James Gregory

James Gregory was born on November 6, 1638 in Drumoak, Scotland.  His father was a minister and died when Gregory was thirteen.  His mother, whose uncle was a professor of mathematics, schooled the boy in geometry and had him attend grammar school in Aberdeen, Scotland.  With his father dead, his education was seen to by his older brother David and he attended Marischal College in Aberdeen, graduating in 1657.  Gregory studied optics and in 1663 published Optica Promota in which he described for the first time the construction of a reflecting telescope, also called a Gregorian telescope, honoring Gregory.  He was not able to construct one because he did not have the skills required to prepare the mirrors.

A reflecting telescope is an optical telescope that uses one or more curved mirrors to reflect light from the object being viewed.  It was invented as an alternative to a refracting telescope, in which light passes through lenses.  Refracting telescopes suffer from the problem of chromatic aberration, in which, due to the fact that different colors of light have different indices of refraction through glass, some details can be blurry and show color blotches.  An index of refraction is the ratio of the speed of light through a vacuum over the speed of light through a particular medium, in this case glass, and can used to determine how far a light beam is bent when it travels through one medium to another. The effect of the differences in the indices of refraction is that different colors will have different focal lengths for a particular telescope. Today nearly all large research-grade telescopes are reflecting telescopes.  Without lenses, they do not suffer from chromatic aberration and have a wider spectrum of color, due to the fact that some wavelengths of light (particularly UV light) are absorbed by glass lenses.  Another advantage of reflecting telescopes is that they can be made larger than refracting telescopes.  The largest lens that can be practically created is only 1 meter in diameter, whereas reflecting telescope mirrors have been created that exceed 10 meters in diameter.

In 1663 Gregory went to London, England where he met some members of the Royal Society, including John Collins, Robert Hooke, and Sir Robert Moray.  These friends introduced him to an optician named Rieve, who attempted to construct a telescope using Gregory's design, but he was unable to make the parabolic mirror to work to Gregory's satisfaction.  Isaac Newton read Gregory's book and the two later corresponded.  At that time the European continent was considered the center of mathematics research so in 1664 he left London for Padua, in the Venetian Republic, where he studied mathematics and published two works on proto-calculus, which bolstered his reputation and got him into the Royal Society when he returned to London in 1668.  In 1669, with the help of Robert Hooke, he was appointed to a new chair in mathematics at the University of St. Andrews.  He taught at St. Andrews for 6 years but did not enjoy his time there.  Suspicious of his new ideas and his interest in higher mathematics his masters at the school shunned him and eventually withheld his salary and servants.  

In 1674 he accepted a new professorship at the University of Edinburgh.  At Edinburgh the university officials were more generous and he had the money he needed to establish an astronomy program.  Sadly, in October of 1675 he suffered a stroke while he was showing the moons of Jupiter to his students.  He died a few days later at the age of 37.  

References:

Chambers, Robert; "Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen"; Volume 2; Blackie and Son, 1835

O'Connor JJ and EF Roberson; "Gregory Biography"; at history.st-andrews.ac.uk

Anon; "Biographical Information" for Gregory, James, at nahste.ac.uk

James Gregory Wikipedia Entry

Daniel Nathans

Daniel Nathans was born on October 30, 1928 in Wilmington, Delaware.  He was the youngest of nine children of Russian immigrant parents.  His father lost his business in the great depression and for some time was unemployed (he later learned that his parents sometimes went hungry in order to feed the children).  His early education was in Wilmington public schools, working in the afternoon and weekends, and he attended the University of Delaware, hitchhiking to get to class, and graduating with a chemistry degree in 1950.  Following his father's wishes Nathans went to medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.  During a summer job, working at a Delaware hospital he was bored with the routine nature of medical practice and when he returned to St. Louis he began working in the research lab of Oliver Lowery.  He graduated medical school in 1954.

