Lipscomb, himself a protege of two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, died Thursday night at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of pneumonia and complications from a fall, said his son, James Lipscomb.
Two of William Lipscomb’s graduate students and a third who spent time at his lab went on to win Nobels. Yale University professor Thomas Steitz, who shared the 2009 chemistry prize, recalled Lipscomb as an inspiring teacher who encouraged creative thinking.
Said Lipscomb’s first graduate student at Harvard, Roald Hoffman, who was awarded the chemistry prize in 1981: “He was a great mentor, letting us work freely, yet continually putting before us puzzles to be explained.” “From him I learned of the importance of paying attention to experiment for a theoretician (as I was). And not to be afraid of the complexity of the real world,” Hoffman, who now teaches at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, told The Associated Press by e-mail.
Lipscomb was awarded the Nobel for his studies on the structure and bonding mechanisms of compounds known as “boranes,” a combination of boron and hydrogen molecules.
He continued Pauling’s work in the 1940s at the California Institute of Technology.
His lab made some of the earliest advances in discovering the structures of large proteins and other complex molecules, including the anticancer agent vincristine.
“This was at the very beginning understanding how enzymes worked in terms of their structures,” Steitz said. “That was in a year when nothing was known about how enzymes worked in three-dimensional chemistry, and this was one of the early pivotal structures — one of the first three.” Lipscomb was born in Ohio and grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. He graduated from the University of Kentucky and served for four years in the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during WWII. He got a doctorate at Caltech under the direction of Pauling, the only person to win two individual Nobels (chemistry in 1954 and peace in 1962).
Lipscomb taught at the University of Minnesota for about 13 years before moving to Harvard, where he taught until he reached the school’s mandatory retirement age of 70.
Lipscomb encouraged students not to fear the risk of exploring solutions to scientific problems, Steitz told the AP.
“He got me into working on the crystal structures of macro molecules — that was the general area in which I received the Nobel Prize in chemistry,” Steitz said.
Another student was Israel’s Ada E. Yonath, who shared the prize with Steitz. Yonath was a postdoctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when she spent some time in Lipscomb’s lab at Harvard and was inspired to pursue studies that eventually led to the award.
Lipscomb had little quirks, including a penchant to wear a Kentucky string tie at formal events, instead of a regular tie, former students and relatives recalled.
He had a keen sense of humor and never shied away from making jokes at his own expense. That included acting in a humorous opera to help honor the strange and comical side of science at the Ig Nobels ceremony. The annual event regularly featured Lipscomb and other Nobel Laureates handing out the Ig Nobels, awards given out by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine for unusual and imaginative scientific discovery.
“He was also a superb musician, a professional-level clarinet player,” Hoffman said.
“The first time I heard him was when he invited some of us to come over to his house to meet a famous pianist visiting town and he said he would bring some of his friends from the Boston Symphony together and they were going to do chamber music in the living room,” Steitz said. “It was fabulous.” Lipscomb, son of a physician, developed an interest in science at a young age. By 12, he had acquired a small Gilbert chemistry set that he set about expanding partly by ordering apparatuses and chemicals from suppliers and partly by using his father’s privilege to purchase chemicals at the local drugstore at a discount.
“Of course, I made my own fireworks, and entertained both willing and unwilling visitors with spectacular color changes, vile odors, and explosions with pure hydrogen and oxygen,” Lipscomb wrote in an autobiographical sketch in “Structures and Mechanisms: From Ashes to Enzymes (Acs Symposium Series,)” authored by Gareth R. Eaton, Don C.
Wiley and Oleg Jardetzky.
“My tolerant, but concerned mother raised questions only once, when I attempted to isolate a large amount of urea from the natural product.” Lipscomb remained hungry for big advances in science throughout his career.
Steitz said: “I remember Lipscomb saying to me when I was in the lab that, ‘Linus Pauling told me that if you never make a mistake, you will never make an important discovery — not that you would want to make a lot of mistakes, but the point is if you want to be in the cutting edge of science you occasionally have to get it wrong and, of course, you have to get it right.”’ Lipscomb is survived by his wife and three children.
Lipscomb was humble and exhibited his characteristic self-deprecating humor even after being awarded the Nobel.
“He said something like ‘I knew that I’d written a lot of good papers, but I didn’t know that anyone had read them,”’ his son said.
