of the processes by which nerve cells transfer information to muscles and other nerve cells opened the way for the advent of new methods for studying the brain. His research also focused on understanding signal transmission across nerve cells at the molecular level. Miledi’s overall contribution to neurophysiology had been significant for understanding certain neurological disorders and developing new methods of treatment. He published more than 350 papers in prestigious scientific journals and is one of the 10 most cited neurobiologists of all times. He also mentored generations of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

Miledi was a Fellow of the Royal Society (London), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Third World Academy of Science, and the National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Science in Mexico. He was the recipient of many illustrious prizes and honors; he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by the University of the Basque Country and the Royal Medal from the Royal Society (London).

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

Pierre Chambon obtained his M.D. in 1958 and began his career as a researcher, then as an associate professor at the Institute of Biology Sciences at Strasbourg Medical School. He became the Director of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics of Eukaryotes (LGME) in 1977. He is currently a Professor of Biochemistry at the Institute of Chemical Biology, Faculty of Medicine, Strasbourg.

Professor Chambon made the striking discovery that eukaryotic cells are split in their amino acid coding sequence. This finding had markedly influenced current views on the structure, function and evolution of living organisms. Another major breakthrough was his discovery of transcription enhancers. This proved to be an essential component of the control of gene expression in eukaryotic cells. Chambon’s research was crucial to the advancement of molecular genetics and earned him several prestigious prizes and honorary fellowships and memberships of major scientific academies and organizations in Europe and the USA, as well as a long list of invited lectureships and visiting professorships. He published more than 250 scientific papers and reviews. He is ranked among the ten most cited researchers in molecular biology and genetics, and is considered by many as the father of the genetic revolution.

Professor Chambon earned many other prizes, and honors including an honorary doctorate degree from Liege University in Belgium. Professor Chambon is a Member of the French Académie des Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He also served on a number of editorial boards, including those of Cell, Molecular Cell, and Genes and Development.

Professor Charbon’s work has thus profoundly influenced the advance of molecular medicine in ways which relate to the understanding of cancer and its possible treatment.

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

Michael Francis Atiyah grew up in Sudan and Egypt before returning to the U.K. to complete his higher education. He obtained his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Cambridge U.K., and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Cambridge and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University USA.

One of the greatest living mathematicians, Sir Michael Atiyah’s first major contribution was the development (with Hirzebruch) of the K-theory, a versatile topologic technique, which led to the solution of many outstanding problems in mathematics. He then developed (with Singer) the “Atiyah-Singer index theorem,” an important theorem that deals with a number of solutions of elliptic differential equations. That theorem later proved to be useful in theoretical physics, such as constructing solutions of certain partial differential equations giving “instantons”. Atiyah analyzed the global geometry of Yang-Mills fields and of general gauge theories. Overall, his work provided a deeper insight and understanding of both quantum field theory and general relativity. He published 15 books while most of his research was included in six volumes of Atiyah’s collected papers (except for his commutative algebra textbook and his later works).

Sir Michael was the Savilian Professor of Geometry and Fellow of St. Catherine’s College at Oxford University. He was also professor at Cambridge and Princeton Universities and visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, Chicago and other leading universities.

Sir Michael Atiya received many prestigious awards, medals and decorations, including the renowned Fields medal, the Royal Medal, and the De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society. He was awarded honorary doctorate degrees by more than 30 universities and honorary fellowships of scientific academies in more than 20 countries. Atiya was knighted in 1983.

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

Michael John Berridge obtained his B.Sc. degree from the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in Salisbury in 1960 and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge in 1965. He carried out postdoctoral studies at the University of Virginia and Case Western Reserve University in the USA. He joined the Unit of Invertebrate Chemistry and Physiology in the Department of Zoology (now Laboratory of Molecular Signaling at the Brahman Institute) as Senior Scientific Officer at the University of Cambridge in 1969.

Professor Sir Michael Berridge made seminal contributions to the study of cellular signal mechanisms, including a discovery of a new signal that regulates various cell activities. The precursor of that signal turned out to be a lipid component of the cell membrane which is cleaved by an external signal (e.g., a hormone) to give a water soluble messenger that diffuses into the cells, thereby generating a variety of different cellular processes.

Professor Sir Michael Berridge is a fellow of the Royal Society and Trinity College (Cambridge), and a member of the Society of Experimental Biology. He received numerous prizes including the Feldberg Prize and the Louis Jeantet Prize in Medicine; Professor Berridge also had a long list of honorary lectureships.

