crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2021-11-09 00:05:14

965) David S. McKay

David S. McKay, in full David Stewart McKay, (born September 25, 1936, Titusville, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died February 20, 2013, Houston, Texas), American astrobiologist and geologist best known for claiming to have found evidence of microscopic life on a Martian meteorite.

McKay was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of an accountant for an oil company. He received a bachelor’s degree (1958) in geology from Rice University in Houston and proceeded to earn a master’s degree in geochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960. He then worked as a field geophysicist for the Exxon Corporation before returning to Rice University to complete his doctorate (1964) in geology. He remained in Houston and in 1965 began working at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center, later renamed Johnson Space Center, where he instructed Apollo astronauts in geology and analyzed soil samples that they had retrieved from the Moon. McKay worked on a variety of projects, including the development of a method for extracting oxygen and water from lunar materials that would enable people to live on the Moon. At the time of his death in 2013, he was serving as chief scientist for astrobiology.

McKay is best known for his work on ALH 84001, a meteorite originally discovered in Antarctica in 1984. The meteorite, believed to be about 4.5 billion years old and weighing 1.9 kg (4.2 lb), had initially been classified as a diogenite, a common type of rock. It was not until 1994 that it was determined to be of Martian origin. One of only 12 such known meteorites, the specimen quickly attracted special interest. A NASA research team was assembled with McKay as its leader. The study, which took more than two years, revealed several peculiarities. First was the presence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). While these organic compounds are commonplace, found throughout the solar system, the PAHs in the meteorite were unusual in appearance, resembling the type that result from the decay of organic matter. The presence of the molecules within the rock and their absence on its surface ruled out Earth contamination. The team also discovered carbonate globules, which are closely associated with bacteria found on Earth. Moreover, iron sulfides and magnetite were present. These compounds, which are so small that one billion of them can fit on the head of a pin, do not usually coexist. Certain bacteria, however, synthesize them simultaneously.

In August 1996 McKay announced that the meteorite had yielded evidence indicating that primitive life may have existed on Mars. The news came only weeks after the 20th anniversary of the first Viking landing on Mars, which had concluded that the planet was sterile. While the publication of these findings in the journal Science generated a flurry of debate, McKay stressed that the findings were not definitive proof and that further research was planned. His subsequent work uncovered similarities between compounds known to be of biological origin (and found in Earth rocks dating from the Cambrian Period and the Proterozoic Eon) and those found in Martian meteorites.

McKay was also involved in the study of nanobacteria, thought by some to constitute a new life-form. However, they were found to be too small to be considered living things. He later claimed that nanobacteria, which are encased in shells made up of calcium compounds, accounted for the increased incidence of kidney stones in astronauts because nanobacteria could more quickly replicate at zero gravity. A 2007 study led by McKay confirmed previous reports that nanobacteria were capable of self-replication.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-11-10 00:17:25

966) Max Delbrück

Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück (September 4, 1906 – March 9, 1981) was a German-American biophysicist and Nobel laureate.

Delbrück was one of the most influential people in the movement of physical scientists into biology during the 20th century.

Delbrück's big idea was to explore genetics by means of the bacteriophage viruses which infect bacteria. This was important in the early development of molecular biology.

Biography

Delbrück was born in Berlin, German Empire. Trained as a physicist, he got his Ph.D. in 1930. he traveled through England, Denmark, and Switzerland. He met Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr, who got him interested in biology.

In 1937, he moved to the United States to pursue his interests in biology, taking up research in the Biology Division at Caltech on genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. While at Caltech Delbrück became acquainted with bacteria and their viruses (bacteriophage or 'phage').

Delbrück remained in the US during World War II, teaching physics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville while pursuing his genetic research. In 1942, he and Salvador Luria of Indiana University demonstrated that bacterial resistance to virus infection is caused by random mutation and not adaptive change. This research, known as the Luria-Delbrück experiment, was also significant for its use of mathematics to make quantitative predictions for the results to be expected from alternative models. For that work, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, sharing it with Alfred Hershey.

During the 1940s Delbrück developed a course in bacteriophage genetics at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to encourage interest in the field. In 1947, Delbrück returned to Caltech as a professor of biology where he remained until 1977.

Max Delbrück, (born Sept. 4, 1906, Berlin, Ger.—died March 9, 1981, Pasadena, Calif., U.S.), German-born U.S. biologist, a pioneer in the study of molecular genetics. With Alfred Day Hershey and Salvador Luria, he was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for work on bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria.

Delbrück received a Ph.D. in physics (1930) from the University of Göttingen. His interest in bacteriophages was aroused while he was a research assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin (1932–37). A refugee from Nazi Germany, Delbrück went to the United States in 1937, serving as a faculty member of the California Institute of Technology (1937–39; 1947–81) and of Vanderbilt University (1940–47). He became a U.S. citizen in 1945.

In 1939 Delbrück discovered a one-step process for growing bacteriophages that, after a one-hour latent period, would multiply to produce several hundred thousands of progeny. Delbrück soon began to collaborate with Luria, and in 1943 they announced their discovery that a bacterium that has been infected by a bacteriophage can undergo spontaneous mutations so that it becomes immune to the phage. In 1946 Delbrück and Hershey independently discovered that the genetic material of different kinds of viruses can combine to create new types of viruses. This process was previously believed to be limited to higher, sexually reproducing forms of life.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-11-12 00:09:55

967) Alfred Hershey

Alfred Day Hershey (December 4, 1908 – May 22, 1997) was an American Nobel Prize–winning bacteriologist and geneticist.

He was born in Owosso, Michigan and received his B.S. in chemistry at Michigan State University in 1930 and his Ph.D. in bacteriology in 1934, taking a position shortly thereafter at the Department of Bacteriology at Washington University in St. Louis.

He began performing experiments with bacteriophages with Italian-American Salvador Luria, German Max Delbrück, and observed that when two different strains of bacteriophage have infected the same bacteria, the two viruses may exchange genetic information.

He moved with his research partner Martha Chase to Laurel Hollow, New York, in 1950 to join the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Genetics, where he and Martha Chase performed the famous Hershey–Chase experiment in 1952. This experiment provided additional evidence that DNA, not protein, was the genetic material of life. Notable post-doctoral fellows in Hershey's lab include Anna Marie Skalka.

He became director of the Carnegie Institution (which later became Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) in 1962 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, shared with Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück for their discovery on the replication of viruses and their genetic structure.

In 1981, Hershey became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.

Hershey had one child, Peter Manning Hershey (1956-1999) with his wife Harriet (often called Jill) (1918-2000). The family was active in the social network of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and regularly enjoyed the beach in season. Hershey was a Christian.

After Hershey died, another phage worker, Frank Stahl, wrote: "The Phage Church, as we were sometimes called, was led by the Trinity of Delbrück, Luria, and Hershey. Delbrück's status as founder and his ex cathedra manner made him the pope, of course, and Luria was the hard-working, socially sensitive priest-confessor. And Al (Hershey) was the saint."

Alfred Day Hershey was born on December 4th, 1908, in Owosso, Michigan. He studied at the Michigan State College, where he obtained B.S. in 1930, and Ph.D. in 1934. In 1967 he got an honorary D.Sc. at the University of Chicago.

From 1934 till 1950 he was engaged in teaching and research, at the Department of Bacteriology, Washington University School of Medicine. In 1950 he became a Staff Member, at the Department of Genetics, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Cold Spring Harbor, New York; in 1962 he was appointed Director of the Genetics Research Unit of the same institution.

Alfred Hershey married Harriet Davidson in 1945, they have one son, Peter.

Alfred Hershey is a Member of the American Society for Microbiology, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Hershey is Recipient of the Kimber Genetics Award of the National Academy of Sciences, 1965. Michigan State University honored him with an M.D.h.c. in 1970.

Alfred D. Hershey died on May 22, 1997.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-11-14 00:06:59

968) Salvador Luria

Salvador Luria, in full Salvador Edward Luria, (born Aug. 13, 1912, Turin, Italy—died Feb. 6, 1991, Lexington, Mass., U.S.), Italian-born American biologist who (with Max Delbrück and Alfred Day Hershey) won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1969 for research on bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria.

Luria graduated from the University of Turin in 1935 and became a radiology specialist. He fled Italy for France in 1938 and went to the United States in 1940 after learning the techniques of phage research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Soon after his arrival, he met Delbrück, through whom he became involved with the American Phage Group, an informal scientific organization devoted to solving the problems of viral self-replication. Working with a member of the group in 1942, Luria obtained one of the electron micrographs of phage particles, which confirmed earlier descriptions of them as consisting of a round head and a thin tail.

In 1943 Luria and Delbrück published a paper showing that, contrary to the current view, viruses undergo permanent changes in their hereditary material. That same year he and Delbrück devised the fluctuation test, which provided experimental evidence that phage-resistant bacteria were the result of spontaneous mutations rather than a direct response to changes in the environment. In 1945 Hershey and Luria demonstrated the existence not only of such bacterial mutants but also of spontaneous phage mutants.

Luria became Sedgwick professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964. In 1974 he became director of the Center for Cancer Research at MIT. He was an author of a college textbook, General Virology (1953), and a popular text for the general reader, Life: The Unfinished Experiment (1973).

Salvador Edward Luria was born on August 13th, 1912, in Torino, Italy. He has been a naturalized citizen of the U.S.A. since January 1947.

In 1929 he started his studies in Medicine at the University of Torino, where he obtained his M. D. summa cum laude in 1935. From 1938 to 1940 he was Research Fellow at the Institute of Radium in Paris; 1940-1942, Research Assistant in Surgical Bacteriology at Columbia University; from 1943 to 1950 he was Instructor, Assistant Professor, and Associate Professor of Bacteriology at Indiana University; in 1950 he was appointed Professor of Microbiology at the University of Illinois; from 1959-1964 he has been Professor of Microbiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; in 1964 he became Sedgwick Professor of Biology at the M. I. T. and in 1965, non-resident Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. In 1970 Luria was appointed Institute Professor at the Department of Biology of the M.I.T.

Professor Luria was honoured with the following awards: 1935, Lepetit Prize; 1965, Lenghi Prize, Accademia dei Lincei; 1969, Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, Columbia University.

He was Guggenheim Fellow, 1942-1943 at Vanderbilt and Princeton; during the year 1963-1964 he worked again in Paris, this time at the Institut Pasteur. He is, or has been, Editor or Member of the Editorial Board of the following journals: Journal of Bacteriology, Virology, Experimental Cell Research, Journal of Molecular Biology, Photochemistry and Photobiology, American Naturalist, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Annual Review of Genetics.

Professor Luria is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Microbiology, American Society for Microbiology (President, 1967-1968), American Society of Biological Chemists, Society for General Microbiology, Genetics Society, American Naturalists, Society for the Study of Development and Growth, A.A.A.S., Sigma Xi, A.A.U.P.

Salvador Edward Luria was, in 1945, married to Zella Hurwitz, they have one son, Daniel, who is studying economics. His wife, Zella Hurwitz Luria, Ph. D., is a Professor of Psychology at Tufts University.

Salvador E. Luria died on February 6, 1991.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-11-16 00:11:40

969) Hannes Alfvén

Hannes Alfvén, in full Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén, (born May 30, 1908, Norrköping, Sweden—died April 2, 1995, Djursholm), astrophysicist and winner, with Louis Néel of France, of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 for his essential contributions in founding plasma physics—the study of plasmas (ionized gases).

Alfvén was educated at Uppsala University and in 1940 joined the staff of the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. During the late 1930s and early ’40s he made remarkable contributions to space physics, including the theorem of frozen-in flux, according to which under certain conditions a plasma is bound to the magnetic lines of flux that pass through it. Alfvén later used the concept to explain the origin of cosmic rays.

In 1939 Alfvén published his theory of magnetic storms and auroral displays in the atmosphere, which immensely influenced the modern theory of the magnetosphere (the region of Earth’s magnetic field). He discovered a widely used mathematical approximation by which the complex spiral motion of a charged particle in a magnetic field can be easily calculated. Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), the study of plasmas in magnetic fields, was largely pioneered by Alfvén, and his work has been acknowledged as fundamental to attempts to control nuclear fusion.

After numerous disagreements with the Swedish government, Alfvén obtained a position (1967) with the University of California, San Diego. Later he divided his teaching time between the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the University of California.

Alfvén devised “plasma cosmology,” a concept that challenged the big-bang model of the origin of the universe. The theory posited that the universe had no beginning (and has no foreseeable end) and that plasma—with its electric and magnetic forces—has done more to organize matter in the universe into star systems and other large observed structures than has the force of gravity. Much of Alfvén’s early research was included in his Cosmical Electrodynamics (1950). He also wrote On the Origin of the Solar System (1954), Worlds-Antiworlds (1966), and Cosmic Plasma (1981).

