Nobel laureates

When one thinks of key papers in the literature that have been within the realm of what we now call computational chemistry, the papers of several chemists who have been honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry come first to mind. Professor Robert S. Mulliken did much to foster a molecular orbital picture of molecules, and his name is probably most frequently used in conjunction with the population analysis developed to assign the electrons in a molecule to its constituent atoms. Mulliken became a laureate in 1966 while at the 

Laboratory of Molecular Spectra and Structure, Physics Department, University of Chicago. Professor Mulliken would not necessarily have considered himself a computational chemist, a term that did not come into vogue until about 1980, Nevertheless, his research helped lay the conceptual foundation from which computational chemistry evolved in part. 

Professors Kenichi Fukui (Kyoto University) and Roald Hoffmann (Cornell University) received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their quantum mechanical studies of chemical reactivity. Their applied theoretical chemistry research is certainly at the core of computational chemistry by today s yardstick. Professor Fukui s name is associated with frontier electrons, which govern the transition states in reactions, while that of Hoffmann is often hyphenated to R. B. Woodward s name in regard to their orbital symmetry rules. In addition, Professor Hoffmann s name is strongly identified with the extended Hiickel molecular orbital method. Not only was he a pioneer in the development of the method, he has continued to use it in almost all of his over 300 papers. 

Several other chemists who have won the Nobel Prize did not receive it for their computational chemistry per se, but nevertheless were extremely influential in computational chemistry. Among these scientists is Professor William N. Lipscomb, Jr., of Harvard University. He received the 1976 Prize for his work on the bonding of boron hydrides,but it was also in his laboratory where the extended Hiickel method first evolved, as well as other original molecular orbital treatments.  

It is beyond the scope of this review to detail every notable contribution to computational chemistry by Nobel Prize winners suffice it to mention the following additional examples. The polymer studies of Stanford chemist Paul J. Flory (1974 laureate) had a computational component. Jean-Marie Lehn (cowinner of the 1987 Prize) studied stereoelectronic effects by ab initio calculations in a series of papers from the University of Louis Pasteur in the 1970s.In 1990, Elias J. Corey (Harvard University) received the Nobel Prize for his organic synthesis work. Besides his laboratory achievements, he and his students also reduced the logic of synthetic chemistry to computer algorithms for computer-assisted organic synthesis.  

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Into the late 1940s, Nobel Laureate Robert S. Mulliken, a physical chemist at the University of Chicago, maintained a skeptical view regarding the future of applying the theories of physics to solving practical problems in chemistry (4,5). Subsequentiy, Mulliken (5) related that... 

Nobel-laureate Richard Feynman once said that the principles of physics do not preclude the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom (260). Recent developments in the fields of physics, chemistry, and biology (briefly described in the previous sections) bear those words out. The invention and development of scanning probe microscopy has enabled the isolation and manipulation of individual atoms and molecules. Research in protein and nucleic acid stmcture have given rise to powerful tools in the estabUshment of rational synthetic protocols for the production of new medicinal dmgs, sensing elements, catalysts, and electronic materials. 

Deisenhofer, J., and Michel, H., 1989. The photosyndietic reaction center from die purple bacterium Rhodopseudomonas viridis. Science 245 1463-1473. Published version of die Nobel laureate address by the researchers who first elucidated the molecnlar structure of a photosyndietic reacdon center. 

See. e.g.. Otto Paul Hfrmann Difls in Nobel Laureate in Chemistry 1901-1992, L. K. Jamfs (Ed.). American Chemical Society 1994, p. 332. 

Anderson, R. H. (1989). Andrei D. Sakharov, 68, Nobel Laureate and Wellspring of the Soviet Conscience. New York Times, December 16. 

To learn more about Dorothy Hodgkin and other women Nobel laureates, we recommend the book Nobel Prize Women in Science by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, published in 1993. 

A most important early addition to organic structure theory was made by the first Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, van t Hoff, who in 1874 recognized that the optical activity of carbon compounds can be explained by the postulate that the four valence bonds of the carbon atom are directed in space toward the comers of a tetrahedron. 

