Jerome and Isabella Karle received the Department of the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Awards upon their retirement from the Naval Research Laboratory in 2009.WIKIMEDIA, JOHN F. WILLIAMSIsabella Lugoski Karle, a pioneering chemist who with her husband helped develop a groundbreaking and still-popular method for visualizing the structure of molecules, died earlier this month (October 3) in Arlington, Virginia. She was 95.
Karle’s husband, Jerome Karle, who passed in 2013 at age 94, had developed the technique of X-ray crystallography in the 1950s. This is based on analyzing the patterns of light that bounce off a crystallized molecule. It remains the most widely used method for determining the three-dimensional structure of molecules.
Jerome Karle received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Herbert Hauptman in 1985. Isabella Karle played a big role in his work by demonstrating how the technique could be used.
She had used it to explore the structures of biological molecules found in drugs, steroids, and frog toxins. Karle told The New York Times in 2013, “After I found some structures that no one could have dreamt of solving before, it started to get ...
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