338
FREDERICK SANGER
1918–2013
British biochemist Frederick Sanger
is one of four scientists to have
won two Nobel prizes, both
in Chemistry. He won his first
prize in 1958 for determining the
sequence of amino acids that make
up the protein insulin. Sanger’s
work on insulin provided a key to
understanding the way that DNA
codes for making proteins, by
showing that each protein has its
own unique sequence of amino
acids. Sanger’s second prize was
awarded in 1980 for his later work
sequencing DNA. Sanger’s team
sequenced human mitochondrial
DNA—a set of 37 genes found on
mitochondria that is inherited
only from the mother. The Sanger
Institute, now one of the world’s
leading centers of genomic
research, was established in
his honor near his home in
Cambridgeshire, Britain.
See also: James Watson
and Francis Crick 276–83 ■
Craig Venter 324–25
MARVIN MINSKY
1927–
American mathematician and
cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky
was an early pioneer in artificial
intelligence, co-founding in
1959 the AI laboratory at the
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), where he spent
the rest of his career. His work
focused on the generation of
neural networks—artificial “brains”
that can develop and learn from
experience. In the 1970s, Minsky
and his colleague Seymour Papert
developed the “Society of Mind”
theory of intelligence, investigating
the way in which intelligence can
emerge from a system made solely
of nonintelligent parts. Minsky
defines AI as “the science of
making machines do things that
would require intelligence if done
by men.” He was an advisor on the
film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and
has speculated as to the possibility
of extraterrestrial intelligence.
See also: Alan Turing 252–53 ■
Donald Michie 286–91MARTIN KARPLUS
1930–Increasingly, modern science is
conducted using computers to
model results. In 1974, American-
Austrian theoretical chemist
Martin Karplus and his colleague,
American-Israeli Arieh Warshel,
produced a computer model of the
complex molecule retinal, which
changes shape when exposed to
light and is crucial to the working
of the eye. Karplus and Warshel
used both classical physics and
quantum mechanics to model the
behavior of electrons in the retinal
molecule. Their model greatly
improved the sophistication and
accuracy of computer modeling for
complex chemical systems. Karplus
and Warshel shared the 2013 Nobel
Prize in Chemistry with British
chemist Michael Levitt for their
achievement in this field.
See also: Augus Kekulé 160–65 ■
Linus Pauling 254–59ROGER PENROSE
1931–In 1969, British mathematician
Roger Penrose collaborated with
physicist Stephen Hawking toshow how matter in a black hole
collapses into a singularity.
Penrose subsequently worked
out the mathematics to describe
the effects of gravity on the
space-time surrounding a black
hole. Penrose has turned his
attention to a wide range of
topics, proposing a theory
of consciousness based on
quantum mechanical effects
operating at a subatomic level in
the brain, and more recently a
theory of a cyclic cosmology, in
which the heat death (end state) of
one universe becomes the Big Bang
of another, in an endless cycle.
See also: Georges Lemaître
242–45 ■ Subrahmanyan
Chandrasekhar 248 ■
Stephen Hawking 314FRANÇOIS ENGLERT
1932–In 2013, Belgian physicist
François Englert shared the
Nobel Prize in Physics with Peter
Higgs for independently proposing
what is now known as the Higgs
field, which gives fundamental
particles their mass. Working
with fellow Belgian Robert Brout,
Englert first suggested in 1964
that “empty” space might contain
a field that confers mass to matter.
The Nobel Prize was awarded as
a result of the detection in 2012
at CERN of the Higgs boson—
the particle associated with the
Higgs field—which confirmed
Englert, Brout, and Higgs’
predictions. Brout had died
in 2011, and so missed out on
the Nobel Prize, which is not
awarded posthumously.
See also: Sheldon Glashow
292–93 ■ Peter Higgs 298–99 ■
Murray Gell-Mann 302–07DIRECTORY