After graduating he did an internship at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City and spent two years as a clinical associate at the National Cancer Institute where he cared for patients and researched the synthesis of immunoglobulins by myeloma tumors. He returned to Columbia-Presbyterian for two more years and then began his research career at the Rockefeller Institute working for Fritz Lippman in 1959, where he studied bacterial protein synthesis.  Nathans began a Ph.D. program but did not complete it because he did not want to sit in any more lectures. In 1962 he moved to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and worked for Barry Wood, who had been his teacher in medical school at Washington University.  In 1969 he went to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel to learn about animal viruses and while he was there he received correspondence from his colleagues at Johns Hopkins about a restriction endonuclease enzyme.  When he returned to America, Nathans, with the assistance of his graduate student Kathleen Danna, continued work that further established the function of restriction endonuclease enzymes.

Restriction endonucleases or restriction enzymes are enzymes that cleave double stranded DNA molecules at specific base sequences.  Each enzyme has its own specific recognition sequence, that is a particular sequence of base pairs where it cuts the DNA molecule.  These enzymes are used by bacteria to protect themselves from viruses.  The enzyme with cleave viral DNA but leave the host DNA, which is methylated, alone.  Over 6000 restriction enzymes have been now been characterized. These enzymes have been used to study genetics and find the locations of particular genes.  They are also used in genetic engineering and the insertion of genes into genomic DNA.  For his work characterizing restriction enzymes Nathans was awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with Hamilton Smith, who had made the initial discovery, and Werner Arber who had predicted the existence of restriction enzymes.

Other honors won by Nathans include election to the National Academy of Science and its U.S. Steel Foundation Award in Molecular Biology.  Johns Hopkins has honored him co-naming the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine after him as well as one of its medical school's colleges.

Nathans died on November 16, 1999.


References:

DiMaio, Daniel, "Daniel Nathans: October 30, 1928 - Novermber 16, 1999"; Biographical Memiors Vol. 79, National Academy Press (2001)

Brownlee, Christian; "Danna and Nathans: Restriction Enzymes and the Boon to Modern Molecular Biology"; Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (2005)102:5909

Daniel Nathans Wikipedia Entry

Danile Nathans Nobel Autobiography

Felix Bloch

Felix Bloch was born on October 23, 1905 in Zurich, Switzerland.  His father, Gustav Bloch was a wholesale grain seller in Zurich.  He entered public elementary school at age 6 and initially had trouble in school because he spoke Swiss German with an accent different than those of his peers.  In 1918 he began attending gymnasium run by the canton of Zurich.  Young Bloch excelled in mathematics and science and in 1924 he passed his "matura" an exam that allowed him to go on to an institution of higher learning.  Initially planning to study engineering he entered Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.  After a year he changed his mind and began to study physics and continued at the same institution, graduating in 1927.

After graduating he went to the University of Lepzig, where he studied under Werner Heisenberg, completing his Ph.D. in 1928.  His doctoral thesis introduced the concept of Bloch waves to explain the behavior of electrons in crystals, developing the theory of metallic conduction.  After finishing his doctorate he took a tour of the various centers of experimental physics in Europe working for Wolfgang Pauli at the University of Zurich, Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, and Enrico Fermi in Rome, before returning to the University of Lepzig as a lecturer in physics.  In 1933, soon after Hitler came to power in Germany, he emigrated to the United States, taking a position at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.  Bloch became Stanford's first professor of theoretical physics in 1939.  During World War II he worked on nuclear power at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory and on ways to interfere with radar at Harvard University.  After the war he returned to Stanford.

Bloch is most famous for his work developing the theory of nuclear induction and magnetic resonance.  Atoms that have an uneven number of protons and/or neutrons have an intrinsic magnetic moment and angular momentum.  This is called spin.  When placed into a magnetic field nuclei will emit electromagnetic radiation, as their spin lines up with the magnetic field.   The frequency of this emission depends on the strength of the magnetic field and the isotope.  By measuring these emissions it is possible to determine the chemical structure in which the atom resides.  This technique is used by chemists to determine the structure of compounds and it is used in medical imaging and is called magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI (the name was changed to remove the word "nuclear").  For his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance Bloch won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1952, which he shared with Edward Mills Purcell who developed the theory simultaneously.

