Nobel Prize Scientists

Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr. Carol Greider are pioneers in the study of telomeres, segments of DNA that help determine the number of times a cell divides, an event that affects the life span and health of cells, and the development of some cancers. Carol Greider was a graduate student of Dr. Blackburn's at the University of California, Berkeley in 1985, when she discovered the enzyme telomerase, which creates telomeres. This discovery has spawned a whole new field of research, with Dr. Blackburn and Dr. Greider in the forefront. Blackburn and her team at the University of California, San Francisco, have succeeded in more than doubling the life span of cells in the laboratory, research which may hold promise for controlling age-related and degenerative disorders. Greider's research at Johns Hopkins University focuses on the biochemistry of telomerase, and on the consequences of telomere dysfunction, including the role of telomeres in cancer. In awarding Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine, the awards committee noted that their discoveries "...have added a new dimension to our understanding of the cell, shed light on disease mechanisms, and stimulated the development of potential new therapies." In this address to the Academy of Achievement, recorded during the Academy's 2000 program in Scottsdale, Arizona, they share their research on Telomeres with the Academy's student delegates. They also discuss the roles of inspiration and intuition, the importance of good mentors, and the challenges of balancing the demands of family life with a career as a research scientists.

Dr. William Daniel Phillips shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to laser cooling, a technique to slow the movement of gaseous atoms in order to better study them. He was the valedictorian of his high school class in rural Pennsylvania, went on to graduate summa cum laude from college, and after that earned his physics doctorate from MIT. Phillips studied and advanced the scientific art of supercooling atoms for trapping and examination. Cooling slows the speed of atoms' movements, and extreme cooling to near absolute zero allows the atomic structure of gases to be slowed and trapped without having the gas condense and liquefy or solidify. Working with the laser-based "atom trap" designed by Steven Chu but modifying its parameters, Phillips was able to obtain temperatures even lower than those predicted and achieved by Chu's team. Phillips' results were so remarkable and far beyond what physicists thought would be feasible, he said that he could not believe it. Phillips later earned the Noble Prize in Physics, with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, for his contributions to laser cooling (and especially for his invention of the Zeeman slower) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (where he has worked his entire career). He is also a professor of physics at the University of Maryland. Dr. William Phillips participated in the 1999 Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. and spoke to the student delegates about his life experiences as a scientist.

The chemist Gertrude Elion (1918 -1999) was a trailblazer for women in American science, and the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine. At an early age, her ambition to find new medicines led her to the study of chemistry, but when she graduated from college at age 19 in 1937, she found it almost impossible to land a job in the field. Most employers would not hire a woman to perform scientific work. Gertrude Elion refused to be deterred. She worked wherever she could, often for little or no money, until at last she found a stable position at Burroughs Wellcome, where she was allowed to fulfill her potential as a scientist. For more than 40 years, she studied the chemical composition of disease cells. Within a few years, this approach led to the development of the first successful drugs for the treatment of acute leukemia. As her responsibilities expanded, she began led larger and larger teams, discovering compounds such as allopurinol, used for the treatment of gout and to relieve the side effects of chemotherapy. Her discovery of azathioprine, which suppresses the immune system's rejection of foreign tissue made kidney transplants between unrelated donors possible. She later led the team that developed accyclovir, the first successful anti-viral medication. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world owe their lives to Gertrude Elion's patient determination. In 1998, her discoveries won her the Nobel Prize for Medicine, although she was not a medical doctor and had never received a doctorate in her own field. In this podcast, recorded during the Academy of Achievement's 1998 Summit in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, she downplays the scope of her own scientific achievement, while recalling the challenges she encountered as a woman in the world of science and medicine.