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

Professor Heinrich Rohrer was born in Buchs, St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 1933 and received his bachellor’s degree (1955) and Ph.D. in experimental physics (1960) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where he studied length changes of superconductors in the magnetic field induced superconducting transition. In 1961, he carried out post-doctoral research on thermal conductivity of type II superconductors and metals at Rutgers University in New Jersey, U.S.A. In 1963, he joined IBM Research Laboratory in Zurich where he first studied kondo systems and antiferromagnets, before turning his attention to scanning tunneling microscopy. He also spent one-year sabattical leave at the University of California in Santa Barbara studying nuclear magnetic resonance.

In 1981, Binnig and Rohrer made their brilliant invention of the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM), an instrument so sensitive that it can distinguish individual atoms. The STM is now widely used both in industrial and fundamental research to obtain atomic scale images of metal and other surfaces. It has since been useful in fields as diverse as conducting materials, metallurgy, electrochemistry and molecular biology. The microscope also provided a vital tool in the field of nanotechnology, a promising new science of characterizing structures from the atomic scale (0.3 nm) to around 100 nanometers.

In addition to being a co-recipient (with Binnig) of the King Faisal International Prize for Science, the Hewlett Packard Europhysics Prize in 1984 and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986, Rohrer was also awarded the Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, USA and was inducted to the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. He is a member or honorary member of several professional societies and academies, and the recipient of honorary degrees from several universities.

Professor Rohrer retired in 1997. He currently undertakes research assignments at the Center of Biological Investigations (CISC), Madrid, and Riken, Japan. He died in 2013.

The two research works which he-published with Dr. Heinrich Rohrer at to the award of the King Faisal International Prize of the year 1404H., 1983 A.D. are:

1. Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Surface Scierce 126, (1983) P 236-244.
2. 7 x 7 Reconstruction on Si (III) Resolved in Real Space. Phy. Rev. Lett. 50, (1983) P 120-123.

Professor Gerd Binnig was born in 1947 in Frankfurt. He was educated at J. W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he received his bachelor’s and Ph.D. degrees in 1973 and 1978, respectively. He joined a physics group at the IBM Physics Research Laboratory in Zürich. Between 1985-1986, Binnig was assigned to IBM Almaden Center, in San Jose, Calfornia. In 1987, he was appointed an IBM fellow and from 1987-1988, he was a visiting professor at Stanford University.

Professor Binnig met fellow researcher Heinrich Rohrer at IBM in Zurich. In 1981 the y built the first scanning tunneling microscope (STM), one of the most elegant inventions of the 20th century which allowed imaging of individual atoms. The STM soon proved to be an invaluable tool in many fields, including industry, metallurgy, semi-conductor research, electrochemistry and molecular biology. With the STM, Binnig was the first person to visualize a virus escaping a cell. For this innovation, Bennig and Rohrer were awarded the King Faisal International Prize for Science in 1984, and two years later they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Ernst Rusta who invented the first electron microscope.

In 1985, Binnig and others from IBM and Stanford University invented the atomic force microscope. This allowed imaging non conductive matter such as living cells to molecular resolution. Since then, every year has seen new inventions in the rapidly growing field of scanning probe microscopes. They are now imaging bits on magnetic surfaces, measuring temperature at microscopic sites, and monitoring the progress of chemical reactions.

In 1994, Binnig founded Definiens which turned six years later into a commercial enterprise that provides companies and institutions around the world with sophisticated technologies for analyzing and interpreting images on every scale. In 1989, Binning published his book Aus dem Nichts (Out of Nothing) which speculated that creativity grows from disorder.

In addition to the King Faisal and Nobel Prizes, Binnig (and Rhorer) received numerous prizes including the German Physics Prize, the Otto Klung Prize, the Hewlett Packard Prize, and the Restin Prize. Binnig was appointed honorary professor at the University of Munich since 1987 and was inducted to the US National Hall of Fame.

The two research works which he-published with Dr. Heinrich Rohrer at to the award of the King Faisal International Prize of the year 1404H., 1983 A.D. are:

1. Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Surface Scierce 126, (1983) P 236-244.
2. 7 x 7 Reconstruction on Si (III) Resolved in Real Space. Phy. Rev. Lett. 50, (1983) P 120-123.