Biographical Memoirs Volume 89 (2007) / Chapter Skim
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WALTER GORDY
WALTER GORDY
Pages 96-113
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From page 96... ...
Photograph by Whitley-Strawbridge Inc.
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From page 97... ...
His vision of the importance of the shorter wavelengths has come to fruition in the explosion of fields as varied and vital as interstellar radio astronomy and investigations of the most fundamental atomic and molecular interactions, as well as the current enthusiasm for the terahertz spectral region. Gordy also had the foresight to see the possibilities of applying microwave techniques to the study of biological problems and in doing so became one of the pioneers in biophysics.
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From page 98... ...
Crouch in the establishment of the Earle K Plyler Prize for molecular spectroscopy of the American Physical Society.
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From page 99... ...
During the summers, he traveled to the University of North Carolina and to Ohio State University, using their infrared spectroscopic facilities to pursue his interests in spectroscopic studies of hydrogen bonding. As a result of this work, he was awarded one of just two National Research Fellowships given in physics in 1941 and went to work with Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology.
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From page 100... ...
In 1962, when faced for the first time with the prospect of a female doctoral candidate (B.P.W.) , Gordy bravely proclaimed, "I've never had a girl graduate student before, but I'm willin' to try." Her introduction to the group was, "I want you to treat her like just one of the boys." Which they did, to her relief; but it was Gordy himself who reached to help her carry an oscilloscope one day.
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From page 101... ...
The harshest words I ever heard from Walter Gordy came after a long struggle about a particularly difficult point to his wife, "That may be good English, but it's damn poor physics! " Each manuscript evolved from Gordy's energetic
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From page 102... ...
He wrote impassioned letters about the job crisis for physics students in the early 1970s, not just because of the impact it had on the students who had committed their lives to physics but also because he knew that it would make it difficult to recruit students in the future, that this would damage the discipline of physics, and in doing so deprive society of the best that physics could offer. When Gordy, as a winner of the North Carolina Medal of Science, received a letter from the governor seeking his advice on the establishment of a residential high school
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From page 103... ...
Postdocs spread the expertise of the Gordy lab with lasting effect to Europe. In England, Italy, Germany, and Yugoslavia, laboratories were initiated by visitors in the 1950s and 1960s, which in the case of the latter three countries are still contributing significantly to millimeter wave spectroscopy and electron spin resonance studies.
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From page 104... ...
Gordy determined the hydrogen bond strength, which is related to the electrondonor property, through wave number shifts in infrared bands of many organic substances. At a time when we had less data than we do today, and the concept of the chemical bond was still under discussion, his formulation of the electronegativity scale of bonded atoms, based on force constants and internuclear distances, was a guiding concept for chemical physicists, and could be correlated with the corresponding work of Pauling and Mulliken.
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From page 105... ...
Early and often Gordy extolled the scientific reasons for his drive toward shorter wavelengths and the complimentary technical attributes of nonlinear harmonic generation as an energy source in this spectral region: 1. Molecular absorption coefficients increase very rapidly with frequency, and the generation of even small amounts of microwave power result in very sensitive experiments.
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From page 106... ...
This last attribute -- combined with the widespread adoption of the harmonic generation technique -- has led to a golden age in the application of submillimeter wave spectroscopy. The molecules in our atmosphere and in interstellar space are precisely those that have been or can be studied and monitored with microwave and millimeter wave techniques.
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From page 107... ...
He always thinks of a new type of experiment before we have been remotely able to explore the possibilities in his last experiment." Exploiting his laboratory's microwave expertise in 1955, Gordy pioneered the use of electron spin resonance -- a brandnew technique that he had just begun to explore -- for the study of radiation effects on biological substances. He led in this field with studies of amino acids, and did not shy away from proteins, DNA and RNA, and animal tissue.
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From page 108... ...
His laboratory also became infamous in the physics department at Duke because his students had to go to the local slaughterhouse for fresh bone, horn, and assorted bovine and poultry tissue. After the surprising identification of a hydrogen addition radical in thymidine, Gordy and his coworkers explored observations of the electron spin resonance of free radicals produced in powdered samples of the nucleic acids and their constituents that had been bombarded by hydrogen atoms.
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From page 109... ...
Similarly, he reveled in the unknown possibilities in the applications of electron spin resonance to complex biological systems, the aesthetic antithesis of the discreet millimeter wave spectroscopy of gases. Both fields are active today, 50 years later, with new technological tools and broader applications.
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From page 110... ...
Submillimeter wave spectroscopy.
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From page 111... ...
196:46-53. 1958 Electron spin resonance in the study of radiation damage.
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From page 112... ...
1980 Theory and Applications of Electron Spin Resonance. Techniques of Chemistry XV .
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