Biography of michael jackson book
Donald J. Cram, a leading scientist and teacher at UCLA for 54 years, died of cancer at his home in Palm Desert on June 27, ; he was Don was a pivotal figure in the development of the UCLA Chemistry and Biochemistry Department. He was one of the leading organic chemists of his generation, and he held himself and others to the highest standards throughout his career.
Don was born in semi-rural Vermont in His father died when he was four, and he was brought up by his mother, who read to him from an early age.
He developed an interest in Chemistry as early as twelfth grade, and he experienced numerous part-time jobs while growing up. After receiving his B. S. degree from Rollins College in Florida in and an M. S. from the University of Nebraska in , he worked on the chemistry of penicillin as a Research Chemist at Merck & Co. from to After the war he became a student of Louis Fieser at Harvard and received his Ph.D.
Donald j cram biography of michael jackson Palm Desert, California, 17 June , physical organic chemistry. As a young adult, Cram became enamored of research in chemistry. In the aftermath of World War II , he thrived in the new style of American science: he led a large group of graduate students and postdoctoral associates at the University of California at Los Angeles UCLA ; applied successfully for grants from funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation ; and mastered the new instrumentation, such as nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectrometry. He saw chemistry as an artistic endeavor, heeding the structural lessons offered by natural products in order to improve upon nature. His devising of inclusion complexes for both ground states equilibrium and transition states catalysis won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for jointly with Charles J.in
After a short postdoctoral fellowship at MIT with John D. Roberts (UCLA graduate now at Caltech) as an American Chemical Society (ACS) fellow, Don joined the UCLA faculty in as an instructor. Cram’s quest for excellence as a scholar during these formative years was nurtured at the feet of organic chemistry masters like Tishler, Bartlett, Woodward, Roberts, and, most important, by Saul Winstein, his esteemed colleague, friend, and competitor at UCLA until Saul’s untimely death in
Cram was promoted to full professor in During his career at UCLA he taught organic chemistry to tens of thousands of undergraduates.
His textbook (with George Hammond) caused a revolution in the teaching of organic chemistry. He mentored about Ph.D. students and postdoctorals and authored more than papers and seven books.
Donald j cram biography of michael jackson for kids To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. To browse Academia. The biography of Donald J. Cram details his influential career as a researcher and educator in physical organic chemistry. His collaboration with Saul Winstein and innovative teaching methods transformed organic chemistry education, advocating for an emphasis on mechanisms rather than rote memorization of reactions.For the last 25 years of his career, Cram’s research discoveries created the field of host-guest chemistry, and he won the Nobel Prize for this work which he shared with Charles Pedersen and Jean-Marie Lehn. Host-guest chemistry had its roots in Pedersen’s crown ethers and it was also inspired by a desire to mimic Nature’s catalysts, the enzymes.
Cram turned his flair for design and synthesis more and more to the abstract and produced a vast array of container molecules, inventing a whole new language with words such as spherands, cavitands, and carcerands to describe them.
Before the host-guest era, Don made major contributions to the chemistry of phenonium ions, asymmetric induction (“Cram’s Rule” is a foundation of this area; Cram’s rule of on asymmetric induction represents one of the early milestones in the establishment of asymmetric synthesis and catalysis, the cornerstones of many of today’s triumphs in the pharmaceutical industry), carbanions, paracyclophanes, and the use of stereochemistry for elucidating reaction mechanisms.
His achievements in any one of these areas would have constituted a successful career for most chemists.
Don was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in , received the ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry in and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in In he received the ACS Cope Award for Distinguished Achievement in Organic Chemistry and was named California Scientist of the Year.
He received the Southern California ACS Tolman Award and the Chicago Section ACS Gibbs Medal in and was named the first holder of the Saul Winstein Chair in Organic Chemistry in the same year. He received the American Chemical Society’s top award in organic chemistry, the Roger Adams Award, in
“Container Molecules and their Guests” is a monograph he wrote with his second wife, Jane.
Donald j cram biography of michael jackson life
Professor Cram's early research was in physical organic chemistry, where his notable contributions included the structure and intermediacy of phenonium ions in solvolysis reactions, the stereochemistry of carbanions in he wrote a monograph "Fundamentals of Carbanion Chemistry , and the stereochemistry of carbonyl addition reactions Cram's Rule. But it was for his work on chiral crown ethers and the synthesis of multiheteromacrocycles with cavities shaped to complex selected species that he shared with J-M. Lehn and C. Pedersen the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Cram called this area "host-guest" chemistry.She, along with synthetic chemist, Roger Helgeson, X-ray crystallographers, Ken Trueblood, Emily Maverick, and Carolyn Knobler, along with his assistant and artist, June Hendrix, formed a team that collaborated to turn Cram’s inspirations into realities. He was named University Professor in and received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Chemical Sciences in He received the National Medal of Science from President Clinton in “He truly brought art to science by making his science an art,” concludes the citation on the medal.
Don held honorary degrees from Uppsala University, Sweden (), the University of Southern California (), Rollins College (), the University of Nebraska (), the University of Western Ontario, Canada (), and from the University of Sheffield, U.K. ().
Don was an avid reader of both classical and current literature.
He was a surfer (he belonged to the San Onofre Surfing Club “Old Guys”), a tennis player, and a skier, and his competitive spirit was on display in each of these activities. He also liked to sing folk songs and accompany himself on the guitar, which he often did for large classes of undergraduate organic chemistry students.
When he died, Cram endowed a Chair, the D.J.
and J.M. Cram Chair of Organic Chemistry, which is used to attract and support an outstanding organic chemist to the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA.
K. N. Houk