Famous Scientist

Famous Scientist

William Lipscom

William Nunn Lipscomb, Jr. (December 9, 1919 – April 14, 2011)[2] was a Nobel Prize-winning American inorganic and organic chemist working in nuclear magnetic resonance, theoretical chemistry, boron chemistry, and biochemistry. Lipscomb was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His family moved to Lexington, Kentucky in 1920,[1] and he lived there until he received his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry at the University of Kentucky in 1941. He went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1946.

From 1946 to 1959 he taught at the University of Minnesota. From 1959 to 1990 he was a professor of chemistry at Harvard University, where he was a professor emeritus since 1990.

Lipscomb resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts until his death in 2011 from pneumonia. In grade school Lipscomb studied somewhat independently, collecting animals, insects, pets, rocks, and minerals. Interest in astronomy led him to visitor nights at the Observatory of the University of Kentucky, where Prof. H. H. Dowing gave him a copy of Baker's Astronomy. Lipscomb credits gaining many intuitive physics concepts from this book and from his conversations with Dowing, who became Lipscomb's life long friend.

The young Lipscomb undertook other projects, such as morse-coded messages over wires and crystal radio sets, with five nearby friends who became physicists, physicians, and an engineer.

At age of 12, Lipscomb was given a small Gilbert chemistry set, He expanded it by ordering apparatus and chemicals from suppliers and by using his father's privilege as a physician to purchase chemicals at the local drugstore at a discount. Lipscomb made his own fireworks and entertained visitors with color changes, odors, and explosions. His mother questioned his chemistry hobby only once, when he attempted to isolate a large amount of urea from the natural product.

Lipscomb credits perusing the large medical texts in his physician father's library and the influence of Linus Pauling years later to his undertaking biochemical studies in his later years. Had Lipscomb become a physician like his father, he would have been the fourth physician in a row along the Lipscomb male line.Lipscomb's high-school chemistry teacher, Frederick Jones, gave Lipscomb his college books on organic, analytical and general chemistry, and asked only that Lipscomb take the examinations. During the class lectures, Lipscomb in the back of the classroom did research that he thought was original (but he later found was not): the preparation of hydrogen from sodium formate (or sodium oxalate) and sodium hydroxide. The work was careful, including gas analyses and searching for probable side reactions.