NOBELIST'S CONCERNS GO BEYOND CHEMISTRY
HERSCHBACH'S INTERESTS SPAN ARTS, ATHLETICS

Author: By Brad Pokorny, Globe Staff

Date: Thursday, October 16, 1986
Page: 24
Section: METRO

"The exciting thing about the Red Sox is the improbability of it all," said the Harvard University chemistry professor, referring to the team's comeback in the American League playoffs. "There must be divine intervention here. That's the only way to explain it."

Longtime friends say Herschbach's performance was typical of the professor, whose outside interests extend from athletics to the arts to canoeing. In addition to being a top-notch research scientist, they said, he has a rare degree of human warmth and compassion. Throughout his teaching career, they added, he has expressed a special concern for undergraduates.

Six years ago, they said, Herschbach, along with his wife, Georgene, agreed to serve as comasters at Currier House, a large residence hall on the Harvard- Radcliffe campus.

"That literally requires 40 hours a week outside of teaching and research," said James Anderson, a colleague in Harvard's chemistry department. "The fact he'd spend the time reflects the direction of his concern for the way scientific research fits into the human fabric."

Herschbach, 54, was born in San Jose, Calif., and later attended Stanford University, where he received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1954 and a master's in chemistry in 1955. He continued graduate study at Harvard, earning a doctorate in chemical physics in 1958.

After teaching several years at the University of California at Berkeley, he returned to Harvard as a full professor in 1963. He has served as chairman of the chemistry department and has been awarded numerous medals and prizes for his work.

"He's a very hard-driving, hard-working person, which almost goes without saying for a man of his accomplishments," said James Kinsey, a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has known Herschbach since their years together at Berkeley. "Yet, in many ways, he carries with him the innocence of a California farm boy."

Kinsey said Herschbach used to calculate his salary in terms of prunes. ''He used to pick prunes as a high school student," Kinsey said. "So he knew how many hours of prune picking it took to equal the salary of an assistant professor."

Herschbach lives in Lincoln and has two children. Lisa, 20, is studying humanities at Stanford and Brenda, 18, is studying chemistry at Harvard.

Sharing the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry were:

- Yuan T. Lee, 49, a professor of chemistry at Berkeley. Born in Taiwan, Lee earned his doctorate at Berkeley in 1965, worked as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and then returned to Berkeley as a full professor in 1974. Lee, who worked under Herschbach as a graduate student at Berkeley,
went on to explore the reactions of large molecules in molecular beams.

- John C. Polanyi, 57, professor of chemistry at the University of Toronto. Polanyi, born in Berlin, received his doctorate at the University of Manchester, England, but has worked in Canada since 1956. In addition to his work on infrared chemiluminescence, Polanyi has been active in advocating nuclear disarmament and authored a book on the issue.

Sharing the 1986 Nobel Prize in physics yesterday were:

- Ernst Ruska, 79, a retired professor at the Fritz Haber Institute and Max Planck Society of West Berlin. One of the oldest persons ever to win a Nobel, Ruska worked on the electron microscope as a student at Berlin's Technical
College 55 years ago.

- Gerd Binning, 39, of West Germany and Heinrich Rohrer, 53, of Switzerland. Both conduct research for IBM in Zurich. Their work on the scanning tunneling electron microscope began five years ago.

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