CHEMISTRY NOBEL IS AWARDED TO A SWISS
Author: Associated Press
Date: Thursday, October 17, 1991
Page: 5
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
STOCKHOLM -- The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded yesterday to a
Swiss scientist who improved the tool that measures molecules.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Richard R. Ernst won the
chemistry prize for speeding development of new medicines and facilitating
chemical research through his improvements in nuclear magnetic resonance
spectroscopy.
"With classical methods, it could take years to determine molecular
structures. . . . Now it can take hours or days," said Salo Gronowitz,
chairman of the awards committee.
Ernst is to receive his $1 million prize at a Dec. 10 ceremony.
Americans, who have dominated Nobel science prizes since World War II,
received neither the physics nor the chemistry prize this year for the first
time since 1971.
Ernst, 58, of the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, was
flying to New York to collect a prize from Columbia University when the
academy tried to notify him he had become a Nobel laureate.
His colleagues finally reached him by telephone on the plane, and he said
he was pleased, according to a Pan American World Airways spokesman, Alan
Loflin.
The academy said Ernst's achievement lay in radically improving the
resolution and precision of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a
technology that was discovered in the 1940s and resulted in a Nobel Prize in
Physics to US researchers in 1952.
The method is based on the fact that some atomic nuclei act like minuscule
compass needles when placed in a magnetic field. The introduction of radio
waves and changes in the chemical environment affect the behavior of the
nuclei in ways that can be measured.
A major breakthrough occurred in 1966 when Ernst and an American, Weston
A. Anderson, found that the accuracy of the measurements could be increased up
to a hundredfold if the matter was exposed to intense, rapid radio pulses
instead of slow sweeps.
Nuclear magnetic resonance images of the body are used as a diagnostic
tool in medicine. The technique has also provided experimental verification of
the principles of the quantum theory of physics, one of the most important
physical theories of the 20th century, the academy said.
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