In 1952 Bloch became the first director of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and he formulated its early policies regarding atomic research.  Because as director he had little time for research he returned to Stanford a year later.  In 1965 he served as president of the American Physical Society.

Bloch died on September 10, 1983.


Bibliography:

Hofstader, Richard; "Felix Bloch"; Physics Today (1984)37:115-116

Hofstader, Richard; "Felix Bloch: 1905-1983" in Biographical Memoirs Vol. 64; National Academy Press; 1994

Felix Bloch Nobel Biography

Felix Bloch Wikipedia Entry

Max von Laue

Max von Laue was born on October 9, 1879 in Pfaffendorf (now part of Koblenz), Germany.  Von Laue's father was an official in the German military and his family moved often.  His bookish nature was recognized by his family and his grandfather gave him science books.  A demonstration of the electrical deposition of metallic copper from a solution of copper sulfate fascinated young von Laue and paved the way for a career in physics.  He attended gymnasium school in Posen, Berlin, and Strasbourg.  After a year of military service he attended the University of Strasbourg, the University of Gottingen, and the University of Munich, studying mathematics, chemistry and physics.  He earned his doctorate under Max Planck at the University of Berlin, graduating in 1903.

After finishing his doctorate he spent two years at the University of Gottingen and then went back to work for Max Planck as an assistant at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Berlin.  There von Laue met and became friends with Albert Einstein and von Laue contributed to the development and acceptance of Einstein's theory of relativity.  In 1909 he went to the University of Munich where he lectured on thermodynamics, optics, and relativity.  In 1912 he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Zurich.  In 1913 his father was raised to the ranks of hereditary nobility and the "von" was added to his name.  From 1914 to 1919 he was professor of physics at the University of Frankfurt and in 1916 he worked at the University of Wurzburg on vacuum tubes for use in military wireless communications.  In 1919 he went till the University of Berlin, where he remained until 1943, when he became an emeritus, with his consent, one year before the mandatory retirement age.

Von Laue is most famous for the discovery of the diffraction of  x-rays by crystals. The discovery originated from a discussion of the behavior of light moving through a regular crystalline medium.  This caused von Laue to wonder what affect crystals would have on the much shorter wavelength x-rays.  After the diffraction of x-rays by crystals was demonstrated von Laue worked the results out mathematically and published his results in 1912.  This discovery paved the way for x-ray crystalography, the study of molecular structure of crystals using x-rays.  For his discovery von Laue was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1914.  Other honors won by von Laue include the Max Planck Medal in 1932 and being made and officer in the French Legion of Honor in 1957.

Von Laue opposed the rising National Socialism movement in Germany and worked to help Jewish scientists emigrate from Germany.  When Germany invaded Denmark in 1940 von Laue's golden Nobel Prize was dissolved in aqua regia by Hungarian chemist Georg de Hevesy, who was working at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen where the prize was being kept, in order to prevent it falling into Nazi hands.  Had the prize been discovered von Laue would have faced prosecution for exporting gold out of Germany.  After the war de Hevesey found the solution, where he left it, of on the shelf of his laboratory.  He precipitated the gold and returned it to the Nobel Society which recast the prize.  After World War II von Laue was was seized by Operation Alsos, an Anglo-American operation to grab German nuclear scientists and materials, to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Soviets, and he was interred in Huntington, England at Farm Hill, a bugged house, with nine other German scientists.  He returned to Germany in early 1946 and was the only German scientist invited to attend a conference on crystalography in London, where he was allowed to wander at will only four months after being released from internment.  After the war von Laue worked to reestablish German science and he served as the director of the Max Planck Institute for Physical and Electrochemistry from 1951 to 1959.

