Jean Perrin

Jean Baptiste Perrin was born on September 30, 1870 in Lille, France. He attended Ecole Normale Superieure in Lille and worked there as a physics assistant from 1894 to 1897. He earned his doctorate in 1897 for a thesis on cathode and x-rays. After graduation he was appointed to a readership in physical chemistry at the Sorbonne, University of Paris. He became a professor there in 1910. He served as an officer in the French Army's Engineering Corp. during the World War I and he was removed from his professorship when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940.

Perrin's early work on cathode rays proved that they were made of  negatively charged particles. His work covered a number of topics in physics including the effects of x-rays on the conductivity of gasses, fluorescence, and the radioactive disintegration of radium. He suggested that stars obtained their energy from the thermonuclear reactions of hydrogen. He wrote numerous books and papers including Les Atomes where he describes his studies on Brownian motion, which confirmed the atomic theory, that all matter is made of atoms.

In 1905 Albert Einstein had published a paper on Brownian motion describing how it was the result of atomic theory. Brownian motion is the random motion of particles suspended in a liquid, discovered in 1827 by Robert Brown, an English botanist who watched pollen particles suspended in water. Suspended in a liquid, the particles are constantly bombarded by moving molecules of the liquid. This causes the visible particles to move in random directions. Einstein's paper was theory and it was Perrin who experimentally demonstrated that matter is made of molecules. Perrin was able to use Brownian motion to determine a value for Avagadro's constant that closely agreed with the value obtained using Dalton's law of molecular motion. Avagadro's constant is the number of molecules in a mole of a substance. For his work, proving the atomic theory Perrin was awarded the 1926 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Perrin was the recipient of numerous other awards, including the Joule Prize from the Royal Society in 1896 and the La Caze Prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1914. He was made a commander in the French Legion of Honor in 1926 and a commander in the Legion of Leopold (Belgium). He was awarded numerous honorary doctorates.

In 1940 he fled German occupied France to the United States where he died on April 17, 1942. After World War II, in 1948, his remains were returned to France aboard the light cruiser Jeanne d'Arc and he was buried in the Pantheon in Paris, France.


References:

Allison, Andy; "Jean Perrin and Atomic Theory: Calculating Avagadro's Constant"; Physics @ Suite 101; October 3, 2008

Jean Perrin Nobel Biography

Jean Perrin Wikipedia Entry

Alexandre Yersin

Alexander Yersin was born on September 22, 1863 in the village of Lavaux, on the shores of lake Geneva in Switzerland. He was the youngest of four children of a Swiss father and a French mother. His father, who as a high school teacher, died three weeks before he was born. He began his medical education in Lausanne, Switzerland, continued in Marburg, Germany and finished his PhD in medicine in Paris France, writing his thesis on tuberculosis in 1888.  In 1886 he became a French citizen. Also in 1886 he began working in the laboratories of Luis Pasteur at what would be the Pasteur Institute. With Pierre Roux he isolated the toxin from diphtheria and he participated in the development of rabies anti-serum.

Yersin quickly tired of working for Pasteur, who was notorious for taking credit for the work of those beneath him, so he signed on as a ship's doctor with Messangeries Maritimes, a shipping company. His duties were light and his first voyage took him to Saigon, Vietnam. Yersin spent many years in Vietnam, some on expeditions into unexplored parts and is a honored hero for the free medical consultations he gave. Streets bearing his name remained named after him following the communist revolution.

In 1894 he was sent by the Pasteur Institute and the French government to Hong Kong to investigate an outbreak of plague. When he arrived he found that Shibasaburo Kitasato, who had recently discovered the role of Clostridium tetani in lockjaw, was already working on isolating the bacterial cause of the plague. Yersin saw that Kitasato was culturing bacteria from the blood and organs of patients, but not the characteristic bubos of bubonic plague. Yersin was able to bribe two British sailors and gain access to the morgue. Using a sterile pipette he punctured the infected lymph node of a recently dead patient. He found faintly gram negative staining bacilli (rod-shaped bacteria) in the material he withdrew from the lymph node. He injected mice with the lymph node material and they quickly died. Autopsies showed the same slightly gram negatively staining bacilli.

Kitasato was quick to publish his results and claim credit for the discovery of the bacteria responsible for plague. Kitasato's cultures turned out not to be pure for the causative organism and Yersin was allowed to name the new bacteria. Pasturella pestis was his choice, honoring Pasteur, but since 1944 it has been Yersinia pestis. Yersina and Kitasato are considered co-discoverers of the organism.

