Melvin Calvin – Calvin Cycle and Photosynthesis
Famous Scientist Datebook: April 8
Melvin Calvin (1911-1997), American Chemist
Melvin Calvin Major Work – The Calvin Cycle Discovery and Photosynthesis
Melvin Ellis Calvin (April 8, 1911 – January 8, 1997), was an American chemist famous for his work on photosynthesis and discovering the Calvin cycle along with Andrew Benson and James Bassham. He contributed in all areas of Chemistry and spent most of his career at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Melvin Calvin Professional Profile
The son of Russian and Lithuanian immigrants to the U.S., Melvin Calvin was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. The family settled in Detroit, Michigan, where he attended the Michigan College of Mining and Technology, becoming the school’s first chemistry major. He completed his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Minnesota. He also studied at the University of Manchester and University of California, Berkeley.
It was in the early 1940s when Calvin began to focus his work on photosynthesis by using radioactive tracers in chemical reactions. During this period in his researches and experiments, his now known Calvin Cycle of plant pphotosynthesis took fruition.
The Calvin Cycle and Photosynthesis
The Calvin Cycle or the Calvin-Benson-Bassham Cycle – is a system that describes the series of biochemical reactions taking place in the chloroplasts of photosynthetic organisms. Further, the cycle describes a light independent reaction (that is, without any need for visible or ultraviolet light), where stored energy is used to convert carbon dioxide and water into organic compounds. In each stage of the process of “carbon fixation,” carbon dioxide is added with a carbon-14 tracer to explain the chemical pathway.
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Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and X-Ray Discovery
Wilhelm Roentgen, Physicist
Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen (1845-1923)
Major work: Discovered X-Ray
Wilhelm Röntgen, German physicist was born March 27, 1845. While teaching at Wuerzburg University in 1895, he discovered X-rays, for which he was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.
Röntgen’s name is mainly associated with his discovery of the rays that he called X-rays. In 1895 he was studying the phenomena accompanying the passage of an electric current through a gas of extremely low pressure. Although previous works have already been carried out, his work on cathode rays led him to the discovery of a new and different kind of rays.
He also worked on the heats of gases, in particular, the heat conductivity of crystals and electricity.
Röntgen Awards
His Nobel Prize Award in 1901 was officially “in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him”. He donated the monetary reward from his Nobel Prize to his university. Like Pierre Curie, Röntgen refused to take out patents related to his discovery, as he wanted humankind to benefit from practical applications.
His other Awards:
- Rumford Medal (1896)
- Matteucci Medal (1896)
- Elliott Cresson Medal (1897)
- In November 2004, IUPAC named element number 111 as Roentgenium (Rg) in his honour.
Röntgen Legacy
In Remscheid-Lennep, the house in which Roentgen was born in 1845, is the Deutsches Röntgen-Museum.
In Hamburg DE, the Philips Medical System diagnostic radiography research and development division is on Röntgenstrasse (Röntgen Street).
Röntgen’s name (or a local linguistic derivative) is used to refer to radiology and its products instead of the term “x-ray”, which Röntgen himself coined. Some examples are the Japanese “rentogen”, the Lithuanian “rentgeno”, the Hebrew “rentgen”, the Croatian “rentgen”, Turkish “röntgen” among others.
Source:
- Röntgen Biography: “Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen – Biography”. Nobelprize.org. 9 Nov 2011 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1901/rontgen-bio.html
- http://www.roentgen-museum.de (from the menu, click on the English version)
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Frédéric Joliot-Curie
Nobel Laureate Birthday, March 19
Frédéric Joliot-Curie, French physicist, shared Nobel Prize in physics with wife Irène Joliot-Curie, for artificial radioactivity.
Frédéric Joliot ( (19 March 1900 – 14 August 1958) was born in Paris and graduated from the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris. In 1925 he became an assistant to Marie Curie, at the Radium Institute. He fell in love with her daughter Irène Curie, and married in 1926. At the insistence of Marie, Joliot-Curie obtained a second baccalauréat, a bachelor’s degree, and a doctorate in science, doing his thesis on the electrochemistry of radio-elements.
