William Lipscomb

Biography

Overview

Lipscomb was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to a physician father and housewife mother. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather had been physicians. His family moved to Lexington, Kentucky in 1920, and he lived there until he received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry at the University of Kentucky in 1941. He went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1946.

From 1946 to 1959 he taught at the University of Minnesota. From 1959 to 1990 he was a professor of chemistry at Harvard University, where he was a professor emeritus since 1990.

Lipscomb was married to Mary Adele Sargent from 1944 to 1983. They had three children, one of whom lived only a few hours. He married Jean Evans in 1983. They had one adopted daughter.

Lipscomb resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts until his death in 2011 from pneumonia.

Early years

"My early home environment ... stressed personal responsibility and self reliance. Independence was encouraged especially in the early years when my mother taught music and when my father's medical practice occupied most of his time."

In grade school Lipscomb collected animals, insects, pets, rocks, and minerals.

Interest in astronomy led him to visitor nights at the Observatory of the University of Kentucky, where Prof. H. H. Downing gave him a copy of Baker's Astronomy. Lipscomb credits gaining many intuitive physics concepts from this book and from his conversations with Downing, who became Lipscomb's lifelong friend.

The young Lipscomb participated in other projects, such as Morse-coded messages over wires and crystal radio sets, with five nearby friends who became physicists, physicians, and an engineer.

Aged 12, Lipscomb was given a small Gilbert chemistry set. He expanded it by ordering apparatus and chemicals from suppliers and by using his father's privilege as a physician to purchase chemicals at the local drugstore at a discount. Lipscomb made his own fireworks and entertained visitors with color changes, odors, and explosions. His mother questioned his home chemistry hobby only once, when he attempted to isolate a large amount of urea from urine.

Lipscomb credits perusing the large medical texts in his physician father's library and the influence of Linus Pauling years later to his undertaking biochemical studies in his later years. Had Lipscomb become a physician like his father, he would have been the fourth physician in a row along the Lipscomb male line.

The source for this subsection, except as noted, is Lipscomb's autobiographical sketch. He took care to include gas analyses and to search for probable side reactions.

Lipscomb later had a high-school physics course and took first prize in the state contest on that subject. He also became very interested in special relativity.

Lipscomb attended University of Kentucky on a music scholarship. Prof. Robert H. Baker suggested that Lipscomb research the direct preparation of derivatives of alcohols from dilute aqueous solution without first separating the alcohol and water, which led to Lipscomb's first publication. also reviews the history of the subject beginning with the work of Dilthey. Lipscomb and his graduate students further determined the molecular structure of boranes (compounds of boron and hydrogen) using X-ray crystallography in the 1950s and developed theories to explain their bonds. Later he applied the same methods to related problems, including the structure of carboranes (compounds of carbon, boron, and hydrogen). Longuet-Higgins and Roberts and an essentially equivalent mechanism was proposed by Eberhardt, Crawford, and Lipscomb.

"Lipscomb and his coworkers developed the idea of transferability of atomic properties, by which approximate theories for complex molecules are developed from more exact calculations for simpler but chemically related molecules..." In a way this continued work on the nature of the chemical bond by his doctoral advisor at the California Institute of Technology, Linus Pauling, who was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances."

The source for about half of this section is Lipscomb's Nobel Lecture. displayed in simplified form with atomic detail suppressed. Proteins are chains of amino acids, and the continuous ribbon shows the trace of the chain with, for example, several amino acids for each turn of a helix.

Carboxypeptidase A in 2010, exploring the possibility of finding a treatment for type 2 diabetes, as the MB06322 inhibitor slows the production of sugar by fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase.

Lipscomb's group also contributed to an understanding of concanavalin A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960. Member of United States National Academy of Sciences Member of the Faculty Advisory Board of MIT-Harvard Research Journal Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1976) Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1976)

Five books and published symposia are dedicated to Lipscomb.