In addition to his medical work, Yersin also tried his hand at agriculture, importing the Brazilian rubber tree and the quinine tree from the Andes to Vietnam. He was the director of the medical school at Ha Noi, Vietnam in its first two years (1902-1904).

He died on March 1, 1943.


References:

Burns, William; "Alexandre Yersin and His Adventures in Vietnam"; Mill Hill Essays 2003; National Institute for Medical Research; 2003

Maki, Rebecca; "The Discovery of Yersinia pestis"; at antimicrobe.org

Alexandre Yersin Wikipedia Entry

Albrecht Kossel

Ludwig Karl Martin Leonhard Albrecht Kossel was born on September 16, 1853 in Rostock, Mecklenburg. His father was a merchant, bank director and Prussian Council. Kossel attended gymnasium in Rostock and then in 1872 he went to the newly founded University of Strasbourg. As a youth he had shown an interest in chemistry and botany and he continued those studies at the university. He finished his studies at the University of Rostock, passing the state medical examination in 1877 and earning his medical doctor degree in 1878. After graduation he worked in the laboratory of Felix Hoppe-Seyler, who had been one of his biochemistry professors at Strasbourg.

Hoppe-Seyler in addition to being a biochemist was an inorganic chemist and was interested in what chemical elements made up living tissues. In his lab Kossel studied "nucleins" the newly isolated contents of cell's nuclei. Nucleins had been discovered by Friedrich Miescher in 1869. He had determined that they were chemically different from protein, being more acidic. In 1883 Kossel became the director of the Chemistry Division of the Physiological Institute at the University of Berlin. In the period from 1885 and 1901 Kossel isolated from nuclein the five nucleic acid bases that make up DNA and RNA: adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and Uracil. These five bases are the letters of the genetic code that code for proteins. In DNA, the instructions for construction proteins are written in four nucleotides: adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. In messenger RNAs, the translations of the DNA code that are sent to ribosomes, where proteins are made, thymine is replaced with uracil.

In 1895 Kossel became a professor of physiology and director of the Physiological Institute at the University of Marburg. In Marburg Kossel began to investigate the structure of proteins. In 1896 Kossel isolated histidine, an amino acid with a imidazol functional group. Kossel also was the first to isolate theophyllin a therapeutic drug found in cocoa and tea. In 1901 Kossel became the director of the Physiological Institute at Heidelberg University. In  1910 Kossel was awarded the Nobel Prize "in recognition of the contributions to our knowledge of cell chemistry made through his work on proteins, including the nucleic substances". In 1924 Kossel became professor emeritus at Heidelberg, but continued teaching. His research also continued as he continued working on determining the structure of proteins.

Kossel died on July 5, 1927.


References:

Jones, Mary Ellen; "A Biographical Sketch of Albrecht Kossel"; Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine(1953)26:80-97

Albrecht Kossel Nobel Biography

Albracht Kossel Wikipedia Entry

Elliot Coues

Elliot Coues was born on Septermber 9, 1842 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His father Samuel Elliot Coues was a merchant and worked in the United States Patent Office, which caused him to be away from his family in New Hampshire starting when Coues was eleven. As a child Coues was fascinated by animals and was only interested in books that contained them.. When he moved to be with his father in Washington D.C, Coues went to the Smithsonian and there he met the naturalist Spencer Baird, the first curator of the Smithsonian, who would be his mentor. He published his first technical paper at the age of 19. He attended Gonzaga College High School in Washington D.C. and then Columbia College (which later would be renamed George Washington University) also in Washington D.C. Coues remained at Columbia College for ten years, earning a PhD and an MD.  Coues enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1862 as a medical cadet. In 1863 he was promoted to acting assistant surgeon and in 1864 to assistant surgeon. .

Coues' military career took him all over the United States, with postings in Arizona, North Carolina, California and North Dakota. Coues was an prolific writer and wrote many works on ornithology and natural history. In the Army he got the chance to join expeditions that explored parts of America, serving as both naturalist and surgeon on the United States Northern Boundary Commission form 1873-1876 and from 1876 to 1880 he served as secretary and naturalist to the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories. While in the army he authored 300 works and papers. He resigned from the army in 1881 to devote himself more fully to literary and scientific pursuits. After resigning from the Army he returned to Washington D.C. In 1877 he was appointed professor of Anatomy at the National Medical College and that same year he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He was one of the founders of the American Ornithologists Union and served as its president.

