HARVARD CHEMIST AWARDED NOBEL
Author: By David L. Chandler, Globe Staff
Date: Thursday, October 16, 1986
Page: 1
Section: METRO
A Harvard University professor of chemistry and two colleagues were
jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry yesterday for work that an
American Chemical Society spokesman said "opened up important new fields of
chemistry and . . . has really dramatic implications."
The professor, Dudley R. Herschbach, who has taught chemistry at Harvard
since 1963, said winning the recognition is "a lot of fun. Work that you do
out of pure love is now being recognized."
Herschbach shared the award with Taiwan-born Yuan T. Lee of the University
of California at Berkeley and John Polanyi of the University of Toronto.
The research, done independently by the three chemists, has allowed
scientists to zero in on the behavior of individual molecules in a chemical
reaction rather than just looking at the overall behavior of a large mass.
The new understandings made possible by this research, according to Eric
Leber of the American Chemical Society, could have profound applications in
such varied areas as improving the efficiency of industrial chemical
reactions, improving the ability to burn coal and other fuels cleanly and
understanding reactions in the earth's atmosphere such as the depletion of the
protective ozone layer by various chemicals.
The Nobel committee also announced that the prize in physics was being
awarded to three scientists, Ernst Ruska of Berlin and Gerd Binnig and
Heinrich Rohrer of Zurich. The award was given for their work in developing
two kinds of electron microscopes, one of which is already a fundamental tool
for research in fields ranging from biology to electronics and the other a
relatively new technique that is expected to find equally wide application.
Explaining the significance of his work, Herschbach said at a press
conference at Harvard yesterday that a chemical reaction is "just like the
crowd at a baseball game, with lots of conversations going on. You really want
to know what is being said by a few people at once -- what individual
molecules are doing, the chemistry of individual 'conversations' between
molecules."
Earlier chemical methods, he added, only allowed an understanding of the
behavior of the crowd as a whole.
Leber, director of public policy and communications for the Chemical
Society, explained in an interview yesterday that other chemical experiments
''have been done in a very crude environment: You put a beaker on a heating
element" and observe "crude, gross reactions."
"What you'd like is a way to listen in on the individual pairs" of
molecules, Herschbach explained. The method he developed "gives you a way to
do that," and understanding the details of individual interactions "helped us
to understand the psychology of the mob."
The basic technique used for Herschbach's research was borrowed from the
field of nuclear physics, where beams of subatomic particles are used to study
the basic properties of matter. Herschbach, now 54, hit on the idea of
applying this method to the study of the much larger-scale interactions of
matter that are of interest to chemists -- the interactions of molecules,
which are linked groupings of atoms, rather than elemental particles, which
are the building blocks of atoms.
When he first suggested the idea of using molecular beams to study chemical
reactions, Herschbach says, his colleagues thought he was crazy.
But with the help of Lee, who was a graduate student at the time, he
developed the technique during the early 1960s. The 49-year-old Lee, whom
Herschbach described as "the Mozart of his field, extraordinarily talented,"
developed much of the technology to implement Herschbach's insight.
"In some ways it's a very simple concept," Leder says, "but it's actually
incredibly complex" to put into practice.
Lee has been pursuing this research at Berkeley, where he has built "some
of the most powerful equipment in the field," according to Richard Bernstein,
professor of physical chemistry at the University of California at Los
Angeles.
John Polanyi's work also was directed toward understanding the details of
chemical reactions but was carried out separately and used completely
different methods: He focused on the faint light emitted by individual
molecules as they undergo chemical changes.
The different approaches formed "two separate tracks," Bernstein said, that
are "now synthesized so you can see how they work together." Polanyi's work
led to the discovery of chemical lasers, now an important field in itself and
a central area of research by the Defense Department.
The three new Nobel laureates, Leder said, are "very fine scientists and
also fine people," which he called an unusual combination.
Herschbach, in addition to his research, has remained actively involved in
teaching. "The teaching environment is enormously valuable for research," he
says. "It keeps you focused on the big questions, the really fundamental
questions."
CHANDL;10/15 NKELLY;10/16,11:41 NOBEL16
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