He’s a Rad Scientist : Winning the Nobel Won’t change USC’s new laureate. He proudly says he’ll continue to be the good chemist he was before he won fame and $935,000.
There are times when George A. Olah--USC’s new Nobel laureate--suspects that anyone who really wants to understand him needs an advanced degree in chemistry.
That may explain why, one day in 1950, he came home and announced to his new wife that he had enrolled her as a chemistry major. He did not think to ask her first whether she was actually interested in the bonds that hold the material world together.
And it did not occur to her to refuse.
It was an unexpected experiment in the chemistry of marriage.
“Believe me, it was the biggest shock of my life,” says Judith Olah. “He came home radiant. ‘I enrolled you,’ he said. ‘In chemistry.’ Without asking me. I had absolutely no intention, let me assure you, ever of studying chemistry in my life.”
Nonetheless, she earned undergraduate and then graduate degrees in chemistry. She spent 40 years working in her husband’s laboratory, retiring three years ago as an adjunct professor of chemistry at USC.
“Can I defend myself?” the imperturbable Hungarian-born researcher asks in his accented rumble like distant thunder.
“The life of a scientist is not a very easy life,” he begins. “Once you are hooked on science, it takes up so much time. I am not complaining. I am doing this with joy. It is not just what you do in the lab or with students. It is thinking and writing and so on . . . a hell of a lot of time.
“An essential part of any happy marriage,” he continues, “should be some understanding and balance. I think if somebody doesn’t understand what the other partner is doing, this can cause real difficulty. Our happy marriage, I attribute in part to the fact she started to understand what this is all about.
“So,” Olah says, “she became a chemist.”
They enjoy the moment of silence.
“I think that is the smartest thing he did,” she says.
*
Only on the most pristine days can George and Judith Olah see all the way from their patio at the lip of Coldwater Canyon to the Pacific Ocean. Most of the time the view is obscured by the curtain of smog common in most American cities held captive by the automobile.
In one way or another, the distinguished USC chemist has been trying to clear the air all his life.
To the average person, the most noticeable benefits of his scientific insights are lead-free gasoline, cleaner high-octane gas and the promise of other non-polluting fuels that might one day reduce the burden of hydrocarbons in the atmosphere.
But those are only a few spinoffs from Olah’s exploration of chemical reactions involving hydrocarbons--fundamental building blocks of life--which has revamped basic research in biomedicine and industrial chemistry.
To his peers in the world of advanced chemistry, Olah’s work unlocked an entire world of previously elusive reactions and unexpected chemical structures.
In the research that most impressed the Nobel Prize committee, Olah showed a way to capture and stabilize a class of unusual chemical compounds so fleeting that their lifetimes can be measured in millionths of a second. And he created a new class of powerfully corrosive acids to stabilize them long enough to study in detail. Colleagues said his breakthrough was the fruit of a characteristic leap of imagination.
“He really does march to a different drummer,” says Stanford University chemistry professor John I. Brauman. “He doesn’t buy into the conventional wisdom. That is what makes his stuff so important. It really is different and, it turns out, amazingly interesting.
“He could actually make new reactions happen that you couldn’t get before,” Brauman says.
For several years, USC officials and Olah’s colleagues at other schools have been calling his work “Nobel-class.” When he was persuaded to move from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland to USC in 1977, he had already been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Nonetheless, the telephone call that announced his 1994 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was a shock when it actually arrived Oct. 12 at 6:30 a.m.
Messages from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which makes the Nobel Prize selections, are not a normal part of Olah’s early-morning routine that begins at dawn with a half-hour of laps in the swimming pool, followed by yogurt, an English muffin and a 12-hour workday.
The prize--and the $935,000 cash award that accompanies it--brings with it almost instant international recognition.
So far, Olah is taking the attention in stride.
“I take my science exceedingly seriously. It is my life. But I try to keep myself in proportion,” he says. “I don’t believe in stuffy scientists who get the feeling because they got a prize that all at once they are exceptional people. As much as I appreciate it, I thought I was a pretty good chemist a week ago and a month ago.”
At 67, he has reached a point in life when many people have retired, but he still actively pursues his research projects, teaching responsibilities and the day-to-day direction of the Loker Hydrocarbon Institute at USC.
The most serious chemistry he has done lately, however, is to spike a glass of morning orange juice with celebratory champagne.
*
These are the human facts of the Olah equation:
He was born in 1927 in Budapest amid the faded glory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a child during the Great Depression, a teen-ager during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. He turned 18 the year World War II ended and finished his Ph.D. four years later.
