UCLA Professor Shares Nobel Chemistry Prize : Swiss Scientists Win Physics Award for Conductivity Study

Two American chemists, including UCLA’s Donald J. Cram, and a Frenchman have won the 1987 Nobel Prize in chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Wednesday.

The chemists were honored for their work over the last two decades in making relatively uncomplicated compounds that perform the same biological functions as natural proteins.

The academy said such work has yielded significant new insights into chemical reactions that take place within human cells and has laid the foundation for a field of biomedical research that has grown rapidly.

The academy Wednesday also announced in Stockholm that the 1987 physics prize was awarded to two Swiss researchers who last year reported the discovery of the first “high-temperature” superconductor and forever changed the way researchers think about electrical conduction.

Family of Superconductors

The Swiss researchers, J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Muller of the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, touched off an international race that has led to the discovery of a new family of superconductors. These materials are expected to make possible faster and smaller computers, more efficient transmission of electric power and even magnetically levitated trains.

In addition to Cram, the other chemistry winners are Jean-Marie Lehn of Universite Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg and Charles J. Pedersen of Salem, N.J., who is retired from E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. of Wilmington, Del. Like Muller and Bednorz, they and Cram will divide the $340,000 award.

The chemists developed synthetic molecules that can link up with specific molecules in a process analogous to the mating of a lock with a key. These reactions mimic naturally occurring processes within the cells. The principle is now used in medical diagnosis.

“If you can mimic a reaction that occurs in a cell, then you understand it,” Cram said during an interview in his UCLA office on Wednesday. “And if you understand that reaction, you begin to understand yourself.”

The 68-year-old Cram, witty and self-effacing, has been at UCLA since he received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1947. He still teaches introductory chemistry courses--unusual for a professor of his stature--and is popular with students for his clarity and easy accessibility.

‘Really Shakes Me Up’

Cram and his wife, Jayne, who is also a chemist, are childless, but he frequently refers to his students as his “children.”

At a press conference, Cram was visibly excited and his wife was in tears. “This really shakes me up,” he said. “This doesn’t happen every day, you know.”

Lehn has been attempting to reach the same goals using slightly different synthetic molecules, Cram said. They are friendly and keep each other informed of their progress to prevent duplication of research, Cram said, “but we’ve tried to stay out of each other’s way.”

Cram and Lehn have long been interested in the binding of metal ions, which are widespread in the human body and play key roles in many biological processes.

Pedersen, Cram said, was the first to discover that a key synthetic compound, called a crown ether, would bind with metals. That discovery, made just before Pedersen retired, opened the door to making model systems that mimic cellular activities, such as the subsequent work of Cram and Lehn.

Pederson, 83, received a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but never received a doctorate, which is unusual in this day. He acquired 65 patents during his 42 years at Du Pont.

“I’ve never had an experience like this,” Pedersen told the Associated Press. “It’s a great honor.”

The physics award was a surprise to many scientists because it came so soon after the discoveries for which it was given.

Most physicists have assumed that Muller, 60, and Bednorz, 37, would eventually receive the Nobel. The speed with which it was conferred emphasizes the great importance scientists place on superconductivity.

Superconductors carry electricity without any losses due to resistance. An electrical current induced in a ring of superconducting wire would continue to flow around the ring forever.

Low Temperatures Needed

Many metals and alloys are superconductors, but only at very low temperatures. Before Muller and Bednorz’s work, the best superconductor worked only at temperatures below minus 419 degrees Fahrenheit. It had to be cooled with liquid helium, a process that is inefficient and expensive.

The Swiss researchers reported in April, 1986, that they had found a ceramic composed of copper, barium, lanthanum, and oxygen that was superconducting at temperatures nearly 20 degrees higher. Few physicists believed their report, however, and it was largely ignored until November, when American and Japanese researchers reproduced their findings.

By February, researchers had discovered a family of ceramics that were all superconducting at temperatures above minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, the materials can be cooled with liquid nitrogen, a process that is much cheaper and much more efficient than using liquid helium.

Experts predict that the lowered cooling costs will make possible a wide range of superconductor applications that were not economically feasible when cooling was more expensive.

But the ceramics are difficult to work with and such applications may be 10 to 15 years in the making, experts cautioned.

The Swiss-trained Muller has been at the IBM lab since 1963. Bednorz did his graduate work with Muller and has been an IBM staff member since 1982.

This was the second year in a row that the Nobel physics prize went to the IBM Zurich Laboratory. In 1986, IBM physicists Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer received the prize for the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope.

Cram and Pedersen, along with MIT researcher Susumu Tonegawa, who Monday won the medicine Nobel, will be the first U.S. recipients of the Nobel who will have to pay income taxes on it. As part of the major overhaul of the tax system last year, Congress repealed a provision that exempted the Nobel and other awards from taxation.