Who the R.F. Heck is: Henry Eyring

The subject of the advanced organics class this week is rate laws and transition states. With that, there have been many different names thrown around, Hammond, Morse, and the like. But none have been more prominent than Henry Eyring.

Eyring was born in a Latter-day Saint (Mormon) colony in Mexico in 1901. When he was about 11 years old, the family moved to Pima, Arizona by way of El Paso, Texas. He showed apititude for science and math, and after studying mining engineering, metallurgy, and chemistry, he pursued his graduate studies at UC Berkeley. He was recruited to Princeton where he taught for 15 years until he was offered a position at the University of Utah. He was elected president of the ACS in 1963 and the president of the Association for the advancement of science in 1965.

His religion was very important to him. He was a devout Mormon and wrote many books and papers on the subject of Science and Religion. Of his three sons, two went into science and education, while a third, Henry B. Eyring, is a prominent leader in the Latter-day Saint church.

It is arguably this reason that Eyring never received the Nobel Prize for his work. He developed Transition State Theory, one of the most important developments in chemistry ever, and some received Nobel Prizes based on his work. The Royal Swedish Academy of sciences apparently did not understand his contributions until after his death in 1981, however some argue that there was prejudice against him for his quirky personality and his religious beliefs. He eventually received the less prestigious Berzelius Medal in 1977.

What this means to you, the undergrad: Do science for the love of science. Make breakthroughs for the sake of advancing human understanding; any prizes are merely nice afterthoughts.

-Woodward

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Early this morning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced. Three scientists -Martin Karplus of the University of Strasbourg and Harvard University, Michael Levitt of Stanford University, and Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California - will share the prize this year for their work in developing computational chemistry. Together, the three of them developed the tools necessary for modeling reactions that take place on a atomic level using computers back in the 70's. You can read the NPR summary here.

Some argue that the choices for this selection were not spot on 100%. Many agree that Karplus is deserving of the award, but the others are debatable. What should be clear is that this award is really going to the field of computational chemistry, but the committee needed some faces to go along with it.

So what should this mean for you, the handful of undergrads that read this blog and therefore the intended audience? It means that we should honor those who went before. It means that every time you read about some basic and not-so-basic reaction in a textbook, someone has probably used a computer to simulate that reaction. It means that in our very near future in industry, we will be using these advancements to design drugs and materials before getting to the lab. It means that this field is so important today, that the committee decided to honor it forty years after the fact. And it means that you are not likely to get out of college without knowing something about it.

Link to the official announcement

What do you think? Was this the right call? Are the three scientist deserving of the prize? Who else would you include? Leave a comment below.