World of Scientific Discovery on Rudolph A. Marcus
Rudolph Arthur Marcus, the only son of Myer and Esther Cohen Marcus, was born on July 21, 1923, in Montreal, Canada. Marcus traced his interest in science to his high school years, when he explored mathematics and later chemistry. After graduating from high school, he attended McGill University, receiving his Bachelor of Science degree in 1943 and his doctorate in 1946. At McGill, he was supervised by Carl A. Winkler, who specialized in the rates of chemical reactions. Marcus's first work after McGill was in two research positions, one with the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada in Ottawa and the other at the University of North Carolina. At the NRC, he did experimental work under E. W. R. Steacie on free-radical reactions, which concern atoms or groups of atoms with unpaired valence electrons. While he was at the University of North Carolina, Marcus met Laura Hearne, a graduate student in sociology. They were married on August 27, 1949 and went on to have three sons: Alan Rudolph, Kenneth Hearne, and Raymond Arthur.
Marcus described his move to the United States as the beginning of his theoretical work. For the first three months at North Carolina he read everything he could find on reaction rate theory. After concentrating on a particular problem, he was able within several months to consolidate several theories from early statistical ideas developed in the 1920s and 1930s. What had been called the Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel (RRK) theory became the Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel-Marcus (RRKM) theory, published in the early 1950s. Attempting to explain observed differences in reaction rates, Marcus identified simple mathematical expressions to explain how the energy of a molecular system is affected by structural changes. Counterintuitive and highly controversial, his contribution to the RRKM theory of unimolecular reactions--which related molecular properties and the lifespan of transition states to reaction rates--was validated by experimental findings announced in 1985 by Gerhard L. Closs of the University of Chicago and John R. Miller of Argonn National Laboratory.
Marcus joined the staff of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, New York, as an assistant professor in 1951, eventually becoming the acting head of the division of physical chemistry, and a naturalized U.S. citizen. It was here that Marcus became an independent researcher. He experimented on gas phase and solution reaction rates at first, but a student brought his attention to a problem in polyelectrolytes. By 1960, Marcus felt he needed to commit his time completely to theoretical work.
While he was a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana from 1964 until 1978, Marcus concentrated his interest in electron-transfer and reaction dynamics. During these years, he extended his knowledge into astronomy, including classical mechanics, celestial mechanics, quasiperiodic motion, and chaos. In a year spent as a visiting professor at Oxford and Munich from 1975 to 1976, Marcus explored electron transfer in photosynthesis. In 1978, he accepted an offer from the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in Pasadena to become the Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry. At CalTech, Marcus was influenced by the work of his colleagues and returned to the RRKM theory to treat more complicated problems. This was a fertile association for Marcus, and more than half of his articles were published after he went to CalTech.
In recognition for his contributions to the theory of electron-transfer reactions in chemical systems, Marcus was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in chemistry. While the award was for work Marcus had done in the 1950s and 1960s, some controversy had surrounded his discoveries until they were validated in the 1980s. Marcus's theories of electron-transfer reactions in chemical have been applied extensively by other scientists in numerous areas. Several groups have used computer simulations in the study of electron transfer, employing his theory for the framework of their studies. One research group has been able to apply Marcus's theory to effects present in photosynthetic proteins. It was Marcus's ability to formulate a simple mathematical method for calculating the energy change that takes place in electron-transfer reactions that has made his work so valuable to other researchers. He was also able to find the driving force of the electron-transfer exchange.
Marcus has received many awards and honors other than the Nobel Prize, notably the Irving Langmuir Award in Chemical Physics in 1978, the Wolf Prize in 1985, and the Linus Pauling Award in 1991. Marcus has been an active member of scientific societies in his field and serves on the editorial boards of several scientific journals. He has lectured all over the world. Marcus's leisure interests include skiing, playing tennis, music, and history.
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