Nobel Prizes

Watson s vivid and outspoken account of how he and Crick discovered the structure of DNA (and won themselves a Nobel Prize) - one of the greatest scientific achievements of the century. 

Scaiming probe microscopies have become the most conspicuous surface analysis tecimiques since their invention in the mid-1980s and the awarding of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics [71, 72]- The basic idea behind these tecimiques is to move an extremely fine tip close to a surface and to monitor a signal as a fiinction of the tip s position above the surface. The tip is moved with the use of piezoelectric materials, which can control the position of a tip to a sub-Angstrom accuracy, while a signal is measured that is indicative of the surface topography. These tecimiques are described in detail in section BI.20. 

The principles of operation of quadnipole mass spectrometers were first described in the late 1950s by Wolfgang Paul who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics for this development. The equations governing the motion of an ion in a quadnipole field are quite complex and it is not the scope of the present article to provide the reader with a complete treatment. Rather, the basic principles of operation will be described, the reader being referred to several excellent sources for more complete infonnation [13, H and 15]. 

A definition of catalysis similar to that given above was stated first in about 1895 by Wilhelm Ostwald, whose work on catalysis was recognized with a Nobel prize. Sixty years before, Jakob Berzelius had coined the tenn... 

Iter Kolin, whose name appears on the two key papers wliich provided the impetus for the lopment of modern density functional theory, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in, jointly witli Jolin Pople. 

When considering how the evolution of life could have come about, the seeding of terrestrial life by extraterrestrial bacterial spores traveling through space (panspermia) deserves mention. Much is said about the possibility of some form of life on other planets, including Mars or more distant celestial bodies. Is it possible for some remnants of bacterial life, enclosed in a protective coat of rock dust, to have traveled enormous distances, staying dormant at the extremely low temperature of space and even surviving deadly radiation The spore may be neither alive nor completely dead, and even after billions of years it could have an infinitesimal chance to reach a planet where liquid water could restart its life. Is this science fiction or a real possibility We don t know. Around the turn of the twentieth century Svante Arrhenius (Nobel Prize in chemistry 1903) developed this theory in more detail. There was much recent excitement about claimed fossil bacterial remains in a Martian meteorite recovered from Antarctica (not since... 

The development of the structural theory of the atom was the result of advances made by physics. In the 1920s, the physical chemist Langmuir (Nobel Prize in chemistry 1932) wrote, The problem of the structure of atoms has been attacked mainly by physicists who have given little consideration to the chemical properties which must be explained by a theory of atomic structure. The vast store of knowledge of chemical properties and relationship, such as summarized by the Periodic Table, should serve as a better foundation for a theory of atomic structure than the relativity meager experimental data along purely physical lines. ... 

We also received a solid edncation in mathematics, as well as some physics and chemistry. Although, among others, the physicist Lorand Eotvos and the chemist George Flevesy (Nobel Prize in 1943) attended the same Piarist school in earlier years, I learned about this only years later and cannot remember that anybody mentioned them as role-models during my school years. Classes were from 8 AM to 1 PM six days a week, with extensive homework for the rest of the day. I did... 

In the summer of 1963, I learned that I had won the American Chemical Society Award in Petroleum Chemistry for my work on Friedel-Crafts chemistry. It was a most welcome recognition for someone who only a few years earlier had fled his native country and started all over on a far-away continent. Although I have received numerous other awards and recognitions over the years, with the exception of the Nobel Prize, no other award touched me as much. 1 remember that my first ACS award carried with it a check for 5,000. My research director for some reason believed that a company employee was not... 

Von Baeyer (Nobel Prize, 1905) should be credited for having recognized in 1902 the saltlike character of the compounds formed. He then suggested a correlation between the appearance of color and salt formation—the so-called halochromy. Gomberg (who had just shortly before discovered the related stable triphenylmethyl radical), as well as Walden, contributed to the evolving understanding of the structure of related cationic dyes such as malachite green. 

The new addition of the building was completed by the end of 1994 and dedicated in February 1995. Because I coincidentally won the Nobel Prize just two months before (more about this in Chapter 11), some believed that there was some relationship between the two events. This certainly was not the case. Katherine Loker and our other friends had made their wonderful gifts well before, and it was just a fortunate coincidence that we had such good timing to celebrate the opening of our enlarged institute. 

H. C. Brown (the pioneer of hydroboration chemistry, Nobel Prize, 1979), in contrast, concluded that in solvolysis both 1-exo and 2-endo... 

Intensive, critical studies of a controversial topic also help to eliminate the possibility of errors. One of my favorite quotations is by George von Bekesy, a fellow Hungarian-born physicist who studied fundamental questions of the inner ear and hearing (Nobel Prize in medicine, 1961) ... 

In cases of more effective 7t-electron donor or tz-donor neighboring groups, as is the case in forming /3-phenylethyl (studied by Don Cram from UCLA Nobel Prize in chemistry, 1987) or /3-halogen bridged species, these have sufficient electrons to form 2e-2c bonds (with some intermediate delocalization). 

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