Frédéric and Irène changed their surnames to Joliot-Curie after they married on October 4, 1926 in Paris, France. Eleven months later, their daughter Hélène, was born, who would also become a noted physicist. Their son, Pierre, born in 1932, was a biologist. Frédéric Joliot-Curie devoted the last years of his life to the creation of a centre for nuclear physics at Orsay, where his children were educated.
Frédéric Joliot’s Career
Joliot was a lecturer at the Paris Faculty of Science when he collaborated with his wife Irène with a research on the atom structure, in particular, on the projection of nuclei, which was an essential step in the discovery of the neutron. In 1935, the couple was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
In 1937 Frédéric Joliot left the Radium Institute to become to become a professor at the Collège de France. He worked on chain reactions and the requirements for the successful construction of a nuclear reactor that uses controlled nuclear fission to generate energy through the use of uranium and heavy water.
He was one of the scientists mentioned in Albert Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt as one of the leading scientists on the course to chain reactions. The Second World War, however, largely stalled Joliot’s research, as did his subsequent post-war administrative duties.
Post-war Career
After the Liberation, he served as director of the French National Center for Scientific Research, and appointed by Charles De Gaulle in 1945, becoming the first High Commissioner for Atomic Energy of France. In 1944 French physicists, Pierre Auger and Jules Gueron were working on the British nuclear weapons research program at Chalk River in Canada. As France was being liberated by the Normandy invasion, they informed Joliot-Curie of the progress of the American/British nuclear weapon program. Frederic passed on that information to his Soviet friends. In 1948 he oversaw the construction of the first French atomic reactor. A devout communist, he was relieved of his duties in 1950 for political reasons. Joliot-Curie was also one of the eleven signatories to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955. Although he retained his professorship at the Collège de France, on the death of his wife in 1956, he took over her position as Chair of Nuclear Physics at the Sorbonne.
Joliot-Curie was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and of the Academy of Medicine. He was named a Commander of the Legion of Honour and also awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951 for his work as president of the World Council of Peace.
Legacy of Frédéric Joliot-Curie
A Moon crater is named “Joliot” after him. A street in an upmarket neighborhood of Sofia, Bulgaria and the nearby metro station is named after Frédéric Joliot-Curie. In Canada, there is a street named after him in the Riveriere-des-Praire burrough of north Montreal.
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Happy Birthday Albert Einstein!
Science Celebrity Birthday, March 14
Albert Einstein: German-born American physicist, Famous for Relativity Theory, E=MC²
Albert Einstein, official 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics photograph.
Great Scientist Datebook: March 14
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955), German-born American, is born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany. Einstein is known for his Theory of Relativity, with his formula insignia E=MC2. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, especially for his discovery of the law of photoelectric effect.
Subtle is the Lord
There are two books authored by Abraham Pais, a theoretical physicist himself, that many people think as the best biography of Einstein. The first one is Subtle is the Lord, published in 1982. I haven’t the chance to read this book except brief information about it, but as far as I know this is not for the layman.
Einstein Lived Here
In the second book, Einstein Lived Here (it’s beside me now) by Pais, which is considered the companion volume of Subtle is the Lord, he brings Albert Einstein the man, to us, much in the layman’s language, that is, accessible and non-mathematical. In Einstein Lived Here, we learn not only about Einstein’s views on religion and his philosophies, but his marital problems; his contacts with prominent personalities like John D. Rockefeller, Chaplin, Freud, and Gandhi, to name a few; his interest in capital punishment and vegetarianism; and more. The book was reliably written from the author’s special perspective not only because he is a physicist himself but he also knew Einstein personally for several years. What more can I say of this genius of the century who has been the subject of numerous books, articles, journals, biographies, and factions. Here’s his brief biography … Albert Einstein
Sources:
- Einstein Lived Here, by Abraham Pais, Oxford University Press (1994)
- Illustrated Biographical Dictionary, edited by John Clark, Chancellor Press (1994)
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Albert Einstein, Wiki Commons
Originally posted March 14, 2011. Updated to remember Einstein’s birthday.
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