Jai Ganesh · 2021-11-18 00:12:52

970) Louis Néel

Louis-Eugène-Félix Néel, (born November 22, 1904, Lyon, France—died November 17, 2000, Brive-Corrèze), French physicist who was corecipient, with the Swedish astrophysicist Hannes Alfvén, of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 for his pioneering studies of the magnetic properties of solids. His contributions to solid-state physics have found numerous useful applications, particularly in the development of improved computer memory units.

Néel attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and the University of Strasbourg (Ph.D., 1932), where he studied under Pierre-Ernest Weiss and first began researching magnetism. He was a professor at the universities of Strasbourg (1937–45) and Grenoble (1945–76), and in 1956 he founded the Center for Nuclear Studies in Grenoble, serving as its director until 1971. Néel also was director (1971–76) of the Polytechnic Institute in Grenoble.

During the early 1930s Néel studied, on the molecular level, forms of magnetism that differ from ferromagnetism. In ferromagnetism, the most common variety of magnetism, the electrons line up (or spin) in the same direction at low temperatures. He discovered that, in some substances, alternating groups of atoms align their electrons in opposite directions (much as when two identical magnets are placed together with opposite poles aligned), thus neutralizing the net magnetic effect. This magnetic property is called antiferromagnetism. Néel’s studies of fine-grain ferromagnetics provided an explanation for the unusual magnetic memory of certain mineral deposits that has provided information on changes in the direction and strength of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Néel wrote more than 200 works on various aspects of magnetism. Mainly because of his contributions, ferromagnetic materials can be manufactured to almost any specifications for technical applications, and a flood of new synthetic ferrite materials has revolutionized microwave electronics.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-11-20 00:29:40

971) Luis Federico Leloir

Luis Federico Leloir, (born Sept. 6, 1906, Paris, France—died Dec. 2, 1987, Buenos Aires, Arg.), Argentine biochemist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1970 for his investigations of the processes by which carbohydrates are converted into energy in the body.

After serving as an assistant at the Institute of Physiology, University of Buenos Aires, from 1934 to 1935, Leloir worked a year at the biochemical laboratory at the University of Cambridge and in 1937 returned to the Institute of Physiology, where he undertook investigations of the oxidation of fatty acids. In 1947 he obtained financial support to set up the Institute for Biochemical Research, Buenos Aires, where he began research on the formation and breakdown of lactose, or milk sugar, in the body. That work ultimately led to his discovery of sugar nucleotides, which are key elements in the processes by which sugars stored in the body are converted into energy. He also investigated the formation and utilization of glycogen and discovered certain liver enzymes that are involved in its synthesis from glucose.

Luis F. Leloir was born in Paris of Argentine parents on September 6, 1906 and has lived in Buenos Aires since he was two years old. He graduated as a Medical Doctor in the University of Buenos Aires in 1932 and started his scientific career at the Institute of Physiology working with Professor Bernardo A. Houssay on the role of the adrenalin carbohydrate metabolism. In 1936 he worked at the Biochemical Laboratory of Cambridge, England, which was directed by Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins. There he collaborated with Malcom Dixon, N.L. Edson and D.E. Green. On returning to Buenos Aires he worked with J.M. Muñoz on the oxidation of fatty acids in liver, and also together with E. Braun Menéndez, J.C. Fasciolo and A.C. Taquini on the formation of angiotensin. In 1944 he was Research Assistant in Dr. Carl F. Cori’s laboratory in St. Louis, United States and thereafter worked with D.E. Green in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York. Since then he has been Director of the Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas, Fundación Campomar. With his early collaborators, Ranwel Caputto, Carlos E. Cardini, Raúl Trucco and Alejandro C. Paladini work was started on the metabolism of galactose which led to the isolation of glucose 1,6-diphosphate and uridine diphosphate glucose. The latter substance was then found to act as glucose donor in the synthesis of trehalose (with Enrico Cabib, 1953 ) and sucrose (with Carlos E. Cardini and J.Chiriboga, 1955). Other sugar nucleotides such as uridine diphosphate acetylglucosamine and guanosine diphosphate mannose were also isolated. Further work showed that uridine diphosphate glucose is involved in glycogen synthesis and adenosine diphosphate glucose in that of starch.

More recent investigations (with Nicolás Behrens) have dealt with the role of a polyprenol, dolichol, in glucose transfer in animal tissues.

Luis Leloir was married in 1943 to Amelia Zuberbuhler and has a daughter, Amelia. At present Leloir is Professor in the Faculty of Sciences, University of Buenos Aires. He is a member of the following academies; National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Nacional de Medicina, American Philosophical Society, Pontificial Academy of Sciences, and Honorary Member of the Biochemical Society (England). He has received honorary degrees of the following universities: Granada (Spain), Paris (France), Tucuman (Argentina) and La Plata (Argentina). Prof. Leloir has received the following awards: Argentine Scientific Society, Helen Hay Whitney Foundation (United States), Severo Vaccaro Foundation (Argentina), Bunge and Born Foundation (Argentina), Gairdner Foundation (Canada), Louisa Gross Horowitz (United States), Benito Juarez (Mexico); and at present he is President of the Pan-American Association of Biochemical Societies.

Luis Leloir died on December 2, 1987.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-11-22 00:07:36

972) Julius Axelrod

Julius Axelrod (May 30, 1912 – December 29, 2004) was an American biochemist. He won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1970 along with Bernard Katz and Ulf von Euler. The Nobel Committee honored him for his work on the release and reuptake of catecholamine neurotransmitters, a class of chemicals in the brain that include epinephrine, norepinephrine, and, as was later discovered, dopamine. Axelrod also made major contributions to the understanding of the pineal gland and how it is regulated during the sleep-wake cycle.

Education and early life

Axelrod was born in New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Molly (née Leichtling) and Isadore Axelrod, a basket weaver. He received his bachelor's degree in biology from the College of the City of New York in 1933. Axelrod wanted to become a physician, but was rejected from every medical school to which he applied. He worked briefly as a laboratory technician at New York University, then in 1935 he got a job with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene testing vitamin supplements added to food. While working at the Department of Health, he attended night school and received his master's in sciences degree from New York University in 1941.

Research

i) Analgesic research

In 1946, Axelrod took a position working under Bernard Brodie at Goldwater Memorial Hospital. The research experience and mentorship Axelrod received from Brodie would launch him on his research career. Brodie and Axelrod's research focused on how analgesics (pain-killers) work. During the 1940s, users of non-aspirin analgesics were developing a blood condition known as methemoglobinemia. Axelrod and Brodie discovered that acetanilide, the main ingredient of these pain-killers, was to blame. They found that one of the metabolites also was an analgesic. They recommended that this metabolite, acetaminophen (paracetamol, Tylenol), be used instead.

ii) Catecholamine research

In 1949, Axelrod began work at the National Heart Institute, forerunner of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Catecholamine research Institutes of Health (NIH). He examined the mechanisms and effects of caffeine, which led him to an interest in the sympathetic nervous system and its main neurotransmitters, epinephrine and norepinephrine. During this time, Axelrod also conducted research on codeine, morphine, methamphetamine, and ephedrine and performed some of the first experiments on LSD. Realizing that he could not advance his career without a PhD, he took a leave of absence from the NIH in 1954 to attend George Washington University Medical School. Allowed to submit some of his previous research toward his degree, he graduated one year later, in 1955. Axelrod then returned to the NIH and began some of the key research of his career.

Axelrod received his Nobel Prize for his work on the release, reuptake, and storage of the neurotransmitters epinephrine and norepinephrine, also known as adrenaline and noradrenaline. Working on monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors in 1957, Axelrod showed that catecholamine neurotransmitters do not merely stop working after they are released into the synapse. Instead, neurotransmitters are recaptured ("reuptake") by the pre-synaptic nerve ending, and recycled for later transmissions. He theorized that epinephrine is held in tissues in an inactive form and is liberated by the nervous system when needed. This research laid the groundwork for later selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Prozac, which block the reuptake of another neurotransmitter, serotonin.

In 1958, Axelrod also discovered and characterized the enzyme catechol-O-methyl transferase, which is involved in the breakdown of catecholamines.

iii) Pineal gland research

Some of Axelrod's later research focused on the pineal gland. He and his colleagues showed that the hormone melatonin is generated from tryptophan, as is the neurotransmitter serotonin. The rates of synthesis and release follows the body's circadian rhythm driven by the suprachiasmatic nucleus within the hypothalamus. Axelrod and colleagues went on to show that melatonin had wide-ranging effects throughout the central nervous system, allowing the pineal gland to function as a biological clock. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971. He continued to work at the National Institute of Mental Health at the NIH until his death in 2004.

Many of his papers and awards are held at the National Library of Medicine.

Awards and honors

Axelrod was awarded the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1967, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1970. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1979. In 1992, he was awarded the Ralph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience.

Research Trainees

Solomon Snyder, Irwin Kopin, Ronald W. Holz, Rudi Schmid, Bruce R Conklin, Ron M Burch, Marty Zatz, Michael Brownstein, Chris Felder, Robert Kanterman, Richard J Wurtman.

Personal life

Axelrod injured his left eye when an ammonia bottle in the lab exploded; he would wear an eyepatch for the rest of his life. Although he became an atheist early in life and resented the strict upbringing of his parents’ religion, he identified with Jewish culture and joined several international fights against anti-Semitism. His wife of 53 years, Sally Taub Axelrod, died in 1992. At his death, he was survived by two sons, Paul and Alfred, and three grandchildren.

Political views

After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Axelrod used his visibility to advocate several science policy issues. In 1973 U.S. President Richard Nixon created an agency with the specific goal of curing cancer. Axelrod, along with fellow Nobel-laureates Marshall W. Nirenberg and Christian Anfinsen, organized a petition by scientists opposed to the new agency, arguing that by focusing solely on cancer, public funding would not be available for research into other, more solvable, medical problems. Axelrod also lent his name to several protests against the imprisonment of scientists in the Soviet Union. Dr. Axelrod was a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Federation of American Scientists and the International Academy of Science, Munich.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-11-24 00:05:13

973) Ulf von Euler

Ulf Svante von Euler (7 February 1905 – 9 March 1983) was a Swedish physiologist and pharmacologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1970 for his work on neurotransmitters.

Life

Ulf Svante von Euler-Chelpin was born in Stockholm, the son of two noted scientists, Hans von Euler-Chelpin, a professor of chemistry, and Astrid Cleve, a professor of botany and geology. His father was German and the recipient of Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1929, and his maternal grandfather was Per Teodor Cleve, Professor of Chemistry at the Uppsala University, and the discoverer of the chemical elements thulium and holmium. Enjoying such a privileged family environment in science, education and research, it is not surprising that young Ulf would become a scientist, too, so he went to study medicine at the Karolinska Institute in 1922. At Karolinska, he worked under Robin Fåhraeus in blood sedimentation and rheology and did research work on the pathophysiology of vasoconstriction. He presented his doctoral thesis in 1930, and was appointed as Assistant Professor in Pharmacology in the same year, with the support of G. Liljestrand. From 1930 to 1931, von Ulf got a Rochester Fellowship to do his post-doctoral studies abroad. He studied in England with Sir Henry Dale in London and with I. de Burgh Daly in Birmingham, and then proceeded to the continent, studying with Corneille Heymans in Ghent, Belgium and with Gustav Embden in Frankfurt, Germany. Von Euler liked to travel, so he also worked and learned biophysics with Archibald Vivian Hill, again in London in 1934, and neuromuscular transmission with G. L. Brown in 1938. From 1946 to 1947, he worked with Eduardo Braun-Menéndez in the Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental in Buenos Aires, which was founded by Bernardo Houssay. His unerring instinct to work with important scientific leaders and fields was to be proved by the fact that Dale, Heymans, Hill and Houssay went to receive the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.

In 1981, von Euler became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.

From 1930 to 1957, von Euler was married to Jane Anna Margarethe Sodenstierna (1905-2004). They had four children: Hans Leo, scientist administrator at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A.; Johan Christopher, anesthesiologist, Serafimer Hospital, Stockholm; Ursula Katarina, Ph.D., curator at The Royal Collections, The Royal Court, Stockholm, Sweden; and Marie Jane, Chemical Engineer, Melbourne, Australia. In 1958, von Euler married countess Dagmar Cronstedt, a radio broadcaster who had during the Second World War worked at Radio Königsberg, broadcasting German propaganda to neutral Sweden.