On April 8, 1960, while driving to the laboratory, von Laue was involved in a automobile accident with a motorcyclist, who had just received his licence.  Although he showed initial signs of recovery, he died on April 20th.

References:

Von Laue, Max; My Development as a Physicist: An Autobiography, at iucr.org

Max von Laue Nobel Biography

Max von Laue Wikipedia Entry

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Thomas Hunt Morgan was born on September 25, 1866 in Lexington, Kentucky.  He was the eldest son of Charlton Hunt Morgan who served as the American Consul in Messina, Sicily in 1860, where he assisted Garibaldi during the uprising that started his campaign of that year.  He later joined the Confederate Army  was wounded at the Battle of Shiloh.  Morgan as a boy was interested in natural history and spent several summers in the mountains near Oakland, Maryland where he collected fossils.  When he grew older he spent his summers in the mountains of Kentucky doing geological and biological field work.  He graduated with a BS from the University of Kentucky in 1886.

Morgan received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1890.  After which he received the Bruce Fellowship which allowed him to study in Italy at the Marine Zoological Laboratory in Naples.  In 1891 Morgan was appointed associate professor (and head of the biology department) at Bryn Mawr University, where he stayed until 1904.  While at Bryn Mawr he met and married Lillian Vaughan Sampson, who would later contribute to his research.  In 1904 Edmund Wilson, who Morgan had replaced at Bryn Mawr, invited him to Columbia University where he was appointed professor of experimental biology.  He remained at Columbia until 1928 when moved to the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, California, where he was appointed professor of biology and director of the Kerckhoff Laboratories.  While at Caltech he established a marine laboratory at Corona Del Mar, California.  He remained at Caltech until 1945.

Morgan's research at Columbia, influenced by Wilson, looked at the role of cytology in influencing biological systems.  He worked with fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to study genetics.  Although he was initially skeptical of the theories of Gregor Mendel, Morgan used fruit flies to show how certain traits are linked, that is the genes which are responsible for them are located on the same chromosome.  From his experiments he was able to make maps of the Drosophila chromosomes, showing the locations of various genes.  Drosophila have become a common model organism used for studying genetics.  For his work showing the importance of chromosomes in heredity Morgan was awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine.  Morgan was also interested in embryology and made important contributions to that field including demonstrating that gravity has no effect on a developing egg.

Other honors won by Morgan include membership in the National Academy of Sciences and foreign membership in the Royal Society.  In 1924 he was awarded the Royal Society's Darwin Medal and he has honorary degrees from Johns Hopkins and the University of Kentucky.

Morgan died on December 4, 1945.


References:

Sturtevant, A. H. "Thomas Hunt Morgan: 1866-1945"; in Biographical Memiors; National Academy Press; 1959

Thomas H. Morgan Nobel Biography

Thomas Hunt Morgan Wikipedia Entry

Edwin Mattison McMillan

Edwin Mattison McMillan was born on September 17, 1907 in Redondo Beach, California.  His father Edwin McMillan was a physician.  As a child McMillan was always building gadgets and living in Pasadena, California he was able to attend lectures and get to know the physicists at the nearby California Institute of Technology.  After high school he attended the California Institute of Technology studying physics and chemistry and earning his B.Sc. in 1928 and his M.Sc. one year later.  He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1932.  His thesis described the behavior of a beam of hydrogen chloride molecules in a non-homogeneous electric field.

After earning his Ph.D., McMillan won a National Research Council fellowship.  At the invitation of Ernest Lawrence he went to the University of California at Berkley where he worked in Lawrence's Berkley Radiation Laboratory.  He became a an instructor in the physics department at Berkeley in 1935, assistant professor in 1936, associate professor in 1941, and professor in 1946.  During the World War II MacMillan worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developing radar, at the U.S. Navy Radar and Sonar Laboratory in San Diego California working on sonar, and he worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico.  He returned to Berkley after the war and with the death of Lawrence in 1958 he became director of the Berkley Radiation Laboratory, later renamed after Lawrence.  He remained director until his retirement in 1973.