Douglas D. Osheroff shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Dave Lee and Robert C. Richardson) for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. He earned his degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1967 and joined the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics at Cornell University as a graduate student, doing research in low-temperature physics. Together with David Lee, the head of the lab, and Robert Richardson, Osheroff used a Pomeranchuk cell to investigate the behavior of helium at temperatures within about two thousands of a degree of absolute zero (-273.15 degrees C). They discovered unexpected effects in their measurements, which they eventually explained as phase transitions to a superfluid phase of helium-3. When a liquid becomes superfluid, its atoms suddenly lose all their randomness and move in a coordinated manner in each movement. This causes the liquid to lack all inner friction: It can overflow a cup, flow through very small holes, and exhibits a whole series of other non-classical effects. Fundamental understanding of the properties of such a liquid requires an advanced form of quantum physics, and these very cold liquids are therefore termed quantum liquids. By studying the properties of quantum liquids in detail and comparing these with predictions of quantum physics low-temperature, researchers are contributing valuable knowledge of the bases for describing matter at the microscopic level. Osheroff, Lee and Richardson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. Osheroff then worked at Bell Labs for 15 years, and in 1987, joined the Department of Physics at Stanford University. His research continued to be focused on phenomena that occur at extremely low temperatures. Osheroff is an avid photographer and introduces students at Stanford to photography in a freshman seminar titled ’źThe Technical Aspects of Photography.’Ź Professor Osheroff participated in the 1997 Achievement Summit in Baltimore, Maryland soon after receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics.

For 40 years, Martin Perl plumbed the mysteries of matter. His experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center led to the discovery of the "tau lepton," a particle similar to an electron but vastly heavier, that plays a central role in one of the most fundamental questions in physics: "What is mass, and why do things have the masses they do?" This landmark contribution to science earned him the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics. The son of Russian immigrants, he grew up in Brooklyn, New York. As a child, he loved reading, particularly mathematics and science, but a career as a scientist seemed unimaginable. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemical in engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic, but was soon drawn to the ever-expanding field of particle physics and earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University. He spent much of his career as a Professor of Physics at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. At the time of this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1996 Summit in Sun Valley, Idaho, he was Chairman of the High Energy Physics Faculty. Dr. Perl's presentation includes a whimsical review of his contribution to the field of particle physics, and a brief demonstration of an erasable paint system he developed with his wife, artist Judy Finer.

The astrophysicist and cosmologist George Fitzgerald Smoot III received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that led to the measurement of microwave background radiation in the universe. A graduate of MIT, Smoot received dual bachelors' degrees in mathematics and physics, and received his Ph.D. in particle physics in 1970. As a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Smoot began to study cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. This radiation is the reverberation of the Big Bang, the explosion that created the universe. Smoot devised a plan for equipping a satellite with microwave detection technology measure the radiation without interference from the earth's polluted atmosphere. NASA accepted Smoot's plan, launching the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) in 1989. The minute fluctuations in background radiation that OZCBE detected have enabled scientists to form a more accurate picture of the origins of the universe. Professor Smoot has shared his findings with the general public in the book Wrinkles in Time. Professor Smoot has been called "the planet's most popular astrophysicist." In 2009, he appeared as a contestant on a television quiz program called "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" He was, and won a million-dollar prize. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1994 Summit in Las Vegas, Professor Smoot told the Academy's student delegates how he was first drawn to the beauty of science. He shares his experiences at the South Pole. He urges the student delegates to follow their own goals and have their own adventures in life. Following his presentation, he is joined by Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project (later Director of the National Institutes of Health) and Richard J. Roberts, recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Medicine. The three scientists engage in a brief discussion of ethical issues related to progress in research.

Rudolph "Rudy" Arthur Marcus is a Canadian-born chemist who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. A trailblazing researcher, Dr. Marcus is known for his work in many fields of theoretical chemical kinetics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for elucidating a thermodynamic and kinetic framework for describing one electron outer-sphere electron transfer. "Marcus theory," provides a mathematical method to determine how fast or slow, or in what direction, electrons jump between molecules without breaking chemical bonds, explaining the electron transfers which make it possible for plants to store energy from sunlight and use it to fuel growth, or for humans to store energy from a meal and use it later to power the body's activities. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he has received the Irving Langmuir Award, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the Linus Pauling Award and the National Medal of Science. In this audio podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1993 Summit in Glacier Park, Montana, Dr. Marcus recounts his life and career as a chemist. He encourages the Academy's students to define their goals as the pursuit of excellence, rather than success, and emphasizes the importance of meeting life's unexpected challenges.