Research

His short stay as a postdoctoral student in Dale's laboratory was very fruitful: in 1931 he discovered with John H. Gaddum an important autopharmacological principle, substance P. After returning to Stockholm, von Euler pursued further this line of research, and successively discovered four other important endogenous active substances, prostaglandin, vesiglandin (1935), piperidine (1942) and noradrenaline (1946).

In 1939 von Euler was appointed Full Professor of Physiology at the Karolinska Institute, where he remained until 1971. His early collaboration with Liljestrand had led to an important discovery, which was named the Euler–Liljestrand mechanism (a physiological arterial shunt in response to the decrease in local oxygenation of the lungs).

From 1946 on, however, when noradrenaline (abbreviated NA or NAd) was discovered, von Euler devoted most of his research work to this area. He and his group studied thoroughly its distribution and fate in biological tissues and in the nervous system in physiological and pathological conditions, and found that noradrenaline was produced and stored in nerve synaptic terminals in intracellular vesicles, a key discovery which changed dramatically the course of many researches in the field. In 1970 he was distinguished with the Nobel Prize for his work, jointly with Sir Bernard Katz and Julius Axelrod. Since 1953 he was very active in the Nobel Foundation, being a member of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine and Chairman of the Board since 1965. He also served as Vice-President of the International Union of Physiological Sciences from 1965 to 1971. Among the many honorary titles and prizes he received in addition to the Nobel, were the Gairdner Prize (1961), the Jahre Prize (1965), the Stouffer Prize (1967), the Carl Ludwig Medaille (1953), the Schmiedeberg Plaquette (1969), La Madonnina (1970), many honorary doctorates from universities around the world, and the membership to several erudite, medical and scientific societies. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1973.

Summary

Ulf von Euler, in full Ulf Svante von Euler-Chelpin, (born Feb. 7, 1905, Stockholm, Sweden—died March 9, 1983, Stockholm), Swedish physiologist who, with British biophysicist Sir Bernard Katz and American biochemist Julius Axelrod, received the 1970 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. All three were honoured for their independent study of the mechanics of nerve impulses.

Euler was the son of 1929 Nobel laureate Hans von Euler-Chelpin. After his graduation from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Euler served on the faculty of the institute from 1930 to 1971. He joined the Nobel Committee for Physiology and Medicine in 1953 and was president of the Nobel Foundation for 10 years (1966–75).

Euler’s outstanding achievement was his identification of noradrenaline (norepinephrine), the key neurotransmitter (or impulse carrier) in the sympathetic nervous system. He also found that norepinephrine is stored within nerve fibres themselves. These discoveries laid the foundation for Axelrod’s determination of the role of the enzyme that inhibits its action, and the method of norepinephrine’s reabsorption by nerve tissues. Euler also discovered the hormones known as prostaglandins, which play active roles in stimulating human muscle contraction and in the regulation of the cardiovascular and nervous systems.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-11-25 16:50:54

974) André Weil

André Weil, (born May 6, 1906, Paris, France—died August 6, 1998, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.), French mathematician who was one of the most influential figures in mathematics during the 20th century, particularly in number theory and algebraic geometry.

André was the brother of the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure (now part of the Universities of Paris) and at the Universities of Rome and Göttingen, receiving his doctorate from the University of Paris in 1928. His teaching career was even more international; he was professor of mathematics at the Aligarh Muslim University, India (1930–32), and thereafter taught at the University of Strasbourg, France (1933–40), the University of São Paulo, Brazil (1945–47), and the University of Chicago (1947–58). He joined the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S., in 1958, becoming professor emeritus in 1976. He was also a gifted linguist who read Sanskrit and many other languages, and he was a sympathetic expert on Indian religious writings.

Beginning in the mid 1930s, as one of the founding members of a group of French mathematicians writing under the collective pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki, Weil worked and inspired others in the effort to achieve David Hilbert’s program of unifying all of mathematics upon a rigorous axiomatic basis and directed to the solution of significant problems. Weil and Jean Dieudonné were chiefly responsible for Bourbaki’s interest in the history of mathematics, and Weil wrote on it extensively toward the end of his career.

Weil made fundamental contributions to algebraic geometry—at that time a subject mostly contributed to by members of the “Italian school” but being reformulated along algebraic lines by Bartel van der Waerden and Oscar Zariski—and algebraic topology. Weil believed that many fundamental theorems in number theory and algebra had analogous formulations in algebraic geometry and topology. Collectively known as the Weil conjectures, they became the basis for both these disciplines. In particular, Weil began the proof of a variant of the Riemann hypothesis for algebraic curves while interned in Rouen, France, in 1940 for his deliberate failure, as a pacifist, to report for duty in the French army. This internment followed his incarceration and later expulsion from Finland, where he was suspected of being a spy. In order to avoid a five-year sentence in a French jail, Weil volunteered to return to the army. In 1941, after reuniting with his wife, Eveline, Weil fled with her to the United States.

The Weil conjectures generated many new ideas in algebraic topology. Their importance can be gauged by the fact that the Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne was awarded a Fields Medal in 1978 in part for having proved one of the conjectures. The Weil conjectures have recently had ramifications in cryptology, computer modeling, data transmission, and other fields.

Weil’s published works include Foundations of Algebraic Geometry (1946) and his autobiography, Souvenirs d’apprentissage (1992, The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician). The three volumes of his Oeuvres scientifiques (Collected Papers) were published in 1980.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-11-26 22:24:23

975) Bernard Katz

Sir Bernard Katz, (26 March 1911 – 20 April 2003) was a German-born British physician and biophysicist, noted for his work on nerve physiology. He shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1970 with Julius Axelrod and Ulf von Euler. He was made a Knight Bachelor in 1969.

Life and career

Katz was born in Leipzig, Germany, to a Jewish family originally from Russia, the son of Eugenie (Rabinowitz) and Max Katz, a fur merchant. He was educated at the Albert Gymnasium in that city from 1921 to 1929 and went on to study medicine at the University of Leipzig. He graduated in 1934 and fled to Britain in February 1935.

Katz went to work at University College London, initially under the tutelage of Archibald Vivian Hill. He finished his PhD in 1938 and won a Carnegie Fellowship to study with John Carew Eccles at the Kanematsu Institute of Sydney Medical School. During this time, both he and Eccles gave research lectures at the University of Sydney. He obtained British nationality in 1941 and joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1942. He spent the war in the Pacific as a radar officer and in 1946 was invited back to UCL as an assistant director by Hill. For three years until 1949, the Katz family lived with Hill and his wife Margaret in the top flat of their house in Highgate.

Back in England he also worked with the 1963 Nobel prize winners Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley. Katz was made a professor at UCL in 1952 and head of biophysics, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1952. He stayed as head of biophysics until 1978 when he became emeritus professor.

Katz married Marguerite Penly in 1945. He died in London on 20 April 2003, at the age of 92. His son Jonathan is Public Orator of The University of Oxford.

Research

His research uncovered fundamental properties of synapses, the junctions across which nerve cells signal to each other and to other types of cells. By the 1950s, he was studying the biochemistry and action of acetylcholine, a signalling molecule found in synapses linking motor neurons to muscles, used to stimulate contraction. Katz won the Nobel for his discovery with Paul Fatt that neurotransmitter release at synapses is "quantal", meaning that at any particular synapse, the amount of neurotransmitter released is never less than a certain amount, and if more is always an integral number times this amount. Scientists now understand that this circumstance arises because, prior to their release into the synaptic gap, transmitter molecules reside in like-sized subcellular packages known as synaptic vesicles, released in a similar way to any other vesicle during exocytosis.

Katz's work had immediate influence on the study of organophosphates and organochlorines, the basis of new post-war study for nerve agents and pesticides, as he determined that the complex enzyme cycle was easily disrupted.

Summary

Sir Bernard Katz, (born March 26, 1911, Leipzig, Germany—died April 20, 2003, London, England), German-born British physiologist who investigated the functioning of nerves and muscles. His studies on the release of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine—which carries impulses from nerve fibre to muscle fibre or from one nerve ending to another—won him a share (with Julius Axelrod and Ulf von Euler) of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

After receiving a medical degree from the University of Leipzig in 1934, Katz immigrated to England, where he pursued advanced studies at University College in London, taking a Ph.D. in 1938. Upon receiving a Carnegie fellowship, he studied in Australia (1939–42) and then served in the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II. He returned to University College in 1946 and from 1952 to 1978 was professor and head of the biophysics department. Katz was knighted in 1969.

Katz wrote Electric Excitation of Nerve (1939), Nerve, Muscle and Synapse (1966), and The Release of Neural Transmitter Substances (1969). He and his associates made numerous discoveries concerning the chemistry of nerve transmission, including the role of calcium ions in promoting the release of neurotransmitter substances and the fact that quanta of these substances are being released constantly at random intervals.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-11-28 00:59:17

976) Dennis Gabor

Dennis Gabor, (born June 5, 1900, Budapest, Hung.—died Feb. 8, 1979, London, Eng.), Hungarian-born electrical engineer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971 for his invention of holography, a system of lensless, three-dimensional photography that has many applications.

A research engineer for the firm of Siemens and Halske in Berlin from 1927, Gabor fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and worked with the Thomson-Houston Company in England, later becoming a British subject. In 1947 he conceived the idea of holography and, by employing conventional filtered-light sources, developed the basic technique. Because conventional light sources generally provided either too little light or light that was too diffuse, holography did not become commercially feasible until the demonstration, in 1960, of the laser, which amplifies the intensity of light waves.

In 1949 Gabor joined the faculty of the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, where in 1958 he became professor of applied electron physics. His other work included research on high-speed oscilloscopes, communication theory, physical optics, and television. Gabor was awarded more than 100 patents.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-11-30 02:30:39

977) Gerhard Herzberg

Gerhard Herzberg. full name, Gerhard Heinrich Friedrich Otto Julius Herzberg, was born in Hamburg, Germany, on 25 December, 1904. He was married in 1929 to Luise Herzberg neé Oettinger and has two children. He was widowed in 1971.

Herzberg received his early training in Hamburg and subsequently studied physics at the Darmstadt Institute of Technology where in 1928 he obtained his Dr.Ing. degree under H. Rau (a pupil of W. Wien). From 1928 to 1930 he carried out post-doctorate work at the University of Göttingen under James Franck and Max Born and the University of Bristol. In 1930 he was appointed Privatdozent (lecturer) and senior assistant in the Physics Department of the Darmstadt Institute of Technology.

In August 1935 Herzberg was forced to leave Germany as a refugee and took up a guest professorship at the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, Canada), for which funds had been made available by the Carnegie Foundation. A few months later he was appointed research professor of physics, a position he held until 1945. From 1945 to 1948 Herzberg was professor of spectroscopy at the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago. He returned to Canada in 1948 and was made Principal Research Officer and shortly afterwards Director of the Division of Physics at the National Research Council. In 1955, after the Division had been divided into one in pure and one in applied physics, Herzberg remained Director of the Division of Pure Physics, a position which he held until 1969 when he was appointed Distinguished Research Scientist in the recombined Division of Physics.

Herzberg’s main contributions are to the field of atomic and molecular spectroscopy. He and his associates have determined the structures of a large number of diatomic and polyatomic molecules, including the structures of many free radicals difficult to determine in any other way (among others, those of free methyl and methylene). Herzberg has also applied these spectroscopic studies to the identification of certain molecules in planetary atmospheres, in comets, and in interstellar space.

Herzberg has been active as President or Vice President of several international commissions dealing with spectroscopy. He was also Vice President of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics from 1957 to 1963. He held the offices of President of the Canadian Association of Physicists for the year 1956-57 and President of the Royal Society of Canada for the year 1966-67.

Herzberg was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1939 and of the Royal Society of London in 1951. He was Bakerian Lecturer of the Royal Society of London in 1960 and received a Royal Medal from the Society in 1971. He was George Fischer Baker Non-Resident Lecturer in Chemistry at Cornell University in 1968, and Faraday Medallist and Lecturer of the Chemical Society of London in 1970. He is Honorary Member or Fellow of a number of scientific societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Optical Society of America and the Chemical Society. He is also a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He is a Companion of the Order of Canada. He has received many other medals and awards and holds Honorary Degrees from a number of universities in Canada and abroad, including one from the University of Stockholm.

Gerhard Herzberg died on March 3, 1999.

Summary

Gerhard Herzberg, (born Dec. 25, 1904, Hamburg, Ger.—died March 3, 1999, Ottawa, Ont., Can.), Canadian physicist and winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in determining the electronic structure and geometry of molecules, especially free radicals—groups of atoms that contain odd numbers of electrons. His work provided the foundation for molecular spectroscopy.

