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George Olah: The Master of Hydrocarbons
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14035 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1995 |
3,013 Words |
| Author
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George B. Kauffman and Laurie M. Kauffman
George B. Kauffman, professor of chemistry at California
State
University, Fresno, is a contributing editor to four journals
and has authored more than 1,200 publications on chemistry,
chemical education, and the history of science and
technology.
Laurie M. Kauffman, his wife and frequent collaborator, is a
retired schoolteacher with an interest in the humanistic
aspects of science. |
With these words, George Andrew Olah, director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, began his address accepting the 1994 Nobel Prize in chemistry, which he received in Stockholm last December 8. Olah's selection by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to receive the ne plus ultra of science "for his contributions to carbocation chemistry" marked the ultimate recognition of work, begun four decades ago, that, for many years, "we were interested in and that nobody considered of much practical use," as he told us in a recent interview.
With his students and coworkers, Olah had succeeded in isolating, stabilizing, and characterizing certain very short-lived intermediates in organic chemical reactions that he christened carbocations. The term was later approved by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. These fleeting intermediates had been predicted theoretically, but because no one had ever observed them, many chemists questioned their existence. Olah, however, never lost faith in his quest: "You do a lot of work before you really convince yourself that you have observed something, particularly in a field where for decades and decades people have tried and failed. ... It was a long-standing challenge. ... I was fortunate to have found a way to solve that puzzle."
Olah's discoveries revolutionized the study of carbocations, and his numerous contributions to synthetic organic chemistry have found a prominent place in all modern textbooks. Although his work has had tremendous practical consequences, especially in synthetic industrial chemistry and the manufacture of fuels, plastics, and pharmaceuticals, this was not the motivation for his work. According to Olah,
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