Kimdir ? Nobel ödüllü bilim adamları

 

Alfabetik Ödüllü kişi arama

 

Paul C. Lauterbur

 

 

My ancestors apparently emigrated from Europe in the middle of the 19th century; the Lauterburs probably from Luxembourg, and my mother's people, Wagners and Weingartners, from Baden-Baden or nearby. They settled in northern Ohio, where my mother's father, Hans Christian Wagner, married Margaret (Maggie) Weingartner. They lived in Tiffin, Ohio when I was a child, where they had raised my mother, Gertrude Frieda Wagner, her twin brother Joseph, and their youngest child, who became a nun with the name Mary Monica. Nearby lived my grandfather Paul Lauterbur who married a woman of Irish descent, Margaret Hillan. They eventually moved south to Sidney, Ohio and had a number of children, of whom my father, Edward Joseph Lauterbur, was the youngest. He later married Gertrude Wagner (the families seem always to have been acquainted) and they had four children, Thomas who died shortly after birth, me, my younger brother Edward Joseph Lauterbur II (Joe) and my sister Margaret.

We grew up in a house in Sidney complete with a series of dogs, and as the years went by, birds, turtles, newts, fish, snakes, and other animals, and with interesting yards full of trees, bushes and flowers, as well as a nearby park, open spaces and neighbors, some of whom did not resent children trespassing on their property. It was, in memory, an idyllic time. My father worked in the town, as an engineer and part-owner of the Peerless Bread Machinery Company, and my mother kept house with help of a young woman who did some domestic chores and sometimes cared for the children. Although I attended a parochial school, Holy Angels School, I recall little of it except that the nuns who taught there seemed to value order and discipline over all else, which made it especially desirable to evade their control. More influential in my later interests was, I believe, my aunt Anna Lauterbur, who taught in the demonstration school at Ball State Teachers College (now Ball State University) in Muncie, Indiana, just west of the Ohio-Indiana border. She was fascinated by natural history, always kept a terrarium in her elementary school classroom, and gave me a subscription to Natural History magazine. A very gentle person, always willing to listen to a child, she was my favorite aunt.

Because of my parents' hobby of horseback riding, they had bought a farm just outside of town, and we moved there just as I was transferring to the public high school. The farm, with an old but remodeled house, a barn, various outbuildings, fields, woods, and a little creek, was a small paradise to a teenage boy, even though I acquired many duties, such as caring for the horses, mowing the lawn, cultivating the garden, and helping with harvesting. There was also time, of course, for hunting and fishing, collecting snakes, turtles and caterpillars to raise to butterflies or moths, and for general exploration. School was now more interesting also. Not only did I take up the game of chess as a freshman, but I beat the local champions at it, to their great disgust because they were seniors, and then moved on to play a local adult expert, one of the teachers. Classes were a mixture of pleasure and boredom. One of my teachers, who taught biology and chemistry, had the foresight to excuse me and some of my classmates, who were members of the local science club, from his lectures, so that we were free to use the time to do experiments, both standard and wild, in the school lab. He also had the courage to intervene when some of the dangerous ones came to the attention of the school authorities and we could have been expelled.

I met him again recently, and his son recalled that when told of my Nobel Prize, he said, "I always knew he would do something like that." After graduating from high school, I went on to Case Institute of Technology, an engineering school now part of Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio, about 200 miles north-east of Sidney. My father had recommended it, because, as he observed, he didn't know what scientists did for a living, but engineers could always get a job. But, given a choice of majors, I chose chemistry.

I had had so-called "chemistry sets" of simple chemicals and apparatus since my earliest years (I particularly liked the pungent smell of burning sulfur), and my own home laboratories even before high school. The curriculum at Case was quite general, including all forms of science (except biology) and engineering, including civil, electrical, mechanical, and chemical, and all of the related technologies such as surveying, mechanical drawing, as well as seemingly endless labs of all kinds, for which I have always been grateful. In addition to the excitement and drudgery of academics, there were also the pleasures and stresses of fraternity life, girls, and culture, as well as new friends and foods. Continuing my habit of doing things a little differently than expected, I wrote a Senior Thesis on my attempt to make an organosilicon free radical, but the advisor for it was an organic chemist who specialized in natural products.

When I graduated (with a B.S. in chemistry, because I did not qualify for an engineering degree as I had replaced a Unit Operations laboratory course with a graduate course in Quantum Chemistry), I was tired of lectures and professors, and determined to get back to lab work. I knew little about graduate study and the structure of a scientific career, so I accepted an offer to work for the Dow Corning Corporation in their Mellon Institute laboratories, where the emphasis was more scientific than technical. I was also told that I could take graduate courses at the University of Pittsburgh free as an Institute employee. There was much interesting work, I found, in our group at the Institute. Organosilicon synthesis, theories of rubber elasticity, techniques of vacuum distillation, elastomer testing, all were new to me and endlessly stimulating. I was particularly fascinated by the puzzle of how small particles strengthened rubber. I even managed to overcome my distaste for academics and take a few courses.

It had long been known that "carbon black" dramatically improved the properties of natural or synthetic organic rubbers, and it had been found that the same was true for silicone elastomers if small particles of silica were used instead of carbon, but not whether surface chemistry was involved or simply physical properties. I addressed one aspect of the problem by substituting phthalocyanine dyes for silica, and they worked perfectly, with their effectiveness decreasing as predicted when the particle size was increased by recrystalization from liquid hydrogen fluoride. Unfortunately, I never achieved a theoretical understanding of the effect, despite intense study of elastomer theory, but I had bright blue rubber and skin.

During that period, I also began to learn about nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) from various visitors and speakers, and to read a little about that new form of spectroscopy as well. It seemed ideally suited, even at that early date, for investigating the structures and electron distributions in molecules, and various physical properties of materials. Therefore, as part of my graduate education at the University of Pittsburgh, in addition to a "literature seminar" on interstellar molecules, I gave one on a paper describing NMR properties of rubber. Before I could begin a planned collaboration on the hydrogen NMR spectroscopy of silicon compounds, however, my deferments came to an end and I was drafted into the Army and my eventual assignment was proposed to be in the SPP (Scientific and Professional Personnel) program, which my B.S. and two years of work experience qualified me for.

First, however, I was assigned by mistake to a tank battalion at Fort Knox, Kentucky. After hastily correcting that error, I was given eight weeks of minimal basic training and assigned to the SPP program, as planned, at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland. My specific assignment there was in the Medical Laboratories, where I learned to operate an electron microscope to measure the properties of small aerosol particles meant to carry chemical warfare agents deep into the lungs, and I also proposed, and began to set up, a light scattering apparatus to quantitate vapor absorption on aerosol particles. Another aspect of my duties was to capture and weigh experimental animals meant for chemical weapons testing, so that I became skilled, for example, at catching goats in an open field, for which my farm experience was useful. In time, I learned, from a fellow draftee in my barracks, a Columbia Ph.D., that his unit had purchased an NMR machine, but didn't know how to use it. I said, "Hey, I know all about that!", and managed a transfer to help set it up, and arranged for one of my science club buddies, Marlon Shepard, from high school, who had also just been drafted, to join me in the lab, where, among others, we had a drafted Harvard Ph.D. in physical chemistry, Norbert Muller, later a professor at Purdue for many years. We got to work enthusiastically, and I eventually published four papers from our work there, which had turned into a rather unusual opportunity for a young soldier. Perhaps, even more important for my future, I received at least second-hand scraps of a Harvard education, especially the attitudes, from Nobby Muller.