Herzberg became Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) at the Darmstadt Institute of Technology in 1930 but fled Nazi Germany in 1935 and obtained a position with the University of Saskatchewan. From 1945 to 1948 he worked at the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, after which he returned to Canada, where he joined the National Research Council, Ottawa.

Herzberg’s spectroscopic studies not only provided experimental results of prime importance to physical chemistry and quantum mechanics but also helped stimulate a resurgence of investigations into the chemical reactions of gases. He devoted much of his research to diatomic molecules, in particular the most common ones—hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide. He discovered the spectra of certain free radicals that are intermediate stages in numerous chemical reactions, and he was the first to identify the spectra of certain radicals in interstellar gas. Herzberg also contributed much spectrographic information on the atmospheres of the outer planets and the stars. His most important works are Atomspektren und Atomstruktur (1936; Atomic Spectra and Atomic Structure) and a long-standing reference work, the four-volume Molecular Spectra and Molecular Structure (1939–79).

Jai Ganesh · 2021-12-02 00:03:02

978) Earl Wilbur Sutherland Jr.

Concise

Earl W. Sutherland, Jr., in full Earl Wilbur Sutherland, Jr., (born Nov. 19, 1915, Burlingame, Kan., U.S.—died March 9, 1974, Miami, Fla.), American pharmacologist and physiologist who was awarded the 1971 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for isolating cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cyclic AMP) and demonstrating its involvement in numerous metabolic processes that occur in animals.

Sutherland graduated from Washburn College (Topeka, Kansas) in 1937 and received his M.D. degree from Washington University Medical School (St. Louis, Missouri) in 1942. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he joined the faculty of Washington University. In 1953 he became chairman of the department of pharmacology at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland, Ohio, where in 1956 he discovered cyclic AMP. In 1963 Sutherland became a professor of physiology at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee), and from 1973 until his death he was a member of the faculty of the University of Miami Medical School.

Detailed

Earl Wilbur Sutherland Jr. (November 19, 1915 – March 9, 1974) was an American pharmacologist and biochemist born in Burlingame, Kansas. Sutherland won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1971 "for his discoveries concerning the mechanisms of the action of hormones", especially epinephrine, via second messengers, namely cyclic adenosine monophosphate, or cyclic AMP.

Early life

Sutherland was born on November 19, 1915, in Burlingame, Kansas. The second youngest of six children, he was raised by his mother, Edith M. Hartshorn, and his father, Earl W. Sutherland. Though his father, who was originally from Wisconsin, had attended Grinnell College for two years, he ultimately led an agrarian lifestyle that took him to both New Mexico and Oklahoma before settling down in Burlingame to raise a family. Edith, a Missouri native, had some training in nursing at what was called a "ladies college". To provide for the family, Sutherland's father ran a dry goods store, where he gave each of his children working jobs. Sutherland began fishing at the age of five, and this became a pastime that he enjoyed for most of his life. As a high school student, Sutherland played and excelled in several sports, including tennis, basketball, and football.

Education

In 1933, at the age of 17, Sutherland enrolled in Washburn College, a school located in Topeka, Kansas and began the pursuit of a Bachelor of Science degree. In order to pay for tuition, he worked throughout his undergraduate years as a medical staff assistant at a local hospital. Sutherland graduated in 1937, at the age of 21. He was then accepted to Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, where he developed a strong mentorship with Carl Ferdinand Cori. In 1942, Sutherland graduated with a Doctor of Medicine.

Professional experience and research

In 1940, while studying at the Washington University School of Medicine, Sutherland had his first encounter with research as an assistant in pharmacology in the laboratory of Carl Ferdinand Cori, who won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1947 for his discovery of the mechanism of glycogen metabolism. Under Cori's guidance, Sutherland conducted research on the effects of the hormones epinephrine and glucagon on the breakdown of glycogen to glucose. In 1942, he worked as an intern at Washington University's Barnes Hospital.

After receiving his medical degree from Washington University in 1942, Sutherland served as a World War II army physician. He returned to Washington University in 1945, where he continued to do research in Cori's Laboratory. Sutherland accredits his decision to pursue a research career, as opposed to entering the medical profession, to his mentor Cori.

Sutherland held various teaching titles during his time at the Washington University School of Medicine, including instructor in pharmacology (1945–46), instructor in biochemistry (1946–50), assistant professor in biochemistry (1950–52), and associate professor in biochemistry (1952–53).

In 1953, Sutherland moved to Cleveland, Ohio for a position as a professor of pharmacology and chairman of the department of pharmacology at the school of medicine at Case Western Reserve University (formerly, Western Reserve University). There, he collaborated with Theodore W. Rall, also a professor of pharmacology, who was to become a lifelong research partner. Together, they conducted further research on the mechanism of hormone action at the molecular level. During his ten years at Case Western Reserve University, Sutherland made several ground-breaking discoveries that led to the identification of cyclic adenosine monophosphate, or cyclic AMP, and its role as a secondary messenger.

In 1963, Sutherland became professor of anatomy at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee. His position allowed him to devote more time to his research. He continued his work on cyclic AMP, receiving financial support from the Career Investigatorship awarded to him by the American Heart Association in 1967. He held his teaching title at Vanderbilt University until 1973.

Discovery of cyclic AMP

While working in Cori's laboratory, Sutherland, with the help of his co-workers, made several discoveries concerning the mechanism of glycogen metabolism that, years later, led him to his discovery of the biological activity of cyclic AMP. Cori's laboratory had previously established the basic mechanism of glycogen metabolism, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Sutherland helped to identify the importance of liver phosphorylase (LP) in the process of glycogenolysis. Of the three basic enzymes involved in glycogenolysis, he found that LP was rate-limiting, meaning that the progression of glycogen metabolism is dependent on this enzyme. LP would become the subject of his research for the next several years, and it was through experimentation on LP and hormone interaction that his most renowned discovery was made.

After identifying the importance of LP, Sutherland moved his research efforts to Western Reserve University. There, he worked in collaboration with Ted Rall, Walter D Wosilait, and Jacques Berthet to publish a series of papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry titled "The Relationship of Epinephrine and Glucagon to Liver Phosphorylase", in four parts. These four papers document the purification of LP and the analysis of several of its properties. First, it was determined that the enzymatic activity of LP depends on the addition or removal of a phosphate group, a process called phosphorylation. In a later experiment, they demonstrated that more phosphate is taken up in liver slices when epinephrine and glucagon are added, suggesting that these hormones were promoting the phosphorylation of LP, activating the enzyme. The results of a later paper in the series suggested that this phosphorylation and activation of LP was a result of the action of phosphorlyase kinase. This series also investigated the inactivation of liver phosphorylase and characterized an enzyme they initially called LP-inactivating enzyme, which functions by cleaving the phosphate group. This enzyme was later renamed liver phosphorylase phosphatase. These papers also characterized LP in terms of molecular weight and other factors. During their analysis, they found the unexpected result that LP activation increased with the addition of 5-AMP, which is a precursor of cAMP; however, this was not known at the time.

The fourth paper published in this series, entitled "The Relationship of Epinephrine and Glucagon to Liver Phosphorylase: IV Effect of Epinephrine and Glucagon on the Reactivation of Phosphorylase in Liver Homogenates", came out in 1956 and was the most influential and groundbreaking of those released. In this paper, Sutherland and associates furthered their investigation of epinephrine and glucagon. The key to the success of this experiment was the use a homogenate of liver cells rather than intact liver cells, as they had been doing in their previous experiments.[9] The general consensus among researchers at that time was that the study of hormones was only possible using intact cells; this was the first instance that a hormone pathway was studied using a cell homogenate. Sutherland and his co-authors were able to observe similar effects in liver homogenate to what was observed in whole liver slices. More importantly, they were able to observe this response in two stages. This stage response was characterized by the particulate fraction producing an unknown heat stable factor in the presence of the hormones epinephrine and glucagon. This factor then stimulates the formation of liver phosphorylase in a fraction of the homogenate where the hormones are not present. This unknown heat stable factor, which was produced in the presence of hormones and ultimately led to the secondary formation of liver phosphorylase, was later termed cyclic AMP.

Even though the discovery of cyclic AMP and the idea of second messengers were of great importance to the world of medicine, Sutherland's findings were actually achieved through strenuous trial and error. First of all, Sutherland and Ted Rall were convinced that a sucrose homogenate of liver cells was absolutely necessary in order to keep their cells healthy and proliferating. This inference was made by Rall from his experience studying mitochondria, which responded well to these sucrose homogenates; however, it had nothing to do with what was being studied at the time. It turned out that this sucrose was not necessary for the homogenate and once they set up the experiment without sucrose they were able to see more effective results. Secondly, Sutherland initially believed that there was something vital about the intact cell, and that disrupting its structure would not produce any hormonal effect. However, after some debate, Rall had convinced Sutherland to use liver homogenates. Once they had witnessed nearly a doubling of the rate of LP activation, they knew this belief in that keeping cells intact was crucial to studying the effects of hormones was not necessarily true, at least in this case. Finally, Sutherland had decided to ignore Jacques Berthet's request to conduct the same experiment using proper lab technique, specifically the Lehninger Hard Pour, where the supernatant material was decanted by pouring the liquid into another test tube once the particulate fraction reached the top of the original tube. Berthet not only demanded this step of the procedure be done through careful aspiration, he also critiqued the lack of specificity during centrifugation with respect to suspension height, rpm and time. The willingness of Sutherland and his associates to modify their experimental procedures and mistaken assumptions allowed them to make the discoveries that they made.

Personal life

Sutherland married Mildred Rice in 1937, the same year that he graduated from Washburn College. In 1944, during World War II, Sutherland was called into service as a battalion surgeon under General George S. Patton, and was later sent to Germany, where he served as a staff physician in a military hospital until 1945. He had two sons and a daughter with Mildred Rice.

In 1962, Sutherland divorced his first wife. A year later, when he became professor of physiology at Vanderbilt University, Sutherland married Dr. Claudia Sebeste Smith, the assistant dean at the university and they were together for the remainder of Sutherland's life.

Awards and achievements

* 1937 – Bachelor of Science from Washburn College in Topeka, Kansas;
* 1942 – Doctor of medicine from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri;
* 1969 – Torald Sollman Award in Pharmacology | Gairdner Foundation International Award;
* 1970 – Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research;
* 1971 – Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine | Achievement Award from the American Heart Association;
* 1971 – Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement;
* 1973 – National Medal of Science awarded by Richard Nixon.

In 1952, Sutherland was awarded the Banting Memorial Lectureship and, in 1953, was elected as the Chairman of the Case Western Reserve University Department of Pharmacology in Cleveland, Ohio. He was awarded the Career Investigator position at the American Heart Association in 1967 and was elected as member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1973.

Sutherland was also a member of various scientific societies which included the American Society of Biological Chemists, the American Chemical Society, the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Sigma Xi. From 1951 to 1956, Sutherland was a member of the editorial board for the Biochemical Preparations Journal. The editorial board of the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics sought is attention from 1957 to 1958.

After Sutherland's death, in 1974, the Miller School of Medicine established the Sutherland Memorial Lecture. In 1976, Vanderbilt University created the Sutherland Prize which is awarded annually to a faculty member whose work has garnered them national, if not international, acclaim and respect. Recipients are awarded $5,000, and their name is engraved on a silver bowl. Vanderbilt honored Sutherland in 1997 by starting a Sutherland lecture, and again in 2001 in the creation of the Sutherland Chair of Pharmacology. Heidi E. Hamm, a member of the Vanderbilt faculty, was appointed to this position upon its establishment and still maintains this title.

Later life

In 1973, after spending 10 years at Vanderbilt University, Sutherland moved to Miami, Florida where he joined the faculty at the Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine as a distinguished professor of biochemistry. He continued to be involved in novel research about adenosine monophosphate and guanosine monophosphate, co-authoring four papers in 1973 alone.

On March 9, 1974, Sutherland died of internal bleeding due to surgical complications after suffering a massive esophageal hemorrhage. He was 58 years old.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-12-04 00:02:50

979) Christian B. Anfinsen

Christian Boehmer Anfinsen Jr. (March 26, 1916 – May 14, 1995) was an American biochemist. He shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Stanford Moore and William Howard Stein for work on ribonuclease, especially concerning the connection between the amino acid sequence and the biologically active conformation.

Background

Anfinsen was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania, into a family of Norwegian American immigrants. His parents were Sophie (née Rasmussen) and Christian Boehmer Anfinsen Sr., a mechanical engineer. The family moved to Philadelphia in the 1920s. In 1933, he went to Swarthmore College where he played varsity football and earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1937.

