A to Z of Chemists, Updated Edition

Elizabeth Oakes

Description

A to Z of Chemists, Updated Edition tells the stories of nearly 100 chemists—both well-known scientific greats of history and contemporary scientists whose work is just verging on greatness. Readers will find fascinating entries on people such as Gertrude Belle Elion, who developed drugs to cure diseases as diverse as leukemia, gout, herpes, malaria, and arthritis. From famous mainstream chemists to minority scientists often excluded from similar titles, A to Z of Chemists, Updated Edition spans all cultures, ethnicities, and eras.

Designed for high school through early college students, this title in the Notable Scientists series is also an ideal resource for all readers interested in chemistry. Articulated in everyday language, even the most complex concepts are accessible. While the majority of the scientists in this work are, first and foremost, chemists, there is a handful of physicists, biologists, and other scientists who made significant contributions to chemistry.

People covered include:

• Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (1811–1899)


• Louis Pasteur (1822–1895)


• George Washington Carver (1864–1943)


• St. Elmo Brady (1884–1966)


• Karl Ziegler (1898–1973)


• Percy Lavon Julian (1899–1975)


• Linus Carl Pauling (1901–1994)


• Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910–1994)


• Robert Burns Woodward (1917–1979)


• Sir George Porter (1920–2002)


• Sir Aaron Klug (1926–2018)


• Jean-Pierre Sauvage (1944–present)


• Aziz Sancar (1946–present)


• Ahmed Zewail (1946–2016)


• Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952–present)

Sujets

• Chimie
• Science
• Nature
• History
• Scientist
• Chemistry
• Chemical Science
• Biography
• Sciences et techniques
• Young Adult Nonfiction

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438196008
• Langue: English

Extrait

A to Z of Chemists, Updated Edition
Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth H. Oakes
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:
Facts On File An imprint of Infobase 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001
ISBN 978-1-4381-9600-8
You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.infobase.com
Contents Entries Amp re, Andr -Marie Anfinsen, Christian Boehmer Arrhenius, Svante August Aston, Francis William Becquerel, Antoine-Henri Berg, Paul Bergius, Friedrich Bishop, Hazel Bosch, Carl Brady, St. Elmo Br nsted, Johannes Nicolaus Buchner, Eduard Bunsen, Robert Wilhelm Carr, Emma Perry Carver, George Washington Cavendish, Henry Cori, Gerty Theresa Radnitz Curie, Marie Dalton, John Daly, Marie Maynard Davy, Sir Humphry Debye, Peter Dubochet, Jacques Eigen, Manfred Elion, Gertrude Belle Faraday, Michael Feringa, Bernard Fischer, Ernst Otto Frank, Joachim Fukui, Kenichi Gilbert, Walter Good, Mary Lowe Grignard, Fran ois-Auguste-Victor Haber, Fritz Henderson, Richard Herzberg, Gerhard Heyrovsk , Jaroslav Hill, Henry Aaron Hodgkin, Dorothy Crowfoot Hoobler, Icie Gertrude Macy Ingold, Sir Christopher Joliot-Curie, Fr d ric Julian, Percy Lavon King, Reatha Clark Klug, Aaron Kuhn, Richard Langmuir, Irving Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent Le Beau, D sir e Lee, Yuan Tseh Lindahl, Tomas Mendeleyev, Dmitry Ivanovich Modrich, Paul Moissan, Henri Moore, Stanford Natta, Giulio Newlands, John Alexander Reina Nocera, Daniel Northrop, John Howard Ochoa, Severo Osborn, Mary J. Pasteur, Louis Pauling, Linus Porter, Sir George Pregl, Fritz Prigogine, Ilya Proust, Joseph-Louis Ramakrishnan, Venkatraman Sancar, Aziz Sanger, Frederick Sauvage, Jean-Pierre Seaborg, Glenn Theodore Semenov, Nikolay Soddy, Frederick Solomon, Susan Stanley, Wendell Meredith Stein, William Howard Steitz, Thomas A. Stoddart, J. Fraser Sumner, James Batcheller Svedberg, Theodor Tiselius, Arne Virtanen, Artturi Ilmari Wieland, Heinrich Otto Wilkinson, Sir Geoffrey Willst tter, Richard Windaus, Adolf Woodward, Robert Burns Yonath, Ada E. Zewail, Ahmed Ziegler, Karl
Entries
Ampère, André-Marie
(b. 1775–d. 1836)
chemist, physicist, mathematician, philosopher

