More Canadian Born Nobel Prize Winners In Chemistry

1908: Dr. Ernest Rutherford, was born in New Zealand in 1871. He did most of his important research at McGill University from 1898 to 1907. In 1908 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his investigations of the disintegration theory of the atom and the principles of radioactivity. Most of this research was done while he was at McGill.

1946: Dr. James Summer received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946 for isolating an enzyme in crystalline form. James Summer taught briefly at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick where he held the position of "Professor of Chemistry and Physiology". Tragically, Summer lost an arm as a young boy in a hunting accident. Harvard University, where he obtained his undergraduate degree, told him that he should turn to something other than experimental chemistry due to his disability. After Harvard, Dr. Summer took a post at Mount Allison that lasted from 1911-1913. Did Dr. Summer’s short stay at Mount Allison convince him to realize his dream of becoming a top-notch experimental chemist? One wonders…

1971: Dr. Gerhard Herzberg was born in 1904 in Hamburg, Germany. In 1935 he emigrated to Canada and soon became a Research Professor at the University of Saskatchewan, later moving to the National Research Council in Ottawa. He became a Canadian citizen in 1945. In the early 1950’s he began to study free radicals, species which are very reactive. In 1971 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his "contributions to the knowledge of the electronics structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals."

1983: Dr. Henry Taube was born in 1915 in Newdorf, Saskatchewan. In 1935 he received his B.Sc. at the University of Saskatchewan and two years later he received his Masters degree there. In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies on the mechanisms of electron transfer reactions, particularly those of metal complexes.

1986: Dr. John C. Polanyi was born in 1929 in Berlin, Germany. Polanyi did postdoctoral work from 1952 to 1954 at the laboratories of the National Research Council in Ottawa. In 1962 he was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the University of Toronto. His research set the basis for the development of lasers. In 1986 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with two Americans, Dudley R. Herschbach and Yuan T. Lee, for contributing to the development of a new branch of chemistry called "reaction dynamics."

1989: Dr. Sidney Altman was born in Montreal in 1939. He received his B.Sc. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960 and move on to the University of Colorado to receive his Ph.D. In 1971 he accepted a professorship at Yale University. In 1989 Dr. Altman won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the catalytic properties of the genetic material RNA.

1992: Dr. Rudolf Marcus, a native of Montreal who received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from McGill University in 1946, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1992. His award-winning work involved calculations on how electrons move around in chemical reactions. Today he is performing research at the California Institute of Technology.