In 1939, he earned a master's degree in organic chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and was awarded an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowship to develop new methods for analyzing the chemical structure of complex proteins, namely enzymes, at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 1941, Anfinsen was offered a university fellowship for doctoral study in the Department of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School where he received his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1943. During World War II he worked for the Office of Scientific Research and Development.

Anfinsen had three children with his first wife, Florence Kenenger, to whom he was married from 1941 to 1978. In 1979, he married Libby Shulman Ely, with whom he had 4 stepchildren, and converted to Orthodox Judaism. However, Anfinsen wrote in 1987 that "my feelings about religion still very strongly reflect a fifty-year period of orthodox agnosticism."

His papers were donated to the National Library of Medicine by Libby Anfinsen between 1998 and 1999.

Career

In 1950, the National Heart Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, recruited Anfinsen as chief of its laboratory of cell physiology. In 1954, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship enabled Anfinsen to return to the Carlsberg Laboratory for a year and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship allowed him to study at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel from 1958 to 1959. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958.

In 1962, Anfinsen returned to Harvard Medical School as a visiting professor and was invited to become chair of the department of chemistry. He was subsequently appointed chief of the laboratory of chemical biology at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases (now the National Institute of Arthritis, Diabetes, and Digestive and Kidney Diseases), where he remained until 1981. In 1981, Anfinsen became a founding member of the World Cultural Council. From 1982 until his death in 1995, Anfinsen was Professor of Biology and (Physical) Biochemistry at Johns Hopkins.

Anfinsen published more than 200 original articles, mostly in the area of the relationships between structure and function in proteins, as well as a book, The Molecular Basis of Evolution (1959), in which he described the relationships between protein chemistry and genetics and the promise those areas held for the understanding of evolution. He was also a pioneer of ideas in the area of nucleic acid compaction. In 1961, he showed that ribonuclease could be refolded after denaturation while preserving enzyme activity, thereby suggesting that all the information required by protein to adopt its final conformation is encoded in its amino-acid sequence. He belonged to the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the American Philosophical Society.

Christian B. Anfinsen Award

Established in 1996, The Christian B. Anfinsen Award is presented annually to distinguished scientists, the Awards recognize excellence and outstanding achievements in the multidisciplinary fields of protein science, and honor distinguished contributions in the areas of leadership, education, or service. It is sponsored by The Protein Society, and recognizes significant technical achievements in the field of protein science.

Summary

Christian B. Anfinsen, in full Christian Boehmer Anfinsen, (born March 26, 1916, Monessen, Pa., U.S.—died May 14, 1995, Randallstown, Md.), American biochemist who, with Stanford Moore and William H. Stein, received the 1972 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for research clarifying the relationship between the molecular structure of proteins and their biological functions.

Anfinsen received a doctorate in biochemistry from Harvard University in 1943 and then held various research and teaching positions. He joined the staff of the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, Md.) in 1950, and he headed the laboratory of chemical biology in the National Institute of Arthritis, Metabolism, and Digestive Diseases from 1963 to 1982. He was a professor of biology at Johns Hopkins University from 1982 until his death.

In his Nobel Prize-winning research, Anfinsen studied how the enzyme ribonuclease breaks down the ribonucleic acid (RNA) present in food. Anfinsen was able to ascertain how the ribonuclease molecule folds to form the characteristic three-dimensional structure that is compatible with its function. His writings include The Molecular Basis of Evolution (1959).

Jai Ganesh · 2021-12-06 00:06:37

980) Stanford Moore

Stanford Moore (September 4, 1913 – August 23, 1982) was an American biochemist. He shared a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972, with Christian B. Anfinsen and William Howard Stein, for work done at Rockefeller University on the structure of the enzyme ribonuclease and for contributing to the understanding of the connection between the chemical structure and catalytic activity of the ribonuclease molecule.

Moore attended Peabody Demonstration School, now known as University School of Nashville, and in 1935 graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma. He earned his doctorate in Organic Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1938. Moore then joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute, later Rockefeller University, where he spent his entire professional career, with the exception of a period of government service during World War II. He became Professor of Biochemistry in 1952.

In 1958, he and William H. Stein developed the first automated amino acid analyzer, which facilitated the determination of protein sequences. In 1959, Moore and Stein announced the first determination of the complete amino acid sequence of an enzyme, ribonuclease, work which was cited in the Nobel award. He never married.

Summary

Stanford Moore, (born Sept. 4, 1913, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died Aug. 23, 1982, New York, N.Y.), American biochemist, who, with Christian B. Anfinsen and William H. Stein, received the 1972 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their research on the molecular structures of proteins.

Moore received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1938 and joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) in New York City in 1939, attaining the rank of professor in 1952.

Working together at the Rockefeller Institute, Moore and Stein pioneered new methods of chromatography for use in analyzing amino acids and small peptides obtained by the hydrolysis of proteins. In 1958 they helped develop the first automatic amino-acid analyzer, a machine that greatly facilitated the analysis of the amino acid sequences of proteins. In 1959 Moore and Stein used the new machine to make the first determination of the complete chemical structure of an enzyme, ribonuclease.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-12-08 00:10:18

981) William Howard Stein

William H. Stein, in full William Howard Stein, (born June 25, 1911, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Feb. 2, 1980, New York City), was a American biochemist who, along with Stanford Moore and Christian B. Anfinsen, was a cowinner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1972 for their studies of the composition and functioning of the pancreatic enzyme ribonuclease.

Stein received his Ph.D. degree from the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York City, in 1938. In that year he joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University), also in New York City. He was promoted to a professorship there in 1954.

With Moore, who was his colleague at the Rockefeller Institute, Stein between 1949 and 1963 deciphered how ribonuclease catalyzes the digestion of food. The two men developed methods for the analysis of amino acids and peptides obtained from proteins, and then they applied those procedures to determine the structure of ribonuclease. The same year they were awarded the Nobel Prize, Stein and Moore worked out the complete sequence of deoxyribonuclease, a molecule twice as complex as ribonuclease.

Details

William Howard Stein (June 25, 1911 – February 2, 1980) was an American biochemist who collaborated in the determination of the ribonuclease sequence, as well as how its structure relates to catalytic activity, earning a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972 for his work. Stein was also involved in the invention of the automatic amino acid analyzer, an advancement in chromatography that opened the door to modern methods of chromatography, such as liquid chromatography and gas chromatography.

Life and Education:

Early life and education

William H. Stein was born on 25 June 1911 in New York City. His father, Fred M. Stein, was a businessman who retired early to support local New York health organizations. His mother, Beatrice Borg Stein, was a children’s rights activist who developed afterschool activities. Staunch advocates for the welfare of society, Stein’s parents fostered his interests in the life sciences from a young age. As a child, Stein attended the recently established “progressive” Lincoln School which was sponsored by the Teachers College of Columbia University; there, he was able to explore the natural sciences through field trips and science projects. At the age of sixteen, Stein was transferred to the Phillips Exeter Academy in New England to prepare for higher education.

In 1936, during his graduate studies at Columbia University, William H. Stein married Phoebe Hockstader. They had three sons together: William H. Stein, Jr., David F. Stein, and Robert J. Stein. Stein lived with his family in New York the rest of his life - mainly in Manhattan and briefly in Scarsdale, New York.

Academic career

William H. Stein began his higher education as a chemistry major at Harvard University in 1929. He spent one year as a graduate student at Harvard University before transferring to the Department of Biological Chemistry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, in 1934 to focus on biochemistry. Hans Thatcher Clarke, the chairman of the department at the time, was collecting many talented graduate students who would become the distinguished biochemists of the early twentieth century. In 1937, Stein completed his thesis on the amino acid composition of elastin, earning his Ph.D. Stein was introduced to potassium trioxalatochromate and ammonium rhodanilate by Max Bergmann, a Jewish-German biochemist who fled to the United States in 1934 under threat of Nazi occupation and worked in a laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute. He used these two precipitating agents to isolate the amino acids glycine and proline, respectively, for his research on elastin. With the conclusion of his academic career, Stein went on to work under Bergmann.

Late Life and Death

William H. Stein and his wife traveled around the world and hosted many prominent scientists in their own home in New York City throughout his scientific career. In addition to Stein’s long-term professorship at Rockefeller Institute, he served as a visiting professor to the University of Chicago in 1961 and Harvard University in 1964. Stein also lectured at the Washington University in St. Louis and Haverford College.

In 1969, Stein suffered from sudden paralysis, diagnosed as Guillain-Barré syndrome, after developing a fever several days prior during a symposium in Copenhagen. Despite remaining quadriplegic the rest of his life, Stein’s colleagues alleged that his spirit and sense of humor endured. He continued to be a guiding presence at the Rockefeller Institute to his younger colleagues and their work on the study of RNase. At the age of sixty-eight, Stein experienced unexpected heart failure. William H. Stein died 2 February 1980 in New York City.

Scientific career:

Early Work

Following the completion of his formal education, Stein became a researcher under Bergmann at Rockefeller Institute, where much of his most important work was done. Stanford Moore joined Bergmann's lab in 1939, where he and Stein began research focusing on amino acids. According to Moore, "During the early years of our cooperation, Stein and I worked out a system of collaboration that lasted for a lifetime." Their work in this area was disrupted with the beginning of World War II, and they temporarily parted ways to aid the war efforts, Stein staying with Bergmann to research the molecular scale effect of blister agents on the human body. They began collaborating again, however, after Bergmann died in 1944 and they were given an opportunity by the Director of the Rockefeller Institute, Herbert S. Gasser, to continue Bergmann’s work in amino acids.

Chromatography

Stein and Moore developed a method to quantify and separate amino acids with column chromatography, using potato starch as the stationary phase. The fractions, originally collected manually, were collected in their newly developed automated fraction collector, and the amount of each amino acid was determined by an adjusted color reaction with ninhydrin. They began testing other methods of separation, such as ion exchange chromatography, to reduce the analysis time, as it took two weeks to analyze one protein using the starch columns. Ion exchange chromatography reduced the time to 5 days during initial experiments, and eventually Stein and Moore whittled the process down even further with the help of Daryl Spackman, which resulted in the first automatic amino acid analyzer. Along with their well-known work in protein sequences, this automatic amino acid analyzer was also utilized in Stein’s study of amino acids in human urine and blood plasma.

Determination of Protein Sequences

With their success in improving the analysis time for amino acids, Stein and Moore began to determine the structure of an entire protein molecule, specifically bovine ribonuclease, in the early 1950s. They determined the entire sequence of ribonuclease by 1960. This sequence combined with X-ray analysis of the crystallized ribonuclease lead to the determination of the nuclease’s active site. Stein won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972 with Moore and Christian Boehmer Anfinsen, for their work on ribonuclease and "for their contribution to the understanding of the connection between chemical structure and catalytic activity of the ribonuclease molecule."

Jai Ganesh · 2021-12-10 00:02:10

982) Gerald Edelman

Brief

Gerald Maurice Edelman (July 1, 1929 – May 17, 2014) was an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system. Edelman's Nobel Prize-winning research concerned discovery of the structure of antibody molecules. In interviews, he has said that the way the components of the immune system evolve over the life of the individual is analogous to the way the components of the brain evolve in a lifetime. There is a continuity in this way between his work on the immune system, for which he won the Nobel Prize, and his later work in neuroscience and in philosophy of mind.

Details

Gerald Maurice Edelman, (born July 1, 1929, Queens, New York, U.S.—died May 17, 2014, La Jolla, San Diego, California), American physician and physical chemist who elucidated the structure of antibodies—proteins that are produced by the body in response to infection. For that work, he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1972 with British biochemist Rodney Porter. Edelman also made significant contributions to developmental biology and neurobiology.

Edelman received an M.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania (1954) and then served two years in the Army Medical Corps in Paris. During that time he became intrigued by questions concerning the immune system, and upon his return to the United States he enrolled at Rockefeller Institute (now called Rockefeller University) in New York City. He earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1960 and continued his immunological research as a member of the faculty at Rockefeller, becoming a full professor in 1966.

As a graduate student, Edelman began to study antibodies, and by 1969 he and his colleagues had constructed a precise model of an antibody molecule. Edelman’s group narrowly beat a rival group of British investigators led by Porter to this goal. Both researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize for the enormous contributions they made to the field of immunology.