André-Marie Ampère is considered one of the founders of electromagnetic theory. His name is most often evoked in measuring electrical current in the unit of amps, a shortening of his name introduced after his death by Lord Kelvin. Experimentally, Ampère is remembered for his demonstration that two parallel wires conducting electricity attract each other when the flow heads in the same direction but repel each other when the flow of electricity heads in opposite directions.
Ampère was born on January 22, 1775, in Polémieux, near Lyons, France. His father was a wealthy merchant and civic official who had his son tutored privately, although Ampère was largely an autodidact: By the age of 13, he had written a treatise on conic sections. In 1793, in the midst of the French Revolution, the Republican army guillotined his father, eliciting a nervous breakdown in Ampère. He recovered well enough to start teaching mathematics at a Lyons school in 1796. He married in 1799 and the following year saw the birth of his son, Jean-Jacques-Antoine, who later became an important historian and philologist. His wife, however, died after only five years of marriage, further destabilizing Ampère emotionally.
In 1802 Ampère's monograph on probability earned him renown. Entitled Considerations on the Mathematical Theory of Games , it correlated the odds of winning to the bankroll that backs a gambler. Before this publication, the École Centrale in Bourg had appointed him professor of physics and chemistry; after its publication, the lycée in Lyons hired him away as a professor of mathematics. In 1805 he moved to Paris, where the École Polytechnique hired him as an assistant lecturer in mathematical analysis, then in 1808 Napoléon appointed him as the first inspector general of France's university system, a position he retained for the rest of his life. He continued to teach through the remainder of his career as well; by 1809 he had been promoted to a full professorship of mathematics.
Over the next decade, Ampère studied and conducted research in a wide range of fields: psychology, philosophy, physics, and chemistry. In 1814, for example, he hypothesized the same theory on the molecular makeup of gases as Amedeo Avogadro had three years earlier (although Avogadro's hypothesis did not receive validation in his own lifetime). Ampère's professional appointments also reflected his diversity of expertise: In 1819 he taught philosophy at the University of Paris, the following year the university appointed him to an assistant professorship in astronomy, and in 1824 the Collège de France appointed him to the chair in experimental physics.
On September 11, 1820, Ampère attended a séance at the Académie des Sciences during which Dominique Arago demonstrated Hans Christian Oersted's experiment whereby a current of electricity deflected a compass needle, suggesting a magnetic force in traveling electricity. At the next séance, Ampère demonstrated that electrical currents traveling in the same direction through parallel wires attracted each other but repelled each other when traveling in opposite directions. The history of science marks this event as the genesis of the field of electromagnetics (although Ampère called it "electrodynamics" at the time, to emphasize the motion of the electricity and to distinguish it from electrostatics, or electrical forces in stasis).
Ampère expounded his theories of electromagnetism in his 1822 text Collection of Observations on Electrodynamics and more completely in his 1827 text Notes on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena Deduced Solely from Experiment . In these he theorized and demonstrated that a solenoid (his name for a coiled wire with electricity flowing through it) acts as a bar magnet, proposed that the degree of deflection of a compass needle by an electrical current could measure the strength of that current (an idea that resulted later in the development of the galvanometer), and announced what came to be known as Ampère's law, a mathematical calculation of magnetic force based on the separation, orientation, and magnitude of current emanating from two parallel current-carrying conductors. Ampère equated electricity in motion with magnetism; he applied this idea at the molecular level, suggesting that molecules are surrounded by an electrical current because of the perpetual motion of what are now known as electrons . In this sense, he presaged the electron shell model.
Ampère died of pneumonia on June 10, 1836, while conducting his duties as inspector general. His headstone epitaph, "Happy at last," bears testament to the grievous life he endured with the premature deaths of his father and wife. About a half century after his death, Lord Kelvin honored him by dubbing the unit of electrical current the ampere , or amp .
Entry Author: Oakes, Elizabeth H.
Anfinsen, Christian Boehmer
(b. 1916–d. 1995)
biochemist

Christian Anfinsen shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Stanford Moore and William H. Stein for their work linking the structure of proteins to their biological functioning. Anfinsen focused his research on the protein enzyme ribonuclease, discovering how it folds into a three-dimensional structure that determines its function.
Christian Boehmer Anfinsen was born on March 26, 1916, in Monessen, a town on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His mother, Sophie Rasmussen, was of Norwegian descent, as was his father, Christian Anfinsen, who was an engineer by trade. Anfinsen attended Swarthmore College, where he earned his bachelor of arts degree in 1937. He then pursued graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his master's of science in organic chemistry in 1939.
Anfinsen then traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he served for a year as a visiting investigator through an American Scandinavian Foundation fellowship. He returned to the United States to enroll in the doctoral program in biochemistry at Harvard University, writing his dissertation on methods to identify eye retina enzymes and earning his doctorate in 1943.
Anfinsen remained in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working as an instructor in biochemistry at the Harvard Medical School until he was conscripted into the war effort, in which he served in the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development from 1944 through 1946. For the next two years, 1947 to 1948, he traveled to Sweden as an American Cancer Society senior fellow working on flavoproteins under Hugo Theorellin at the biochemical division of the Medical Nobel Institute. In the meanwhile, Harvard University had promoted him to an assistant professorship in 1945, and upon his return in 1948, the university again promoted him to an associate professorship.
In 1950 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) appointed Anfinsen director of its Laboratory of Cellular Physiology at the National Heart Institute. Over the next dozen years he conducted the ribonuclease research that earned him renown. (He spent one of those years, 1954, in Carlsberg, Denmark, conducting research under Kaj Linderstrøm-Lang with the funds granted him by the Rockefeller Foundation as part of its Public Service Award.) He obtained ribonuclease, or Rnase, an enzyme containing 124 amino acids folded into one specific configuration to elicit the breakdown of ribonucleic acid, from bovine pancreas; in addition, he obtained an extracellular nuclease from Staphyloccus aureus . He exposed these enzymes to high temperatures and chemicals such as urea, which acted to denature the e