Caltech’s Nobel Tradition Continues
The vigil began before dawn in a subbasement laboratory at Caltech, where graduate students and researchers can usually be found zapping molecules with laser beams to tease them into excitement.
On Tuesday, the excitement was of a different kind, spilling out of the lab and across the Pasadena campus as one of the students cried out in triumph: “A.Z. just got the prize.”
Nothing more had to be said.
Ahmed H. Zewail, who had led teams of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars into a scientific frontier of probing chemical reactions with ultrafast lasers, had won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.
“It was overdue,” said Mirianas Chachisvilis, a postdoctoral scholar from Sweden who joined Zewail’s team of 15 researchers in 1992. “It was clear to me that he would get it one day.”
Zewail was the 28th Caltech faculty member or graduate to land the biggest prize in science or medicine. An early morning call from the Royal Swedish Academy touched off a day of news conferences, champagne receptions and parties packed with men in tweed jackets.
“It’s not just another prize,” said Caltech President David Baltimore, who is a Nobel laureate. “You have to see Ahmed as the inheritor of the tradition that Linus Pauling started by seeing chemistry as a molecular process.”
Pound for pound, the California Institute of Technology has won more Nobel Prizes than any other university. It’s a tiny institution compared to most major research universities, enrolling a mere 1,889 students--more than half of them graduate students.
Caltech has been on a roll this year, landing the coveted spot as the No. 1 institution in U.S. News & World Report’s annual list of best national universities. Its 260-member freshmen class once again has the highest average SAT scores in the nation--1,500 combined math and verbal out of a possible 1,600.
With its reputation for robust scientific inquiry and an enormous research budget, Caltech also attracts many of the top research scientists and postdoctoral scholars in the world.
So Zewail wasn’t just being magnanimous when he tried to deflect some of the limelight Tuesday.
“It’s not me,” Zewail said, pointing to a gaggle of young scientists near him. “We have close to 100 people or more who have worked on this over the last 22 years.”
The work in femtochemistry continued Tuesday in the subbasement of Noyes Hall, measuring chemical reactions in femtoseconds, or one-millionth of a billionth of a second.
Red warning lights winked outside the Ultrafast Electron Diffraction Lab, illuminating a “Danger: Laser Radiation” sign on the door.
Inside, two graduate students and two postdoctoral fellows padded around in powder-blue booties worn to minimize dust in a lab full of lasers and elaborate optical equipment that bounce pulses of ultraviolet light around the room.
The team of researchers had just wrapped up a 10-day experiment, agitating molecules with bursts of lasers and monitoring their progress in shifts around the clock.
Rather than showing signs of fatigue, they were energized by the worldwide recognition of their mentor, the man they call A.Z.
“It’s the chance of a lifetime to work with a Nobel laureate,” said Hyotcherl Ihee, a graduate student carrying a flute of champagne.
Counting the endless hours his researchers spend in the lab, some people around Caltech view Zewail “as a slave driver,” Ihee said. “That’s not true. We are inspired by his passion for science.”
Researcher Boyd Goodson has been surprised at Zewail’s patient and upbeat nature. “Even if the experiment doesn’t work, he’s still excited and finds something that’s good about it.”
Vladamir Lobastov, a postdoctoral scholar from Moscow, praised Zewail for giving him the chance to build the apparatus that sprawls across the lab.
“This is his baby,” Lobastov said. “He’s going to get the next prize for this.”