In the 1970s Edelman shifted his research to focus on questions outside of immunology: specifically, how the body—the brain in particular—develops. In 1975 he discovered substances called cell adhesion molecules (CAMs), which “glue” cells together to form tissues. Edelman found that, as the brain develops, CAMs bind neurons together to form the brain’s basic circuitry. His work led to the construction of a general theory of brain development and function called neuronal group selection, which he explained in a trilogy of books (1987–89) for a scientific audience and in Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (1992) for laypersons. He also wrote Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (2004) and Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge (2006).

From 1981 Edelman served as director of the Neurosciences Institute, which he founded at Rockefeller University. In 1993 he moved the institute to the La Jolla neighbourhood of San Diego. From 1995 the institute was part of the Scripps Research Institute campus; it moved to another location in La Jolla in 2012. Edelman also formed and chaired (1992) the neurobiology department of the Scripps Research Institute and was a member (from 1996) of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at Scripps.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-12-12 00:13:12

983) Rodney Robert Porter

Summary

Rodney Robert Porter, (born Oct. 8, 1917, Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, Eng.—died Sept. 6, 1985, near Winchester, Hampshire), was British biochemist who, with Gerald M. Edelman, received the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his contribution to the determination of the chemical structure of an antibody.

Porter was educated at the University of Liverpool (B.S., 1939) and the University of Cambridge (Ph.D., 1948) and worked at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill from 1949 to 1960. He served as professor of immunology at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School, London, until 1967, when he joined the faculty at the University of Oxford.

Porter approached the problem of antibody structure by using an enzyme, papain, to cleave the blood’s immunoglobulin molecule into functionally different fragments, which were then amenable to structural analysis. Edelman, working independently, used different methods to break up the molecule, and he concluded that it was a multichain entity rather than a single chain of amino acids. Porter and his research team were then able to determine the now universally accepted four-chain model of the antibody. Using his fragmentation technique, Porter studied the chains of the molecule separately, while Edelman worked on the whole molecule. By 1969 a complete model of the molecule, comprising more than 1,300 amino acids, had been achieved.

Details

Prof Rodney Robert Porter (8 October 1917 – 6 September 1985) was a British biochemist and Nobel laureate.

Education and early life

He was born in Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, England, the son of Joseph Lawrence Porter, chief clerk of the Railway Carriage and Wagon Works in Earlestown (Newton-le-Willows), and his wife, Isabel May Reese. He was educated at Ashton-in-Makerfield Grammar School.

Rodney Robert Porter received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Liverpool in 1939 for Biochemistry.

His career was interrupted by the Second World War during which he served as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers serving in Sicily and North Africa. In 1944 he was promoted to Major and transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps acting as a War Department analyst, based in Naples in Italy.

After the war he moved to the University of Cambridge where he became Fred Sanger's first PhD student. He was awarded his doctorate (PhD) in 1948.

Career and research

Porter worked for the National Institute for Medical Research for eleven years (1949–1960) before joining St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, Imperial College London and becoming the Pfizer Professor of Immunology. In 1967 he was appointed Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. His colleague Elizabeth Press (Betty Press) worked with him at NIMR, St Mary's and at Oxford contributing extensively to the work which led to the Nobel Prize.

Awards and honours

Porter was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1964. He won the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1966.[citation needed] In 1972, Porter shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Gerald M. Edelman for determining the chemical structure of an antibody. Using the enzyme papain, he broke the blood's immunoglobin into fragments, making them easier to study. He also looked into how the blood's immunoglobins react with cellular surfaces. He subsequently worked with colleagues Kenneth BM Reid, Robert Sim and Duncan Campbell on developing understanding of the Complement Proteins associated with defence against infection.

In 1991, Raymond Dwek founded the Oxford Glycobiology Institute at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford and this building was named after Porter as the Rodney Porter building. The department organises the Rodney Porter Memorial Lecture every year.

Family

In 1948 he married Julia New. They had five children together.

Death

Porter died following a four car accident on 6 September 1985, near Beacon Hill outside Guildford, as the driver of one of the cars. Julia was only slightly injured in the accident. They had been en route to France for a holiday, just prior to his formal retirement.

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Jai Ganesh · 2021-12-14 00:14:22

984) Frank Wilczek

Summary

Frank Anthony Wilczek (born May 15, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and a Nobel laureate. He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Founding Director of T. D. Lee Institute and Chief Scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University (ASU) and full Professor at Stockholm University.

Wilczek, along with David Gross and H. David Politzer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction."

Details

Frank Wilczek, (born May 15, 1951, New York, New York, U.S.), is an American physicist who, with David J. Gross and H. David Politzer, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004 for discoveries regarding the strong force—the nuclear force that binds together quarks (the smallest building blocks of matter) and holds together the nucleus of the atom.

After graduating from the University of Chicago (B.S., 1970), Wilczek studied under Gross at Princeton University, earning an M.S. in mathematics (1972) and a Ph.D. in physics (1974). He later served on the faculty at Princeton (1974–81) and taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1980–88). In 1989 Wilczek became a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, a post he held until 2000, when he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the early 1970s Wilczek and Gross used particle accelerators to study quarks and the force that acts on them. (See fundamental interaction.) The two scientists—and Politzer working independently—observed that quarks were so tightly bound together that they could not be separated as individual particles but that the closer quarks approached one another, the weaker the strong force became. When quarks were brought very close together, the force was so weak that the quarks acted almost as if they were free particles not bound together by any force. When the distance between two quarks increased, however, the force became greater—an effect analogous to the stretching of a rubber band. The discovery of this phenomenon, known as asymptotic freedom, led to a completely new physical theory, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), to describe the strong force. QCD put the finishing touches on the standard model of particle physics, which describes the fundamental particles in nature and how they interact with one another.

Wilczek also contributed to the study of questions relating to cosmology, condensed matter physics, and black holes. His books included The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces (2008), A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design (2015), and Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality (2021). In addition to the Nobel Prize, Wilczek received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (1982) among numerous other honours.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-12-17 00:15:39

985) Karl Drais

Karl Freiherr von Drais (full name: Karl Friedrich Christian Ludwig Freiherr Drais von Sauerbronn) (29 April 1785 – 10 December 1851) was a noble German forest official and significant inventor in the Biedermeier period. He was born and died in Karlsruhe.

Bicycle

Drais was a prolific inventor, who invented the Laufmaschine ("running machine"), also later called the velocipede, draisine (English) or draisienne (French), also nicknamed the hobby horse or dandy horse. This was his most popular and widely recognized invention. It incorporated the two-wheeler principle that is basic to the bicycle and motorcycle and was the beginning of mechanized personal transport. This was the earliest form of a bicycle, without pedals. His first reported ride from Mannheim to the "Schwetzinger Relaishaus" (a coaching inn, located in "Rheinau", today a district of Mannheim) took place on 12 June 1817 using Baden's best road. Karl rode his bike; it was a distance of about 7 kilometres (4.3 mi). The round trip took him a little more than an hour, but may be seen as the big bang for horseless transport. However, after marketing the velocipede, it became apparent that roads were so rutted by carriages that it was hard to balance on the machine for long, so velocipede riders took to the pavements (sidewalks) and moved far too quickly, endangering pedestrians. Consequently, authorities in Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and even Calcutta banned its use, which ended its vogue for decades.

Other inventions

Drais also invented the earliest typewriter with a keyboard (1821). He later developed an early stenograph machine which used 16 characters (1827), a device to record piano music on paper (1812), the first meat grinder (1840s), and a wood-saving cooker including the earliest hay chest. He also invented two four-wheeled human powered vehicles (1813/1814), the second of which he presented in Vienna to the congress carving up Europe after Napoleon's defeat.[6] In 1842, he developed a foot-driven human powered railway vehicle whose name "draisine" is used even today for railway handcars.

Time as civil servant

Drais was unable to market his inventions for profit because he was still a civil servant of Baden, even though he was being paid without providing active service. As a result, on 12 January 1818, Drais was awarded a grand-ducal privilege (Großherzogliches Privileg) to protect his inventions for 10 years in Baden by the younger Grand Duke Karl. Grand Duke Karl also appointed Drais professor of mechanics. This was merely an honorary title, not related to any university or other institution. Drais retired from the civil service and was awarded a pension for his appointment to professor of mechanical science.

Upheaval

In 1820, trouble overtook Drais when the political murder of the author August von Kotzebue was followed by the beheading of the perpetrator, Karl Ludwig Sand. In 1822, Drais was a fervent liberal who supported revolution in Baden. Drais's conservative father, as the highest Judge of Baden, had not entered a plea for pardon in the beheading of Karl Ludwig Sand, and the younger Drais was mobbed by the student partisans everywhere in Germany due to his family ties. Therefore, Drais emigrated to Brazil where he lived from 1822 to 1827, and worked as a land surveyor on the fazenda of Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff. In 1827, he returned to Mannheim. Three years later in 1830, Drais's father died and the younger Drais was mobbed by jealous rivals.

In 1839, after surviving a murderous attack in 1838, he moved to the village of Waldkatzenbach in the hills of Odenwald and remained there until 1845. During this period, he invented the railway handcar (later known as the draisine). Finally, he moved back to his place of birth, Karlsruhe. In 1849, and still a fervent radical, Drais gave up his title of Baron and dropped the "von" from his name. Subsequently, after the revolution collapsed, he was in a very bad position. The royalists tried to have him certified as mad and locked up. His pension was confiscated to help to pay for the "costs of revolution" after it was suppressed by the Prussians.

Death

Drais's undoing had been the fact that he had publicly renounced his noble title in 1848, and adopted the name "Citizen Karl Drais" as a tribute to the French Revolution.

Karl Drais died penniless on 10 December 1851 in Karlsruhe. The house in which he lived last is just two blocks away from where at that time a young Carl Benz was raised.

In 1985, West Germany issued a commemorative postage stamp, a semipostal 50 Pf+25 Pf surcharge, in remembrance of the 200th anniversary of Karl Drais's birthday.

In 2017, Germany issued a commemorative postage stamp (0,70 Euro) in remembrance of the 200th anniversary of Karl Drais's first run of his "running machine" on 12 June 1817. The stamp shows the machine plus as its shadow, a bicycle.

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Jai Ganesh · 2021-12-19 00:07:56

986) Peter Henlein

Peter Henlein (also spelled Henle or Hele) (1485 - August 1542), a locksmith and clockmaker of Nuremberg, Germany, is often considered the inventor of the watch. He was one of the first craftsmen to make small ornamental portable clocks which were often worn as pendants or attached to clothing, and which are regarded as the first watches. Many sources also erroneously credit him as the inventor of the mainspring.

Life

Henlein grew up in Nuremberg. His parents were Peter, a brass forger and citizen of Nuremberg since 1461, and Barbara Henlein. He had one older brother, Herman Henlein, who became also a master cutler in 1496. In his life he was married to three women: Kunigunde Ernst, his first wife, and Margarethe, his second, and Walburga Schreyer, his third wife.

He apparently apprenticed in his youth as a locksmith. At the time, locksmiths were among the few craftsmen with the skills and tools to enter the new field of clockmaking.

On September 7, 1504, he was involved in a brawl in which a fellow locksmith, Georg Glaser, was killed. As one of the accused he asked for and received asylum in the Franciscan Monastery of Nuremberg, where he lived until 1508. This monastery had a history as a center of scientific and astronomical knowledge. During his asylum he may have gained deeper knowledge of the craft of clockmaking there.

Henlein became known as a maker of small portable ornamental spring-powered brass clocks, very rare and expensive, which were fashionable among the nobility of the time, worn as pendants or attached to clothing, which can be considered the first watches. He was known as the first craftsman to build clockworks into "Bisamköpfe", musk-balls or pomanders, small pendant containers fashioned from precious metals for fragrances or disinfectants; these are now known as pomander watches. In November of 1509, he became a master in the city's locksmith guild. He is mentioned in the city's records as the supplier of these small clocks, which were given as gifts to important people. The earliest extant example of a watch, the Watch 1505, a fire-gilded pomander watch dated 1505, has been attributed to Henlein.

In 1529, Henlein traveled to Strasbourg on behalf of the Nuremberg council, for a sky globe. Six years later, he crafted a watch for the council of Nuremberg. He also built a tower clock for Lichtenau castle in 1541, and was known as a builder of advanced astronomical instruments.

Henlein died in August 1542 and was buried at the Katharinenkirche, Nuremberg.

Recognition

The first and most important historical tribute of Peter Henlein and his invention of a portable watch was made in 1511 by an influential figure of the time. Johannes Cochläus, humanist and contemporary of Peter Henlein, he wrote in the appendix of the description of the world “Cosmographia Pomponius Mela – De Norimberga Germania Centro”, which is dedicated to the humanist of the Renaissance Willibald Pirckheimer, a eulogy to the City of Nuremberg, including a praise for Peter Henlein and his watches:

“Every day they (the craftsmen of Nuremberg) invent finer things. For example, Peter Hele (Henlein), still a young man, fashions works that even the most learned mathematicians admire: for from only a little bit of iron he makes clocks with many wheels, which, no matter how one might turn them, show and chime the hours for forty hours without any weight, even when carried at the breast or in a handbag (purse).”