The structure theory of inorganic chemistry may be said to have been bom only fifty years ago, when Werner, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1913, found that the chemical composition and properties of complex inorganic substances could be explained by assuming that metal atoms often coordinate about themselves a number of atoms different from their valence, usually four atoms at the comers either of a tetrahedron or of a square coplanar with the central atom, or six atoms at the comers of an octahedron. His ideas about the geometry of inorganic complexes were completely verified twenty years later, through the application of the technique of x-ray diffraction. 

With regret, the passing is noted, on April 16, 1997, of Guy G. S. Dutton, a member of the Board of Advisors of Advances for many years and a staunch supporter of the series. Also deceased in 1997 are two giants of science, Melvin Calvin and Alexander Todd, Nobel laureates, each of whom made seminal contributions in the carbohydrate field. 

To determine molecular motions in real time necessitates the application of a time-ordered sequence of (at least) two ultrafast laser pulses to a molecular sample the first pulse provides the starting trigger to initiate a particular process, the break-up of a molecule, for example whilst the second pulse, time-delayed with respect to the first, probes the molecular evolution as a function of time. For isolated molecules in the gas phase, this approach was pioneered by the 1999 Nobel Laureate, A. H. Zewail of the California Institute of Technology. The nature of what is involved is most readily appreciated through an application, illustrated here for the photofragmentation of iodine bromide (IBr). 

De Broglie received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1929, only two years after experiments confirmed his theory. Davisson, a student of Nobel laureate Robert Millikan, and Thomson, the son and student of J. J. Thomson (who won the Nobel prize for discovering the electron), shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1937. 

This review outlines aspects of the various phases of Swiss chemistry from the introduction of alchemy in Western Europe, its transition to chemistry as a science and profession and the more recent practice. Attention is drawn to the large number of Swiss Nobel Laureates in chemistry and the contributions of Swiss physicists to chemical spectroscopy, from the days of Balmer. In all periods, Swiss chemistry has had European dimensions, and links can be traced to most host countries of previous Euroanalysis conferences and indeed to the next, at Lisbon, in AD 2000... 

Shortly afterward, a scandal erupted in Basel s small chemistry community when Switzerland s Nobel laureate complained publicly that the Geigy Corporation had not paid him the proper royalties on his patented inventions. When Muller hired a politically active lawyer to represent him, the story hit the Swiss newspapers. In the end, Muller became a vice director of Geigy and received a share in the profits. 

This series of fora which began in 1977 was planned and organized, under my chairmanship, by distinguished scientists from academia and high level industrial representatives. The planning committee included several Nobel Laureates who worked hard to make successful the series of fifteen fora. The following dates, venues, topics, and... 

Hans A. Bethe Nobel Laureate in Physics CornellUniversity... 

In 1962, George A. Olah (Nobel Laureate in chemistry in 1994 now at the University of Southern California) and co-workers published the first of a series of papers describing experiments in which alkyl cations were prepared in an environment in which they were reasonably stable and in which they could be observed by a number of spectroscopic techniques. 

In 1943, after being awarded the D.Sc. degree, Jeanloz was appointed as Research Associate, first with Meyer and then with Tadeusz Reichstein, Nobel Laureate for his work on steroid hormones. With Reichstein he studied the chemistry of deoxy sugars, some of which are constituents of these hormones, and developed3 a new method for the assay of these sugars. In 1946-1947 he spent 1 year in Canada as Research Associate at the University of Montreal, where he collaborated with D. A. Prins from the Research Division, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH, in the preparation of... 

The most famous fungal metabolites are, of course, the penicillins and cephalosporins. The association of sulfur and penicillin has a curious history. Penicillin was investigated chemically in 1932 by Harold Raistrick and his colleagues.14 The antibacterial activity could be extracted into ether from acid solution but on solvent evaporation the residue was without antibacterial activity. Clearly, penicillin was not a well-behaved natural product If only Raistrick had carried out a back-extraction from ether into dilute alkali, penicillin might have become available in the 1930s (and Raistrick would have become a Nobel Laureate). 

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