Herbert C. Brown opened an entirely new field of chemistry for study with his discovery of the organoboranes (an important chemical compound). Much of Brown's career has focused on the investigation of boron reagents, molecules that can temporarily link larger molecules together during a reaction. Because these boron-based molecules are highly active, they can foster chemical reactions that had previously been unachievable; they have become valuable in organic chemistry and in the manufacture of synthetics and pharmaceuticals. A professor at Purdue University, Brown received the 1979 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Herbert Charles Brown was born in London on May 22, 1912. His parents, Charles Brovarnik and Pearl Gorinstein Brovarnik, were Ukranian Jews who had emigrated to London in 1908. Brown's paternal grandparents had already settled in Chicago and anglicized their surname to Brown; when his family arrived in Chicago in 1914 they followed suit. The only son, Herbert was the second of four children. Charles Brown had been a cabinetmaker in England and worked in the United States as a carpenter. He opened a hardware store in 1920, and the family lived upstairs. After his father died in 1926 of an infection, Herbert dropped out of high school to run the store and support the family. Returning to high school in 1929, he completed two years of work in one year to graduate in 1930.
After the hardware store failed, Brown worked as a shoe salesman and packer of notebook paper and belts, which strengthened his resolve to return to school. In February 1933 he entered Crane Junior College in Chicago. There he met Sarah Baylen, his future wife. The Depression forced Crane, like many other city colleges, to close. Brown worked odd jobs and took classes at Lewis Institute. Both Sarah and Brown attended Wright Junior College in 1934, graduating in 1935. Brown then won a partial scholarship to the University of Chicago. Because the tuition (and the scholarship) amounted to one hundred dollars per semester with no course limit, Brown loaded himself down with course work. Once again, he completed two years of work in one year, working with the noted chemist H. I. Schlesinger to investigate diborane--a rare but excellent reagent that could at the time be produced only in small quantities. In 1936 Brown's graduation gift was a copy of Alfred Stock's The Hydrides of Boron and Silicon, prophetically inscribed by his wife "to the future Nobel Prize winner."
Brown intended to find a job in industry after graduation, but his mentor Julius Stieglitz convinced him to go on to graduate school at the university. Again working with Schlesinger, Brown investigated the reactions of diborane with carbonyl compounds (molecules containing a carbon-oxygen double bond), and received his Ph.D. in 1938. Brown and Sarah married while he was in graduate school. Their son, Charles, became a chemist.
Brown remained at the University of Chicago on a one-year postdoctoral fellowship with M. S. Kharasch, one of his mentors; he then became assistant to Schlesinger in his study of the borohydrides. In 1940 the National Defense Research Committee approached the researchers and asked them to search for volatile uranium compounds that could be used to produce the pure uranium needed for the atomic bomb. They used diborane to create uranium borohydride, but the process of preparing diborane was so slow and difficult that they sought a new method. They succeeded in preparing diborane by reacting lithium or sodium hydride with boron trihalides, but by then the war department had obtained what it needed from other sources. Their efforts had not, however, been in vain. Not only did Brown's group discover a new way to create what had been a rare and expensive compound, but they also discovered a new reagent, sodium borohydride, which was to become an important reducing agent, or electron donor, in organic chemistry.
Brown left the University of Chicago in 1943 for a position as assistant professor of chemistry at Wayne (later Wayne State) University in Detroit. Much of his research during his four years at Wayne focused on steric strains, the deviations of the bond angles of a molecule from their norms. He showed that these angles could have as much effect on how a compound reacts as could the constituent atoms' electrical charges.
In 1947 he became a full professor at Purdue University in Indiana. There he experimented with adding diboranes to carbon-carbon double bonds, and accidentally discovered that a process called hydroboration permitted rapid and easy conversion to organoboranes. Subsequent work with these compounds showed them to be of substantial utility in synthetic chemistry, particularly as intermediaries, or temporary links, in the creation of new carbon-carbon bonds. Brown has often compared the investigation of the organoboranes to the discovery of a new continent. As he told Malcolm Brown in the New York Times, "I feel that we have uncovered a new continent, just beginning to explore its mountain ranges and valleys. But it will take another generation of chemists to fully explore and apply this new chemistry of boron hydrides and organoboranes."
For his work with boron reagents Brown shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Georg Wittig of West Germany. In addition, he has received the Linus Pauling Medal in 1968, the National Medal of Science in 1969, the American Chemical Society's Award in Synthetic Organic Chemistry in 1960, the Chemistry Pioneer Award in 1974, the Priestly Medal in 1981, and the Perkin Medal in 1982.
In the course of his career, Brown has written over seven hundred scientific papers and four books and influenced countless students and colleagues with his thoroughness. In the January 1980 issue of Science, James Brewster and Ei-ichi Negishi noted, "Brown has been almost religious in resisting facile conclusions and has thereby succeeded in avoiding erroneous ones. Some of his most significant discoveries and developments have resulted from a dogged, logical pursuit of the kind of everyday chemical puzzle that many would dismiss with a glib rationalization."
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