Johann Neudörfers wrote in 1547 that Henlein invented the portable pomander watches (die bisam Köpf zu machen erfunden).

In his lifetime, Henlein crafted many watches and instruments. A paper from 1524 records that Heinlein was paid 15 florins (one florin is approximately between 140 and 1000 modern US dollars) for a gilt pomander watch. His customers included the high society of the 16th century, f. e. Martin Luther, Kaspar von Schöneich (chancellor of Mecklenburg), Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, Kardinal Albrecht from Brandenburg, Philip Melanchthon, Mercurino di Gattinara as well as gifts which were given by the Nuremberg Council.

Commemoration

In 1905, the German Watchmakers’ Association and the City of Nuremberg celebrated the 400th anniversary of the invention of the pocket watch. A watch exhibition was held in Nuremberg during the celebrations, at which outstanding works were awarded Henlein medals.

The Peter Henlein Fountain was unveiled on the occasion of the opening of the watch exhibition in. The fountain was donated by the City of Nuremberg and the watchmakers’ association. Inscription: ‘IN MEMORY OF THE INVENTOR OF THE POCKET WATCH PETER HENLEIN FROM THE CITY OF NUREMBERG AND THE GERMAN WATCHMAKERS ASSOCIATION’.

His fame as the inventor of the watch came after his rise to popular consciousness in the 19th century, through a novel by Karl Spindler, Der Nürnberger Sophokles. This was made into a book and the 1939 film called "The Immortal Heart". Also in 1942, Germany dedicated a stamp with the words: Peter Henlein - Inventor of the Watch (Peter Henlein - Erfinder der Taschenuhr).

Much earlier, the Walhalla in Donaustauf, which is a memorial for "politicians, sovereigns, scientists and artists of the German tongue", honors Peter Henlein in 1842, at its inauguration with the words inventor of the watch. By coincidence, it was the 300th anniversary of his death.

Mainspring

The mainspring which made portable clocks possible, often attributed to him, actually appeared in the early 15th century, almost a century before his work. Although he did not invent the mainspring, the production of his portable watches was made possible primarily by a previously unseen scale of miniaturization of the torsion pendulum and coil spring mechanism, placed in a technical unit by Peter Henlein, a technological innovation and novelty of the time, operating in all positions; which makes him to the inventor of the watch.

Pomander watch and Nuremberg eggs

Henlein did not create the typical Nuremberg eggs - he crafted mainly portable pomander watches. Although they are associated with Henlein, and are a development of the watch-making tradition of Henlein's time, they thus become popular only several decades after his death.

The German word Eierlein "little egg" is a corruption of a diminutive of Uhr (Middle Low German ûr, from Latin hora) "clock", Aeurlein or Ueurlein (Modern German Ührlein). The association with "eggs" may arise with a 1571 translation of Rabelais by Johann Fischart in 1571; Fischart translated as Eierlein an instance of Ueurlein in Rabelais. This form of the name may have played a part in inspiring the oval shape becoming popular in the 1580s.

The former watchmaker and art collector Jürgen Abeler from the Wuppertaler Watch Museum concludes about pomander watches in his book: „So if any one of the preserved watches at all should be linked with the person of Peter Henlein, it can only be this watch in the pomander.“´

Inspirational period and environment

A well-known saying at the time of the Holy Roman Empire positioned the various different European centres of the early Renaissance age, including Nuremberg's special atmosphere:

“If I had Venice's power, Augsburg's splendour, Nuremberg's esprit, Strasburg's weapons and Ulm's money, I would be the richest man in the world.” Nuremberg's esprit referred to its inventive spirit, its openness to innovation, its ability to puzzle out new things.”

As a citizen of Nuremberg, Peter Henlein had the privilege of living in the midst of this intellectual atmosphere. The foundation on which the extraordinary development of his artistic craftsmanship was based was laid by the development and diversity of the crafts of metalwork and fine mechanics of Nuremberg.The atmosphere of the European Renaissance and the Renaissance city of Nuremberg was shaped by the energy of flourishing trade, the development of the civilisation and new cultural influences.

Peter Henlein most likely procured this Oriental pomander in the monastery. The plague had descended on Nuremberg in 1505 and the pomander as status symbol had returned to the awareness of many of his high-ranking contemporaries. In an age of new perspectives, it must have been very tempting to place the essence or spirit of time in the container of a fragrance dispenser.

Influence

Under the immense Renaissance conditions and dramatic personal circumstances, a German fine forger, locksmith and later watchmaker named Peter Henlein had the vision, artistic skill and craftsmanship to make a timepiece that was wearable on the body for the very first time. This was a new step beyond the simple miniaturization of table clocks (this idea existed already) and he transformed this idea to a robotic invention, made it a wearable and personalized technology.

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Jai Ganesh · 2021-12-21 00:07:49

987) Ian Donald

Summary

Ian Donald (1910-1987), the developer of the use of ultrasound in the field of obstetrics, was Regius Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology from 1954 to 1976. He was awarded an honorary DSc in 1983.

Born in Cornwall, Donald was educated at schools in Scotland and South Africa and studied Medicine at London University. He served as a Medical Officer in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, when he was mentioned in dispatches and awarded (in 1946) an MBE for bravery. In 1951 he was appointed Reader in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at St Thomas Medical School, London, where he devised a respirator for new-born babies with respiratory problems.

Donald became interested during the Second World War in the possibilities of adapting radar and sonar technology for medical diagnosis. He worked with T G Brown of the the scientific instrument makers Kelvin & Hughes to create the first diagnostic ultrasound machine, and in 1958, with Brown and John MacVicar, he published his findings in The Lancet. He was involved in the planning and design of the Queen Mother's Hospital in Glasgow, which opened in 1964 and was appointed CBE in 1973.

Details

Ian Donald (27 December 1910 in Liskeard – 19 June 1987) was an English physician who was most notable for pioneering the diagnostic use of ultrasound in obstetrics, enabling the visual discovery of abnormalities in pregnancy. Donald was Regius Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Glasgow. Donald's work was characterised by a series of collaborations between clinicians and engineers that led to the designing and building of a series of instruments that enabled the examination of the unborn and that eventually enabled him to build the world's first obstetric ultrasound machine, the Diasonograph in 1963. His other great achievement was to secure the construction of the Queen Mother's Maternity Hospital that was built next to the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow.

Life

Donald was born to John Donald and Helen née Barrow Wilson in 1910. His father was a general practitioner who came from a Paisley medical family. His grandfather was also a GP. His mother was a concert pianist. Donald was the eldest of four children and his siblings were Margaret, Alison, and Malcolm. His sister Alison Munro would later become a leading headmistress.

Donald took his early education at the Warriston School preparatory school in Moffat and then his secondary education was completed at Fettes College, Edinburgh. However, Donald never completed his education in Scotland as the family decided to move to South Africa due to his father's poor health. Donald continued his secondary education at Diocesan College in Rondebosch where he studied the classics as well as music, philosophy, and languages. In 1927 Donald's mother and two of his siblings contracted diphtheria and his mother died of a myocardial infarction. Three months later Donald's father died. Maud Grant, the housekeeper, with a trust fund was left to care for the children. Also in the same year, Donald achieved a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in arts and music at the University of Cape Town graduating with a First-class honours. Achieving a BA is considered a traditional route to start medical school.

In 1930 the family moved back to London and Donald matriculated at the University of London to study medicine at the St Thomas's Hospital Medical School. In 1937 Donald achieved a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery at St Thomas's becoming the third generation of doctors in Donald's family.

At the end of his graduate education, Donald married Alix Mathilde de Chazal Richards a farmer's daughter from the Orange Free State. Donald retired on 1 October 1976. He was offered a consultancy at Nuclear Enterprises in Edinburgh, a position he held until 1981. After he fully retired, he moved to Paglesham, an area known for sailing and yachting, which he loved doing all his life. Donald passed away quietly on 19 June 1987. He was survived by his wife, his four daughters and thirteen grandchildren. He was buried in the churchyard at St Peters Church, in Paglesham, Essex.

Career

Donald started his postgraduate medical training at the end of the 1930s planning to specialise in Obstetrics with a position in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at St Thomas's and in 1939 he started his residency.

Donald's medical career was interrupted by the arrival of World War II and in May 1942 he was drafted into the Royal Air Force as a medical officer to do his bit. He was so successful in the role that he was mentioned in dispatches[3] for bravery after he pulled several airmen from an bomber that had crashed and had set on fire while the bombs were still in the airframe. In 1946 he was awarded a MBE for bravery. During his time with the RAF, Donald became aware of a variety of techniques involving Radar and Sonar.

In 1946 Donald completed his war service and returned to work at St Thomas's. In 1949 he was appointed as a tutor in the department of obstetrics and gynaecology. By 1949 the National Health Service was in operation for three years and instead of the continual search for money for patient care, money now came from government taxes, so the hospital's role changed from a needs based approach to a focus on research. Specifically each doctor now had to conduct a research project as part of their remit.

Health

For much of his life, Donald suffered from valvular heart disease, that was a result of him and his sister Margaret becoming infected with Rheumatic fever when he was young. His sister had died from a mitral valve replacement surgery that was still in the early stages of development. In the Autumn of 1961, Donald collapsed in New York with atrial fibrillation. He decided to travel back to the Western Infirmary for treatment with a mitral valve replacement. The condition meant that he suffered many debilitating illnesses, attacks and conditions like pressure sores, blot clots and hematomas that led to further cardiac deterioration, necessitating a new operation.

Over a period of four years, Donald underwent three major heart operations at Hammersmith Hospital. For the third operation, a mitral valve replacement from a pig, with a homograft that had lasted since 1969 was replaced with a Starr Edwards artificial valve in 1976. Donald had published personal accounts of his second and third cardiac operations.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-12-23 00:16:28

988) Ferdinand Verbiest

Summary

Ferdinand Verbiest, Chinese name (Pinyin) Nan Huairen or (Wade-Giles romanization) Nan Huai-jen, (born Oct. 9, 1623, Pitthem, Spanish Netherlands [now Pittem, Belg.]—died Jan. 23, 1688, Beijing, China), was a Dutch Jesuit missionary and astronomer who became an influential official in the Chinese government.

At a time when the Chinese were impressed with Western astronomical knowledge, Verbiest, a trained astronomer, took the place of his Jesuit predecessor, Adam Schall von Bell, as director of the Imperial Board of Astronomy. He advised the Chinese emperor in many matters, including the construction of more than 300 cannon when the Qing dynasty was threatened by a rebellion in South China. In 1678 Verbiest served as a translator in Chinese treaty negotiations with the Russians, in the process obtaining from the Russians knowledge of an overland route through Siberia that could be used by Jesuits coming to China from Europe. Verbiest’s correspondence with his European friends describing the achievements of Chinese civilization inspired such European Enlightenment figures as the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz.

Details

Father Ferdinand Verbiest (9 October 1623 – 28 January 1688) was a Flemish Jesuit missionary in China during the Qing dynasty. He was born in Pittem near Tielt in the County of Flanders (now part of Belgium). He is known as Nan Huairen in Chinese. He was an accomplished mathematician and astronomer and proved to the court of the Kangxi Emperor that European astronomy was more accurate than Chinese astronomy. He then corrected the Chinese calendar and was later asked to rebuild and re-equip the Beijing Ancient Observatory, being given the role of Head of the Mathematical Board and Director of the Observatory.

He became close friends with the Kangxi Emperor, who frequently requested his teaching in geometry, philosophy and music.

Verbiest worked as a diplomat, cartographer, and translator; he spoke Latin, German, Dutch, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian and Manchu. He wrote more than thirty books.

During the 1670s, Verbiest designed what some claim to be the first ever self-propelled vehicle – many claim this as the world's first automobile, in spite of its small size and the lack of evidence that it was actually built.

Early life

Ferdinand Verbiest was the eldest child of Joos Verbiest, bailiff and tax collector of Pittem near Kortrijk, Belgium. Verbiest studied humanities with the Jesuits, in Bruges and Kortrijk, and next went to the Lelie College in Leuven, for a year, to study philosophy and mathematics. He joined the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) on 2 September 1641. Verbiest continued studying theology in Seville, where he was ordained as a priest in 1655. He completed his studies in astronomy and theology in Rome. His intention had been to become a missionary in the Spanish missions to Central America, but this was not to be. His call was to the Far East, where the Roman Catholic Church was 'on mission' to compensate for the loss of (Catholic) believers to the emerging Protestantism in Europe.