He married Judith in 1949, fathered the first of two sons, and, in the years of Soviet dominance of Hungary started the experiments that would eventually garner him the 1994 Nobel Prize. Then, in the year the Soviet Union sent tanks into Budapest to crush a rebellion, Olah fled with his family to London, then to Canada and finally to the United States.
“We survived a long while between East and West,” he says. “Then I had a chance to restart my life.”
Today, in their comfortable living room, where original lithographs by Picasso and Chagall grace the flagstone mantle and chemistry texts compete for shelf space with tomes on Dali and Renoir, Olah and his wife are not inclined to reminisce about hardship or privation.
Even in repose, Olah is imposing, so tall--6 feet, 5 inches--that to sit comfortably in an armchair he must fold himself up like a jackknife, crossing his legs one over the other and tucking his foot behind one ankle.
If pressed, Olah acknowledges, yes, there was “a darker political side” to life in Hungary. Yes, he grudgingly admits, there were weeks of combat for control of Budapest. Yes, he arrived in the West “with the shirt on his back.” His wife recalls, “he was a young guy from nowhere.”
But other subjects quickly intrude--their collection of Eskimo sculpture and the provenance of their lithograph of Picasso’s “California.”
It is for friends and colleagues to pass along the stories of Olah trying to survive in war-torn Hungary, doling out a gold chain, one link at a time, to buy the potatoes and soybeans that kept his family alive.
*
“Nobody in my family ever had any interest in science,” Olah says.
His father was a lawyer. His mother kept house. Only after high school was Olah’s interest in medieval history and Latin classics preempted by chemistry. Not even Olah can say easily what compels him to invest so much of his life and energy in an investigation of what makes matter hang together.
“I do what I do because I have great curiosity. Creative science, I think, has close relations to art. It is a creative intellectual process,” Olah says.
In Hungary, as in most European countries of the period, a promising student apprenticed with a professor. The mentor collected a handsome fee for the privilege.
Olah earned his keep instead.
“I was privileged that I wasn’t paying my professor. I was his private assistant and was privileged to work seven days a week,” he says dryly. “Even then I had my own ideas, and that did not sit well with my professor.”
The idea of earning his keep underpins his attitude toward research today.
First as an industrial chemist and then as a university-based researcher, Olah has been anxious to see his discoveries put into practical application or published openly where other chemists could benefit from the work.
He has taken out more than 100 patents and published more than 950 research papers.
“He believes that any work you start is incomplete until it is peer-reviewed and published,” says Surya Prakash, Olah’s longtime research collaborator at USC.
Olah recalls being irritated by the attitude of his research director at Dow Chemical Co., where he worked when he first came to the United States.
“His philosophy was that they could afford this fundamental research but I shouldn’t bother them too much with the results. I thought, maybe naively, that they were paying me a good salary and I have some obligation to do something,” Olah says.
*
Not unexpectedly, Olah has strong ideas on the pursuit of scientific truth.
He is unyielding on the principle that a scientist must submit himself to the discipline of what can be measured, observed and openly proven.
“Scientists are there to find out what is there in nature. It is not like politics or economics or many other things,” he says. “In many ways, we have no control about what is there. If nature created a certain molecule or a certain compound, you can’t change that fact.”
Over the years, Olah has demonstrated he sometimes sees those facts differently than other scientists--often more clearly.
“I take pride that my colleagues think I have a rather distinctive individual approach to chemistry,” he says.
But trying to describe that approach is not so easy. One leading authority on organic chemistry at another university is asked to explain Olah’s thought process. The chemist throws up his hands in mock despair. “Olah is just so Hungarian,” he says. “He makes these jumps.”
He is alluding to the intimidating reputation earned by a generation of Hungarian researchers, such as atomic scientists Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, whose intellectual prowess and indomitable energy in post-World War II America led them to prominence in the fields of physics, chemistry and mathematics.
On more than one occasion, Olah’s particular view of the facts put him in conflict with the established experts of the day. Caltech chemist John D. Roberts says “he’s upset a lot of apple carts in the process.”
His clash with Nobel Prize-winning chemist Herbert C. Brown at Purdue University is legendary. For 20 years--in seminars, conferences and in the research papers where academic combat is waged--the two warred over the structure of a certain obscure compound called 2-norbornyl cation.
“It was very harsh . . . lonely,” he says. “I kept a very low profile on some research for very many years. I was hoping my chemistry would speak for itself.” Eventually, the facts proved Olah correct.
“To accumulate basic knowledge just for the sake of understanding, I think, is essential,” he says. “You never know when some obscure, completely unimportant fact becomes very important. . . . Sometimes the practical results take a long time to come, so you must have some faith.”