McMillan is most remembered for his work in creating the first transuranic elements.  Working at Berkley he used the newly invented cyclotron to bombard uranium with neutrons and deuterium to create neptunium and plutonium.  These elements (atomic numbers 93 and 94) were the first elements created with more protons than uranium, which was thought to have the highest possible number.  Like uranium these elements are subject to radioactive decay.  McMillan and Glenn Seaborg, who finished MacMillan's work when he left Berkley to go to M.I.T., were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 for "their discoveries in the chemistry of transuranium elements".  McMillan also used the cyclotron to create other non-naturally occurring radioactive elements including oxygen-18 and beryllium-10.

Other honors won by MacMillan include election to the National Academy of Science in 1947 (he served as its chairman from 1968 to 1971), the Atoms for Peace award in 1963, shared with Vladimir Veksler, for the creation of the synchrotron, and the National Medal of Science in 1990. 

McMillan died on September 7, 1991.


References:

Jackson, David J. and Panofsky, W.K.H.; "Edwin Mattison McMillan: 1907-1991"; Biographical Memoirs Vol. 69; National Academy Press; 1996

Edwin McMillan Nobel Biography

Edwin McMillan Wikipedia Entry

Stanford Moore

Stanford Moore was born on September 4, 1913 in Chicago, Illinois.  His father, Howard Moore, at the time was a law student at the University of Chicago.  His mother was a graduate of Stanford University, where his parents met.  It is alleged that this was the origin of Moore's first name.  Moore began school at age 4 at a progressive school in Winnetka, Illinois.  When he was six his father took a teaching position at the University of Florida Law School.  Later he took a position at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.  During these years Moore attended public schools.  When his father took a position at the Vanderbilt University Law School, where he remained until his retirement in 1949, Moore attended the Peabody Demonstration School, which was attached to the George Peabody College for Teachers.  Moore attended the school for seven years and was an outstanding student.

Moore attended Vanderbilt University and was initially torn between careers in chemistry and aeronautical engineering.  In his third year he was influenced by Arthur William Ingersoll, and took an interest in organic chemistry and molecular structure.  He graduated from Vanderbilt in 1935 with a BA in chemistry.  He also won the Founder's Medal as the outstanding student in his class.  Moore went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin where he worked for Karl Link and learned micro analytical techniques.  He graduated in 1938 with a Ph.D. in organic chemistry.  His thesis project was a method for determining which monosacharides were in the polysacharides he was analyzing.  After graduation he took a job as a research assistant working for Max Bergman at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.  During World War II Moore worked for the Office of Scientific Research and Development researching therapeutic agents for mustard gas and other chemical warfare agents. 

After the war he returned to the Rockefeller Institute and worked with William H. Stein on chromatographic methods of determining the amino acid sequence of proteins.  Proteins are macromolecules composed of a sequence of amino acids bound together by peptide (amide) bonds.  Moore and Stein, worked with Christian Anfinsin of the National Institutes of Health, determining the sequence of ribonuclease, an small enzyme of only 124 amino acid residues.  From the determination of the sequence of the amino acids they were able to learn about the active site of the enzyme, where the chemical reaction takes place.  Enzymes are proteins that catalyze chemical reactions, speeding up the biochemical reactions in living organisms.  For their work on the structure of ribonuclease Moore, Stein, and Anfinsen won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972.

Other honors won by Moore include honorary doctorates from the University of Brussels and the University of Paris, the American Chemical Society award for Chromatography and Electrophoresis, shared with Stein, and the Richards Medal from the American Chemical Society.  Moore remained working at the Rockefeller Institute until his death.

Moore died on August 23, 1982.


References:

Smith, Emil L. and Hirs, C.H.W.; "Stanford Moore: September 4, 1913 - August, 23, 1982"; Biographical Memoirs Vol. 56; National Academy Press; 1987

Stanford Moore Nobel Biography

Stanford Moore Wikipedia Entry