In 1658, Verbiest left for China from Lisbon, accompanied by Father Martino Martini, thirty-five other missionaries, the Portuguese Viceroy of the Indies and some other passengers. Their boat reached Macau in 1659, by which time all but ten of the passengers, including the Viceroy and most of the missionaries, had died. Verbiest took up his first posting in Shanxi, leading the mission until 1660 when he was called to assist – and later, replace – Father Johann Adam Schall von Bell, the Jesuit Director of Beijing Observatory and Head of the Mathematical Board, in his work in astronomy. Unfortunately for them, the political situation shifted dramatically in 1661, on the death of the young Shunzhi Emperor, aged 23. His son and successor, Xuanye (the Kangxi Emperor), was only 7, so the government was placed in the hands of four regents. Unlike Shunzhi, the regents were not in favour of the Jesuits, who suffered increased persecution as a result.

Astronomy contests

An engraving from a French book about the Chinese empire, published in 1736. Represented from left to right:

In 1664, the Chinese astronomer Yang Guangxian (1597–1669), who had published a pamphlet against the Jesuits, challenged Schall von Bell to a public astronomy competition. Yang won and took Schall von Bell's place as Head of Mathematics. Having lost the competition, Schall von Bell and the other Jesuits were chained and thrown into a filthy prison, accused of teaching a false religion. They were bound to wooden pegs in such a way that they could neither stand nor sit and remained there for almost two months until a sentence of strangulation was imposed. A high court found the sentence too light and ordered them to be cut up into bits while still alive. Fortunately for them, on 16 April 1665, a violent earthquake destroyed the part of the prison chosen for the execution. An extraordinary meteor was seen in the sky, and a fire destroyed the part of the imperial palace where the condemnation was pronounced. This was seen as an omen and all the prisoners were released. However, they still had to stand trial, and all the Jesuits but Verbiest, Schall von Bell and two others were exiled to Canton. Schall von Bell died within a year, due to the conditions of his confinement.

In 1669, the Kangxi Emperor managed to take power by having the remaining (corrupt) regent, Oboi, arrested. In the same year, the emperor was informed that serious errors had been found in the calendar for 1670, which had been drawn up by Yang Guangxian. Kangxi commanded a public test to compare the merits of European and Chinese astronomy. The test was to predict three things: the length of the shadow thrown by a gnomon of a given height at noon of a certain day; the absolute and relative positions of the Sun and the planets on a given date; and the exact time of an anticipated lunar eclipse. It was decided that Yang and Verbiest should each use their mathematical skills to determine the answers and that "The Heavens would be the judge". The contest was held at the Bureau of Astronomy in the presence of senior-ranking government ministers and officials from the observatory. Unlike Yang, Verbiest had access to the latest updates on the Rudolphine Tables, and was assisted by telescopes for observation. He succeeded in all three tests, and was immediately installed as Head of the Mathematical Board and Director of the Observatory. Out of consideration for him, the exiled Jesuits were authorized to return to their missions. Meanwhile, Yang was sentenced to the same death he had planned for his Jesuit rival, but the sentence was reduced to exile and he died en route to his native home.

Initial projects

The 1670 calendar included an extra month unnecessarily, added to hide other errors and to bring the lunar months in line with the solar year. Verbiest suggested the errors should be corrected, including removing the extra month. This was an audacious move, as the calendar had been approved by the emperor himself. Fearing the emperor's response, the observatory officials begged him to withdraw this request, but he responded: "It is not within my power to make the heavens agree with your calendar. The extra month must be taken out." Much to their surprise, the emperor after studying the research, agreed, and it was done.

After this, Verbiest and the emperor formed a real friendship, with the Jesuit teaching him geometry, philosophy and music. He was frequently invited to the palace and to accompany the Emperor on his expeditions throughout the empire. He translated the first six books of Euclid into Manchu and took every opportunity to introduce Christianity. In response, the Emperor elevated him to the highest grade of the mandarinate and granted permission for him to preach Christianity anywhere in the empire.

Verbiest undertook many projects, including the construction of an aqueduct, the casting of 132 cannons for the imperial army – far superior to any previous Chinese weapons – and the design of a new gun carriage. He created star charts for the Kangxi Emperor in order to tell the time at night.[9] Other inventions included a steam engine to propel ships.

Instruments for Beijing Observatory

Having resolved the issues surrounding the calendar, Verbiest went on to compose a table of all solar and lunar eclipses for the next 2000 years. Delighted with this, the emperor awarded him complete charge of the imperial astronomy observatory, which he rebuilt in 1673. The existing equipment was obsolete, so Verbiest consigned it to a museum and set about designing six new instruments:

Altazimuth, used to measure the position of celestial bodies relative to the celestial horizon and the zenith – the altitude azimuth.

Ecliptic armilla, armillary sphere, six feet in diameter, used to measure the ecliptic longitude difference and latitudes of celestial bodies. (This was the traditional European device while the Chinese developed the equatorial armilla.).

Sextant, eight feet in radius, used to measure the angle of elevation of a celestial object above the horizon. It is used to calculate the angle between two objects, although it is limited to 60 degrees of arc. In navigation, it is used to take a measure of the angle of the Sun at noon to determine latitude.

These were all very large, made of brass and highly decorated, with bronze dragons forming the supports. Despite their weight, they were very easy to manipulate, demonstrating Verbiest's aptitude for mechanical design.

Final days and death

Verbiest died in Beijing shortly after receiving a wound from falling off a bolting horse. He was succeeded as the chief mathematician and astronomer of the Chinese empire by another Belgian Jesuit, Antoine Thomas (1644–1709). He was buried in the Jesuits' Zhalan Cemetery in Beijing, near those of other Jesuits including Matteo Ricci and Johann Adam Schall von Bell, on 11 March 1688.

Verbiest was the only Westerner in Chinese history to ever receive the honour of a posthumous name by the Emperor.

Verbiest's 'car'

Beside his work in astronomy, Verbiest also experimented with steam. Around 1672 he designed – as a toy for the Kangxi Emperor – a steam-propelled trolley which was, quite possibly, the first working steam-powered vehicle ('auto-mobile'). Verbiest describes it in his manuscript Astronomia Europea that was finished in 1681. A friar brought it to Europe and it was then printed in 1687 in Germany. In this work, Verbiest first mentioned the (latin) term motor in its present meaning. With one filling of coal, he wrote that the vehicle was able to move more than one hour. As it was only 65 cm (25.6 in) long, and therefore effectively a scale model, not designed to carry human passengers, nor a driver or goods, it is not strictly accurate to call it a 'car'. Despite this, it was the first vehicle that was able to move by 'self-made' engine power.

Since the steam engine was still not known at that time, Verbiest used the principle of an aeolipile. Steam was generated in a ball-shaped boiler, emerging through a pipe at the top, from where it was directed at a simple, open "steam turbine" (rather like a water wheel) that drove the rear wheels.

It is not verified by other known sources if Verbiest's model was ever built at the time and no authentic drawing of it exists, although he had access to China's finest metal-working craftsmen who were constructing precision astronomical instruments for him.

The Brumm model

The Italian model manufacturer Brumm produced a non-working 1:43 scale model of the Veicolo a turbina de Verbiest (1681), in their "Old Fire" range of 2002. This model was 9 cm (3.54 in) long, which, when scaled-up, would have suggested that Verbiest's original would have been nearly 4 metres (13 ft 1 in) in length.

However, comparison with drawings in Hardenberg's study show that this model is not the same as Verbiest's. It is actually modelled on a small steam turbine car built in the late 18th century (presumably 1775) by a German mechanic that was inspired by Verbiests vehicle but different, for example, only with three wheels. Unfortunately, the original was probably destroyed during a bombing raid on the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe during World War II. However, a photo of the original car can be seen at the Deutsches Museum. Hardenberg notes that this steam turbine car operated on the same principle as Verbiest's carriage (the impulse turbine), but employed a more modern arrangement of the drive train.

Memorials

Verbiest is commemorated on several postage stamps. One, featuring his face, was issued in Belgium, 24 October 1988, to mark the tri-centenary of his death, with a matching pictorial cancellation postmark. Several more stamps were issued in Macau, in 1989 and 1999, featuring a sketch by Verbiest of the Observatory in Peking, where he worked.

Jai Ganesh · 2021-12-24 22:47:36

989) Johann Philipp Reis

Summary

Johann Philipp Reis (7 January 1834 – 14 January 1874) was a self-taught German scientist and inventor. In 1861, he constructed the first make-and-break telephone, today called the Reis telephone.

The telephone

Reis imagined electricity could be propagated through space, as light can, without the aid of a material conductor, and he performed some experiments on the subject. The results were described in a paper, "On the Radiation of Electricity", which, in 1859, he mailed to Professor Poggendorff for insertion in the then well-known periodical, Annalen der Physik. The manuscript was rejected, to the great disappointment of the sensitive young teacher.

Reis, as Bell would later do, had studied the organs of ear and the idea of an apparatus for transmitting sound by means of electricity had floated on his mind for years. Inspired by his physics lessons he attacked the problem, and was rewarded with success. In 1860, he constructed the first prototype of a telephone, which could cover a distance of 100 meters. In 1862, he again tried to interest Poggendorff with an account of his "telephon", as he called it. His second offering was also rejected, like the first. The learned professor, it seems, regarded the transmission of speech by electricity as a chimera; Reis bitterly attributed the failure to his being "only a poor schoolmaster."

Reis had difficulty interesting people in Germany in his invention despite demonstrating it to (among others) Wilhelm von Legat, Inspector of the Royal Prussian Telegraph Corps in 1862. It aroused more interest in the United States In 1872, when Professor Vanderwyde demonstrated it in New York.

Prior to 1947, the Reis device was tested by the British company Standard Telephones and Cables (STC). The results also confirmed it could faintly transmit and receive speech. At the time STC was bidding for a contract with Alexander Graham Bell's American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and the results were covered up by STC's chairman Sir Frank Gill to maintain Bell's reputation.

Details

Johann Philipp Reis, (born Jan. 7, 1834, Gelnhausen, Hesse-Kassel [Germany]—died Jan. 14, 1874, Friedrichsdorf, Ger.), was German physicist who constructed a precursor of the electric telephone.

Reis was educated at Frankfurt am Main, became a merchant for a few years, and in 1858 began teaching in Friedrichsdorf. While there he experimented with electricity and worked on the development of hearing aids. This research led to his interest in the electrical transmission of sound, and by 1861 he had designed several transmitters and receivers.

In Reis’s instruments, a contact in an electrical circuit was established between a metal point and a metal strip resting on a membrane in the transmitter. It was Reis’s theory that, as the membrane vibrated, the metal point would bounce up and down, producing intermittent contact and intermittent current synchronous with the vibrations, and that, furthermore, the height of the bounce, the force of its return, and the amplitude of the current pulse would vary with the intensity of the sound. Thus, he expected that something of the quality as well as the intensity of the sound would be conveyed. Reis’s receiver consisted of an iron needle surrounded by a coil and resting on a sounding box. It was designed to operate on the principle of magnetostriction, a phenomenon in which the length of a metal rod varies as the magnetic field through it varies. It had been known since 1837 that an interrupted current would produce corresponding “ticks” in such a device. Reis believed that simple musical tones could be transmitted by the apparatus—which he called a telephone—and in fact such demonstrations with his instruments were common.

In addition, though, there were several reports of successful speech transmission. These reports were subsequently discounted in court cases upholding the patents of Alexander Graham Bell, largely because it was recognized that speech transmission would have been impossible if the instruments had operated as Reis believed they did. Nevertheless, it is a fact that, if the sound entering a Reis transmitter is not too strong, contact between the metal point and the metal strip will not be broken. Instead, the pressure of the former on the latter will fluctuate with the sound, causing fluctuations in the electrical resistance and therefore in the current. Similarly, the receiver will respond to continuously fluctuating as well as to intermittent currents (but not by magnetostriction). The sensitivity, however, is extremely low—so low that it is not unreasonable to question the validity of the limited testimony regarding successful voice transmission in the 1860s.

There is no evidence that Reis himself thought of his devices as more than “philosophical toys,” good for lecture demonstrations to illustrate the nature of sound. He authorized their reproduction, and numerous copies were sold for this purpose.

johann-philipp-reis-telefon106~_v-img__3__4__xl_-f4c197f4ebda83c772171de6efadd3b29843089f.jpg?version=935c7

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