Watt W. Webb

Watt Wetmore Webb (August 27, 1927 – October 29, 2020)

Early life and education Watt Wetmore Webb was born on August 27, 1927, in Kansas City, Missouri. Webb hailed from a family of bankers. In 1891, his grandfather, Watt Webb, had founded the Missouri Savings Bank, an organization that would be led by Webb's uncle Wilson S. Webb, and eventually his father Watt Webb Jr. Due to a long illness, Watt W. Webb did not start formal schooling until the age of 10. As a young man, Webb worked at the family banking business; when Webb joined MIT as an undergraduate at 16 years old, he acceded to his parents request that he study business administration to prepare him to join the family banking business. There, in the early 1960s he developed the first stable superconducting magnet along with then-undergraduate Malcolm Beasley (who went on to do his PhD thesis work in Watt's lab as well). Webb was promoted to full professor in 1965. Case Western Reserve University's Michelson–Morley Award in 1999, the Rank Prize for Optoelectronics in 2000,

Watt retired from active research as an emeritus professor in 2012.

Webb died on October 29, 2020, in New York City at the age of 93.

FCS and MPM

Professor Webb pioneered the techniques of Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS) in 1972 and Multiphoton microscopy (MPM) in 1990. FCS enables single-molecule detection in solutions at nanomolar concentrations and provides temporal resolution of the dynamic processes of individual molecules signaled by their fluorescence. FCS reveals molecular mobility, conformational fluctuations and chemical reactions in solutions and allows the detection of extremely sparse molecules and particles. In situ measurements of the dynamics of fluorescence flicker by FCS, photobleaching, phototoxicity, and induced fluorescence are being used to discern dynamics of biological processes and molecular mechanisms of disease. Multiphoton excitation in laser scanning fluorescence microscopy provides for high resolution, high signal-to-noise imaging in living cells and deep in turbid tissues in vivo and significantly reduces photodamage and minimizes image degradation due to scattering and autofluorescence. His laboratory at Cornell University continues to extend the frontiers of these technologies, now for example extending MPM and FCS to imaging molecular processes within the cellular nucleus for gene expression in vivo. Recently initiated is the development of technology for introduction of MPM into Medical Endoscopy for in vivo, in situ real time diagnostics.

Honors

In 2010 Webb was awarded the Alexander Hollaender Award in Biophysics by the National Academy of Sciences. Was awarded the Rosenstiel Award in 2013.

Personal life Webb was an avid sailor, together with his wife Page Chapman – whom he met sailing on the Charles River while Webb pursued his bachelor's degree. Together they raced sailing yachts across the northeast well into their 70s. They had three children together, a son in 1954, and twin boys in 1956.