'John D. Roberts' , Who Brought Miracles In The Field Of Organic Chemistry..!

I read this inspiring article on nytimes.com which was written by Nicholas St. Fleur and thought to share it on LinkedIn to let everyone know abouth this great personality.

John D. Roberts, an organic chemist who pioneered the use of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and other techniques to reveal the structures of molecules and the dance of atoms as they rearrange in chemical reactions, died on Oct. 29 at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 98.

In the 1950s, Dr. Roberts played a crucial role in the explosive growth of physical organic chemistry, a field that studies the reactivity of biological compounds. One notable contribution was in popularizing nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which was developed by physicists, to understand chemical structures and reaction mechanisms.

“This was a real revolution for organic chemists at the time,” said Peter B. Dervan, a professor of chemistry at Caltech, where Dr. Roberts worked for more than 60 years. “Jack saw the potential use of this spectroscopy and mastered it, and then, by publishing papers in this area, convinced other organic chemists that this was a powerful tool.”

Dr. Roberts was a leader in understanding how organic reactions occurred, and he shared his techniques with the scientific community.

“He helped enable the development of everything that involves organic compounds,” said George M. Whitesides, a professor of chemistry at Harvard University who received his Ph.D. under Dr. Roberts in 1964. “So, if you eat it, take it as a drug, use it in your clothes — all that stuff uses techniques that he didn’t necessarily develop, but that he taught to the chemical community.”

In addition to spectroscopy, Dr. Roberts helped popularize the use of isotopes as tracers to monitor where atoms move during chemical reactions.

Isotopes are forms of an element that have different atomic masses but retain similar chemical properties. Dr. Roberts saw their usefulness as labels to help organic chemists decipher the short-lived intermediaries between starting material and product.

“He worked out this quite mysterious and marvelous way of looking at things that are so ephemeral that you can’t see them,” Dr. Whitesides said. “It’s envisioning the invisible.”

Dr. Roberts also wrote about molecular orbital theory, which is one of the fundamental concepts within organic chemistry used for predicting where electrons in a molecule go.

“Jack is an absolute supreme educator,” said Jacqueline K. Barton, who leads the chemistry department at Caltech. “He didn’t come up with molecular orbital theory, but he could beautifully apply it, and explain it and teach us all about it.”

John Dombrowski Roberts was born on June 8, 1918, in Los Angeles. As a teenager he frequented science open houses at Caltech, and was fascinated by the chemistry experiments and electrical machines that shot sparks and blew up blocks of wood.

He took his love for chemistry to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he completed his undergraduate degree in 1941 and received a doctorate in 1944.

In 1945, he went to Harvard to begin a postdoctoral program, and then in 1946, he became a professor at M.I.T. Around this time, Dr. Roberts performed perhaps his most famous experiment, which produced the short-lived molecule benzyne, a form of the molecule benzene that contained a triple bond, which people at one time did not think could exist.

He left that position in 1953 to return to California for a job at Caltech, where Linus Pauling, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize twice, was the chemistry division chairman.

At Caltech, Dr. Roberts persuaded Dr. Pauling and the university’s board to buy a nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy machine, which was the first sold to a university.

Dr. Roberts won a number of awards for his contributions to chemistry, including the Priestley Medal in 1987 and the National Medal of Science in 1990. He wrote his autobiography, “The Right Place at the Right Time,” in 1990. He became a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2008 and a fellow of the American Chemical Society in 2009.

Besides his daughter, Anne, he is survived by three sons, Donald, John and Allen; nine grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. His wife of 68 years, Edith, died in 2010.

Dr. Roberts was well regarded as a mentor to budding chemists, especially to women.

When he was offered a position at Caltech in 1953, one of his graduate students, Dorothy Semenow, presented a problem. At that time, Caltech did not admit women, and there was fierce controversy over whether to let her in. But Dr. Roberts would not take the position without her.

“He spearheaded the campaign to get Caltech to admit women,” Dr. Semenow said. “He and Linus Pauling were very courageous in doing that.”

In recent years, Dr. Roberts said that bringing Dr. Semenow with him to Caltech was “clearly the best thing I have done at Caltech in the 60 years I have been here.”