Jerome (left) and Isabella Karle cut their respective cakes as they retire from the Naval Research Laboratory after a combined 127 years of government service. WIKIMEDIA, US NAVY, JOHN F. WILLIAMSChemist Jerome Karle, who shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemsitry for his help in developing the now-ubiquitous imaging technique of X-ray crystallography, died earlier this month (June 6) at the Leewood Healthcare Center in Annandale, Virginia. He was 94.
“[Molecular] structures are solved all over the world on a daily basis,” Louis Massa, a professor of physics and chemistry at Hunter College in Manhattan and a collaborator with Karle on more recent research told The New York Times. “It’s one of those things that’s taken for granted now.”
Karle developed the technique with colleague Herbert Hauptman, with whom he had attended City College in New York in the 1930s. Following World War II, the duo took a mathematical approach to problem of imaging individual molecules, publishing their initial X-ray crystallography results—based on the pattern of light reflected when X-ray beams are shined on a crystalized molecule—in the 1950s. But their work was not immediately accepted.
“In the beginning, people didn’t understand what my father ...
