Naval Lab `Experimentalist' Honored With Bower Award

Isabella L. Karle, who pioneered new ways to study the three-dimensional structure of molecules, making use of both X-ray and electron diffraction, has been selected to receive the 1993 Bower Award and Prize in Science. 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 three-dimensional nature and the effect on physical and biological properties. "What she came up with is now being used by crystallographers throughout the world," says Drake Eggleston, an associate fellow at SmithKline Beecham in Philadelphia. "We used to have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to understand structures. Now our understanding occurs faster." Karle earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1944, when she was 22 years old. At Michigan, she met her husband, also a Ph.D. student in chemistry. After graduation, both Karles worked in Chicago on the Manhattan Project and then returned to Ann Arbor. At the end of World War II, they went to Washington, where they landed jobs at the Naval Research Lab, which was willing to hire them both. "The problem was that we were looking for academic jobs, and we couldn't get work in the same city," she says, citing as reasons universities' anti-nepotism policies, bias against women, and not enough research funding in smaller towns for both of them. Her husband--now chief scientist at NRL's Laboratory for the Structure of Matter--began working on so-called direct methods for analyzing crystal structures. Along with a collaborator, Herbert A. Hauptman of the Medical Foundation of Buffalo, Jerome Karle received a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1985 for contributions to crystallography. In the 1950s, Isabella Karle sought practical applications for her husband's mathematical theories. In 1963, she introduced the "Symbolic Addition Procedure," which revolutionized the types and complexity of problems that can be solved by analyzing crystal structures. "She kind of took a chance by being the first one to demonstrate belief in her husband's theory," says Eggleston. "Of course, there wasn't much to lose. But direct methods allow us to solve any structure these days." In her own research, Isabella Karle has applied the techniques she developed to the study of a wide variety of substances. These include crystals distilled from frog venom that produces toxins--which block specific nerve impulses-- and the rearranged atomic bonds found in thymine, a component of DNA, when it is irradiated. Today, Isabella Karle heads the X-ray diffraction section of NRL's Laboratory for the Structure of Matter. She has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1978. She's also served as president of the American Crystallographic Association. As for her plans for the prize money, she is rather demur. "There are many things to do with it," she says, hinting that she may give some portion of it away. "But I don't want to promise anything at this point." Also selected to receive an award from the Franklin Institute in April is Robert W. Galvin, chairman of the executive committee at Motorola Inc. of Schaumburg, Ill., for his efforts to improve quality and achieve customer satisfaction while building Motorola into a world-class semiconductor company. The award to be given to Galvin, the Bower Award for Business Leadership, does not include a cash prize. The Bower awards were established in 1989 as part of the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial Awards. They were made possible by a $7.5 million bequest from Henry Bower, a Philadelphia chemical manufacturer. Edward R. Silverman is a freelance writer based in Millburn, N.J.

Naval Lab `Experimentalist' Honored With Bower Award

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