Coues' book A Key to North American Birds first edition was published in 1972. The book was at the time  a unique work of ornithology, one which for years other guides to animal species would follow. Other important works by Coues included A Checklist of North American Birds (two editions) and Field Ornithology. Coues identified for the first time many unknown bird species and introduced the trinomial nomenclature used to distinguish subspecies of animals. All living species are known by their scientific name composed of Latin genus and species names. Coues introduced using a third Latin name for subspecies. Coues was also important in mammology, publishing North American Fur Bearing Animals in 1877.

Coues died on December 25, 1899 at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, during an operation to cure an afflicted throat.


References:

Allen, A.J.; "Biographical Memoir of Elliot Coues: 1842-1889"; in Biographical Memoirs Vol 6; National Academy Press; 1909

Anonymous; "A Great Ornithologist"; The Outlook(1900)64:89-90

Elliot, D.G.; "In Memoriam: Elliot Coues"; The Auk(1901)18:1-11

Elliot Coues Wikipedia Entry

Wilhelm Ostwald

Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald was born on September 2, 1853 in Riga, Latvia.  His father, Gottfried, was a master cooper and he was the middle of three brothers. His family was German in origin, but he attended a local kronsschule with Latvian and Russian children and he attended the local real gymnasium school. He matriculated to the University of Tartu in 1872 and after briefly enjoying fraternity life the influence of his father convinced him to take his academics seriously. He started working in the laboratory of Karl Schmidt. From Schmidt's assistant Johan Lemburg he learned the essentials of inorganic analysis and he earned his bachelor's degree in 1875 and his doctorate in 1978 working in Schmidt's lab.

In 1887 he served as an unpaid lecturer at the University of Tartu. Four years later he became a professor of chemistry at Riga Polytechnic University and six years after that be became professor of physical chemistry at Lepzig University. Ostwald remained at Lepzig until his retirement in 1906, except for one year as the first exchange professor at Harvard University in 1904-5. Ostward's lab became a center for instruction in physical chemistry and among his students were many Nobel Prize winners including Arrhenius, Van 't Hoff and Nernst. Albert Einstein applied to work in Ostwald's lab.

Ostwald began his research in 1875 studying the law of mass action of water with the problem of chemical affinity and with special emphasis on electrochemistry. This led to the discovery of the law of dilution, which is named after him and governs the disassociation of a weak acid or base. Ostwald became one of the founders of modern physical chemistry and wrote several textbooks on the subject. Ostwald founded Zeitschrift fur physikalsche Chemie in 1887 and remained its editor until 1922 editing over 100 volumes. He is the inventor of the Ostwald process for producing nitric acid, which he patented in 1902. His development of the mole concept (a mole of a chemical being equal to its atomic mass in grams) was ironically part of his resistance to atomic theory, against which he was one of the last holdouts.

Ostwald won the 1909 Nobel Prize "in recognition for his investigations into the fundamental principals governing chemical equilibria and rates of reaction". Besides chemistry Ostwald had many insterests including philosophy and painting, for which he produced his own pigments. Later in his career he wrote several books dealing with color theory.

Ostwald died on April 4, 1932.


References:

Kim, Mi Gyung; "Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932)"; 2006; at hyle.org

May, Leopold; "Wilhelm Ostwald"; 2003; at faculty.cua.edu

Wilhelm Ostwald Nobel Biography

Wilhelm Ostwald Wikipedia Entry

James Franck

James Franck was born on August 26, 1882 in Hamburg, Germany. His father was a banker and his mother came from a family of rabbis. Franck attended Wilhelm Gymnasium in Hamburg and was not a brilliant scholar, only barely passing his high school final examinations. After high school he went to the University of Heidelberg, where he was to study law and economics, so that he could take a place at his father's firm. Franck was interested in science and took classes on chemistry and geology. At Heidelberg he met Max Born and the two became lifelong friends. With the help of Born he was able to persuade his father to let him study science and in 1902 he moved to Berlin where he studied physics under Emil Warburg and Paul Drude at the University of Berlin. He finished his PhD under Warburg in 1906, completing a thesis on the movement of ions in gaseous discharges.

After briefly working in Frankfurt-am-Main Frank returned to Berlin to work as an assistant for Heinrich Ruben, where he studied the structure of the electron shells of atoms and molecules, using atomic collisions. In 1911 Franck became a lecturer at the University of Berlin and when World War I broke out he enlisted and served as a private. In the war he was wounded, awarded the Iron Cross, first class, and then was promoted to lieutenant, despite his Jewish heritage. After his promotion he was assigned to a chemical warfare unit led by Fritz Haber, where he became Haber's assistant. After the war, at Haber's suggestion, Franck took a job at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry and in 1918 he became the head of the physics department.