Henry Way Kendall (December 9, 1926 ’Ŭ February 15, 1999) was a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist and an ardent advocate for environmental causes. He enrolled in the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in 1945 and served on a troop transport ship on the North Atlantic. Kendall graduated from Amherst in 1950 and while in college operated a diving and marine salvage company during two summers and co-authored books on diving and underwater photography. He obtained his doctorate in nuclear and atomic physics from MIT and then spent five years at Stanford in the late 1950s and early 1960s, studying the structure of protons and neutrons. Kendall returned to the MIT Physics Department, where he remained the rest of his life. In the early 1970s, he worked in collaboration with researchers Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor on experiments that demonstrated the first experimental evidence that the protons and neutrons were made up of point-like particles, later identified to be the up and down quarks that had previously been proposed on theoretical grounds. The experiments also provided the first evidence for the existence of gluons. Kendall won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Friedman and Taylor) for their pioneering investigations concerning the deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which were of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics. Kendall was also one of the founding members of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and served as chairman of the anti-war group for more than 25 years. He composed the highly publicized but politically-ignored ’źWorld Scientists Warning to Humanity’Ź published in 1992 and co-signed by 1,700 scientists world-wide, which called for policy changes in government and business to avert environmental destruction that would cause widespread human misery and leave the Earth irretrievably damaged. In 1997, he was among the scientists who presented President Bill Clinton with a detailed explanation of the coming crisis of global climate change. In 1999, Kendall died of natural causes while scuba diving in the caves at the Wakulla Springs State Park in Florida. Henry Kendall addressed the student delegates at the 1993 Achievement Summit at Glacier National Park on the environment, population growth, and climate change.

The pioneering biochemist Arthur Kornberg (1918 - 2007) was awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering the means by which DNA molecules are duplicated in the bacterial cell -- landmark research that helped advance our understanding of the hereditary process. He was also honored for devising the procedure for reconstructing this duplication process in the test tube. Dr. Kornberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated in the city's public schools. He received his undergraduate degree in science from the City College of New York, and a medical degree from the University of Rochester in 1941. A commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service, he was assigned to the Navy as a ship's doctor during World War II. Following the war, he was posted to the National Institutes of Health, where he organized and directed the program in enzyme research. After leaving NIH, he chaired the department of microbiology at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1959, the same year he received the Nobel Prize, he moved to Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California. At Stanford, he organized the new department of biochemistry, a department he chaired for the following decade. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he is the recipient of many awards, including his nation's highest scientific honor, the National Medal of Science. His autobiography, For the Love of Enzymes: The Odyssey of a Biochemist, was published by Harvard University Press in 1989. Dr. Kornberg addressed the Academy of Achievement at its 1992 gathering in Las Vegas, Nevada. In this podcast, recorded on that occasion, he discusses the challenges and rewards of a life in science. He describes the discipline that the practice of science requires, while sharing his own passionate curiosity about the chemistry of life.

Jerome Friedman shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with his colleague Richard Taylor for experiments proving that protons, neutrons and the other elementary particles of the atom are made of even more fundamental building blocks, known as quarks. Friedman was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of immigrants from Russia. As a young person, he excelled at art rather than science, but his interest in physics was piqued by reading a book by Albert Einstein. He turned down a scholarship from the Art Institute of Chicago to study physics at the University of Chicago. There, he worked with the renowned Enrico Fermi, father of nuclear fission. Friedman received his Ph.D. in 1956. Four years later, he joined the faculty of MIT, where he has spent the rest of his career. In 1968 and '69, he performed the experiments, along with Richard Taylor of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, which gave the first experimental evidence that protons had an internal structure, later understood to be quarks. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1991 Summit in New York City, Dr. Friedman recounts the encouragement he received from his immigrant parents, and his early discovery of the excitement of theoretical physics.