John C. Polanyi Biography

John C. Polanyi, a pioneer in the field of reaction dynamics, made major contributions toward scientists' knowledge of the molecular mechanisms of chemical reactions. His work on the use of infrared chemiluminescence paved the way for the development of powerful chemical lasers. In recognition of his achievement, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1986.

Polanyi was born on January 23, 1929, in Berlin, Germany to Michael Polanyi, a chemistry professor, and Magda Elizabeth Kemeny Polanyi, both of Hungarian descent. Polanyi's family moved to Manchester, England, when he was four years old. There, his father took a position as professor of chemistry at Manchester University. Polanyi attended Manchester Grammar School as a child, and enrolled at Manchester University in 1946. That same year, his father stopped teaching chemistry and joined the university's philosophy department.

Polanyi's father had focused his research on the molecular basis of chemical reactions. Polanyi, who had taken his father's last chemistry classes, began to conduct his own chemistry research under the supervision of Ernest Warhurst , one of his father's former students. Where Warhurst, the senior Polanyi and their colleagues investigated the probability that a chemical reaction would result from a collision between molecules, the young Polanyi began to investigate the motions of the newly created reaction products.

Initially, Polanyi had been only marginally interested in science. As a student, he was more enthusiastic about politics, writing poetry, and newspaper editing. Eventually, however, he developed an interest in chemistry, especially "reaction dynamics ," as the study of molecular motions in chemical reactions would eventually be called. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1952, and then moved to Ottawa to conduct his postdoctoral work at Canada's National Research Council. There he attempted to determine whether the transition state theory of reaction rates, which his father had helped to develop, could predict the rates at which reactions would occur. He concluded that scientists had insufficient understanding of the forces in the transition state to accomplish this.

After two years in Ottawa, Polanyi worked for several months in the laboratory of Gerhard Herzberg, studying vibrational and rotational motions in molecular iodine. In 1954, he was invited by the chemist Hugh Stott Taylor to a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University. There, the research of Taylor's colleagues, Michael Boudart and David Garvin, impressed Polanyi. In their study of the vibrations produced when atomic hydrogen chemically reacted with ozone, the reaction emitted a visible glow. From this, Polanyi concluded that it should be possible to determine the vibrational and rotational excitation in newly- formed reaction products from the wavelengths of the infrared radiation arising from chemical reactions.

In 1956, Polanyi returned to Canada to take a position as lecturer in the chemistry department at the University of Toronto. He advanced to assistant professor in 1957, and to full professor in 1974. At the University of Toronto, Polanyi and graduate student Kenneth Cashion conducted experiments on the reaction of atomic hydrogen and molecular chlorine. The reaction emitted a faint infrared light "chemiluminescence." The study was significant because it suggested a way to obtain quantitative information, for the first time, concerning the vibrational and rotational energy released in chemical reactions. Polanyi's subsequent report, "An Infrared Maser Dependent on Vibrational Excitation," followed up on Arthur L. Schawlow' s and Charles Townes' 1958 proposal that light could be amplified by passing it through a medium containing highly excited atoms and molecules, a proposal that led to the development of the laser ( l ight a mplification by s timulated e mission of r adiation). Polanyi realized that products of the hydrogen-chlorine reaction--and similar chemical reactions--would provide a medium suitable for a laser--a chemical laser. His report, published in the Journal of Chemical Physics in September 1960, after its initial rejection by Physical Review Letters, paved the way for the University of California, Berkeley's George Pimentel to develop the chemical laser, one of the most powerful lasers that exist.

In 1986, Polanyi and two other scientists, Dudley R. Herschbach and Yuan T. Lee, shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their contributions to "the development of a new field of research in chemistry--reaction dynamics ." Polanyi was cited for his work on "the method of infrared chemiluminescence, in which the extremely weak infrared emission from a newly formed molecule is measured and analyzed." He was also recognized for his use of "this method to elucidate the detailed energy disposal during chemical reactions."

Polanyi's interests extended far beyond the laboratory. Beginning in the late 1950s, he became active in the arms control debate. In an article he'd written for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists after attending an arms control meeting in Moscow, he was struck by the "symmetry of fears" between the Soviets and Western powers that prompted the arms buildup as a precaution against surprise attacks. His concern as a scientist over "the mounting spiral of precaution, fear, increased precaution, increasing fear" led him to become the founding chairman of the Canadian Pugwash Group. He was also an active member of the American National Academy of Sciences' Committee on International Security Studies and the Canadian Center for Arms Control and Disarmament. In addition, he has given many lectures on the subject of arms control and has written approximately sixty articles on this topic.

Polanyi's contributions have been officially recognized by various quarters. His many honors and awards, in addition to the Nobel Prize, include the Marlow Medal of the Faraday Society, the Steacie Prize for the Natural Sciences, the Centennial Medal of the Chemical Society, the Remsen Award, and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of London. He has been awarded more than two dozen honorary degrees from universities in Canada and the United States, including Harvard University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In recognition of his accomplishments, the Canadian government appointed him an officer and, later, a companion of the Order of Canada and a member of the Privy Council. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society of London, he is a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American National Academy of Sciences, and belongs to the Pontifical Academy of Rome.

Polanyi married musician Anne Ferrar Davidson in 1958. The couple has two children. Although Polanyi is more knowledgeable about art, literature and poetry than music, he and his wife have collaborated in writing professionally performed skits, for which she wrote the music and he wrote the words. For relaxation, he enjoys skiing and walking; he no longer engages in the white water canoeing and aerobatics he enjoyed when he was younger.