The four-year-old award, which consists of a gold medal and a cash prize of $250,000, will be presented in April by Philadelphia's Franklin Institute Science Museum to honor outstanding work in the life or physical sciences.The international committee that chose the 72-year-old chemist, who becomes the first woman to win the award, said that Karle is being recognized for facilitating wide-ranging research in chemistry, biology, and medicine. Her specialty, three-dimensional molecular modeling--which relies on detailed X-ray structures to determine accuracy and parameters--has contributed to the discovery of new pharmaceutical agents for many diseases.
But Karle, a senior scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., stresses that it was her husband, Jerome, who developed theories about X-ray crystallography that she pursued. "I'm an experimentalist," she says.
She taught herself X-ray crystallography from textbooks and then developed techniques for studying crystals, which led to a greater understanding of their ...