Franck worked with Gustav Hertz and they studied the nature of electron collisions with atoms. From this work they were able to demonstrate the quantized nature of energy from electron transitions in atoms. In 1900 Max Planck had hypothesized that the energy emitted by excited atoms (atoms with electrons above their ground or lowest energy states) come in discrete amounts. When excited electrons fall back to their ground states they emit energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. Because there are distinct electronic orbitals around the nucleus when electrons transition between these their emissions only come at certain wavelengths that depend on which orbitals the electrons transition between. Franck and Hertz's experiments were the first experimental demonstration of the quantized nature of electronic transitions. For these experiments Franck and Hertz were awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1920 Franck moved to Gottingen where he was a professor of experimental physics at the Physical Institute. Franck's laboratory in Gottingen became a center for study of atomic and molecular physics and many important physicists studied there. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, Franck moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where he was the Speyer Professor of Physics at Johns Hopkins University. He then spent a year in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he was a guest professor. In 1935 he returned to Johns Hopkins as a physics professor. He stayed at Johns Hopkins until 1938, when he moved to the University of Chicago, becoming a professor of physical chemistry. During World War II Franck was the director of the Chemistry Division of the Metallurgical Laboratory, which was part of the Manhattan Project. In 1945 he served as the chairman of the committee that produced the Franck Report, a document signed by several prominent physicists urging the United States Government not to use the atomic bomb on Japan and predicting the arms race. He became a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago in 1947, but continued doing research with the Photosynthesis Research Group until 1956.

Other honors won by Franck include the Planck Medal from the German Physical Society in 1951, the Rumford Medal in 1955 from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his work on photosynthesis and election as a foreign member of the Royal Society of London in 1964.

Franck died suddenly while on a brief trip to Gottingen on May 21,1963, at the age of 81.


References:

Rice, Stuart A. and Jortner, Joshua; "James Franck 1882-1964"; National Academy Press; 2010

James Franck Nobel Biography

James Franck Wikipedia Entry

John Flamsteed

John Flamsteed was born on August 19, 1646 in Denby, in Darbyshire, England. His father Steven Flamsteed was the wealthy owner of a mating business. His mother, Mary, died soon after he was born. Flamsteed was educated at the Darby Free School but due to his rheumatic disease Flamsteed's father decided not to send him to a university. Instead Flamsteed, who was fluent in Latin, studied on his own learning astronomy from books. Another reason his father did not send him to the university was so that Flamsteed could keep his house and labor in his malt business. Because of this Flamsteed bore a lifelong resentment toward his father.  In 1661 He observed his first partial solar eclipse. Eventually Flamsteed was able to enroll at Jesus College, Cambridge, but he was only in residence for two months in 1674 and he received his MA by royal warrant also in 1674. He began corresponding with Henry Oldenburg and John Collins. These two arranged for Flamsteed to meet Jonas Moore, whom he met on a visit to the Royal Society in London in 1670.

In 1675 Flamsteed visited London and with the help of Moore was able to get an audience with king Charles II. Flamsteed had won the favor of the king by building a barometer for him the previous year. Charles II appointed Flamsteed his Royal Astronomer. Greenwich Observatory was built for his observations and he began observing there in 1676. Flamsteed was a careful observer and his project was to observe and catalog the locations of the stars. Over the forty years of his project he cataloged the positions of 3000 stars. Flamsteed was a meticulous worker and did not want to publish any results until they all were checked. Isaac Newton became impatient for the results of the catalog and obtained a pirated copy of the work, which he and Edmund Hally published. Flamsteed was so angry at this that he obtained 300 of the 400 copies that were printed and burned them. Because of this Flamsteed came to view Newton and Halley as his enemies. The finished catalog was not published until 1725.

Other accomplishments credited to Flamesteed include accurate predictions of the solar eclipses of 1666 and 1668 and the invention of the conical projection which is used in cartography. Even before his visit to London and appointment to become the first astronomer royal, Flamsteed had been ordained and he served as a parish priest in Burstow, Surrey. Honors won by Flamsteed include election to the Royal Society in 1677 and a crater on the moon and an asteroid named after him.

Flamsteed died on December 31, 1719 and he was replaced as astronomer royal by his enemy Edmund Hally.


References:

O'Conner, J.J. and Robertson, E.F.; "John Flamsteed"; found at www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk

Moulton, Charles Wells; Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, Vol. 2, 1639-1729; Henry Malkan, Publisher; 1910

John Flamsteed Wikipedia Entry