Scientific Community Mourns The Loss Of Nobel Laureates Bardeen And Luria

Scientific Community Mourns The Loss Of Nobel Laureates Bardeen And Luria John Bardeen & Salvador E. Luria John Bardeen, emeritus professor of electrical engineering and physics at the University of Illinois, and the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field, died January 30, at the age of 82, of a heart attack at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He had been visiting Boston to consult with specialists about his health problems. In 1947, Bardeen, along with Walter Brattain and William P. Schockley, developed the first semiconductor transistor at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. The invention was first used commercially in telephone switching equipment in 1952. The three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956 for their invention, which heralded the dawn of modern electronics by replacing the vacuum tube. In 1951, Bardeen joined the University of Illinois faculty, where he would develop a theory of low-temperature superconductivity, which he considered his greatest professional accomplishment. In 1972, he won his second Nobel Prize for this research, along with two scientists who worked with him as graduate students, Leon Cooper and J. Robert Schreiffer. He retired in 1975. Bardeen received his B.S. in 1928 and his M.S. in 1929, both in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. After working as a geophysicist at Gulf Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh from 1930 to 1933, he earned a Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Princeton University in 1936. He was a fellow at Harvard University and taught at the University of Minnesota before World War II; during the war, he was a physicist with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Afterward, he joined the newly formed research group in solid-state physics at Bell Labs. Bardeen served on the President's Science Advisory Committee from 1959 until 1962 and on the White House Science Council in the early 1980s. In addition to his Nobel Prizes, he won the National Medal of Science in 1965, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976, the Lomonosov Prize from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1988, and the Third Century Award from President Bush in 1990. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Salvador E. Luria, a biologist who shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology, died February 6, at the age of 78, of a heart attack at his home in Lexington, Mass. Luria, who since 1984 had been a senior scientist at the Repligen Corp., a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Mass., was also Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a title MIT bestows as a special honor to distinguished faculty. Luria was a member of the MIT faculty from 1959 until his death. He won his Nobel Prize, along with Max Delbruck of the California Institute of Technology and Alfred D. Hershey of the Carnegie Institution's genetics research laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., for the trio's investigations of the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses. Luria discovered virus host restriction in bacteria; this research led to the discovery of restriction enzymes, which formed the basis of modern recombinant DNA technology. He also organized a program in microbiology at MIT and founded the MIT Center for Cancer Research, which he directed from 1972 to 1985. An advocate of scientists' involvement in the humanities, he also taught a graduate course in world literature. Luria was born in Turin, Italy. He went to Paris to escape the fascists in 1938, working as a research fellow at the Institut du Radium. He came to the United States in 1940 and did research at Columbia University until 1942. Under a Guggenheim Fellowship, he then worked at Vanderbilt and Princeton universities. He became a U.S. citizen in 1947. From 1943 until 1959, Luria taught at Indiana University, Bloomington. One of his graduate students there was James D. Watson, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 for the discovery of the structure of DNA. Throughout his life, Luria was an active member of the peace movement. He opposed the Vietnam War and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and called for an end to the building of new atomic power plants. In 1969, he was among 48 scientists blacklisted by the National Institutes of Health for his political activity. In 1974, Luria won a National Book Award in the Sciences for his first nonacademic book, Life: The Unfinished Experiment (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973). In 1969, he and Delbruck received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for their work on genetics of bacteria and bacteriophage. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientific Community Mourns The Loss Of Nobel Laureates Bardeen And Luria

The Scientist Staff

Scientific Community Mourns The Loss Of Nobel Laureates Bardeen And Luria John Bardeen & Salvador E. Luria

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of