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Donald J. Cram – Autobiography
The beginning is
distant, and was a time when we as a people were without much of the
fruits of science that now refine our lives. But it was also a good
time, when family and town were the domain of our existence. My
father of Scottish, and mother of German extraction, migrated with
their three children from Ontario, Canada, to rural Chester,
Vermont, USA, where I was born in the spring of 1919, as the Cram's
fourth and only male child. Two years later, the family moved to
Brattleboro, Vermont.
My mother, Joanna, was high-spirited
throughout her 94 years, starting with a girlhood rebellion against
the strict Mennonite faith in which she was raised. My father,
William, was a romantic, a cavalry officer, later working
alternately as a successful lawyer and unsuccessful farmer. He died
of pneumonia at 53, leaving my mother with a set of Victorian
upper-class English values, and the task of providing for and
raising my sisters and me, then aged four.
According to my
oldest sister, Elizabeth, I was as a child precocious, curious, and
constantly in, or causing, trouble. This character trait started at
birth; I weighed over ten pounds, and had an unusually large head!
Determined to walk at seven months, I pulled a pan of fresh eggs
down from a table onto that head. At three years, I broke my first
window. My father took me directly to our neighbor, Mr. Mason, to
apologize. Reputedly, I said to him, "Sorry, you nasty
Mason".
By the time I was four and a half, I was reading
children's books. My mother, steeped in English literature,
cultivated incentive by reading to me only the beginnings of
tales that involved heroes, heroines, hypocrites, and villains. When
we reached the exciting part, she left me with the story to finish
by myself. My childhood was adventuresome and idyllic in the things
that mattered.
Elementary schooling for me was series of
multiclass single-room buildings, where the young and very young
witnessed each other being taught. On report card days, I faced
searching questions and criticism during which "character grades"
were stressed over academic accomplishments. I usually was marked
"A" in attitude and accomplishment, "B" in effort, and "C" in
obedience.
What I call my real education occurred
principally outside of the classroom, in a private world of books
and brooks. All of Dickens, Kipling, Scott, Shaw, and much of
Shakespeare were read. I learned how to run up spring-fed brooks,
jumping from one glacier-polished stone to another. I carried
firewood, emptied ashes, and shoveled snow for music lessons. I
picked apples to be paid in apples, strawberries to be paid in
strawberries; and I moved the lawns of a large estate belonging to
the dentist who filled my cavities and pulled my teeth.
The
rate of exchange of my time for his was fifty to one. During the
Christmas rush, I sold ties, shirts, shoes, gloves, and jackets in
return for the same. By the time I was fourteen, my mother's barter
arrangements were replaced by a flat fee of 15 cents an hour working
for neighbors, raking leaves, hoeing corn, digging potatoes,
pitching hay, and delivering newspapers. The last job taught me
about debts, dogs, and bicycle bags.
At sixteen, I left my
home in Brattleboro, Vermont, a handsome old town on the Connecticut
River. By then I had learned how to adapt to eighteen different
employers, and had played high school varsity tennis, football, and
ice hockey. I also had my full growth of 195 pounds, and was 6 feet
tall. My family dispersed at that time, and I drove two elderly
ladies to Florida in a Model-A Ford, without benefit of a license,
and in return for transportation. Stopping at Lake Worth, Florida, I
worked in an ice-cream shop and weeded lawns in return for room and
board. There, I continued my secondary schooling while suffering an
acute case of homesickness for New England. Nine months later, I
hitchhiked north again to Massachusetts, and passed the summer as a
house painter and roofer. My twelfth grade was spent at Winwood, a
little private school on Long Island, New York, working as a
factotum for my tuition and board. While there, I did three things
significant to my future. I took a course in chemistry, taught
myself solid geometry from a book, and won a $6,000 four-year
National Rollins College Honor Scholarship.
While at Rollins,
in the resort town of Winter Park, Florida, I worked at chemistry
and played at philosophy (four courses!). I read Dostoevski,
Spengler, and Tolstoy, and sang in the choir and in a barbershop
quartet. In four halcyon years, I obtained an airplane pilot's
license, acted in plays, produced-announced a minor radio program,
and, while my fellow students complained, dined on the best food I
had yet encountered.
During the summers of 1938 to 1941, I
worked for the National Biscuit Company in New York City, at first
as a salesman covering an area from 144th Street to 78th Street on
the tough East Side. The largest city in the country was also its
best teacher. This was my first exposure to ghetto slums, youth gang
warfare, drugs, prostitution, and petty thievery. The northern end
of my territory was dominated by Jewish delicatessens, out of which
at first (but not later) I was urged to leave. I got to know
everybody, and everybody's business. In the Irish-run grocery
stores, we would conduct "wakes" for the last fig bar in the bin.
Harlem was a place where each street was a playground, and each
store a small fort. The Puerto Rican district was full of street
vendors of all sorts. I started that summer weighing 195 pounds, and
ended it at 155. My $ 15 per week provided me with cash, and a crash
course in ethnic groups and big city street-life. The other summers
involved analyzing cheeses for moisture and fat content in the
National Biscuit Laboratories.
From these routine jobs, I
extracted pleasure by making them into games. They taught me
self-discipline, and illustrated how I did not want to spend my
life. But this period provided me with a keen interest in the
differences between people, and an overwhelming dislike of
repetitive activities. When the word "research" entered my
vocabulary, it had a magic ring, suggesting the search for new
phenomena. Chemical research became my god, and the conducting of
it, my act of prayer, from 1938 to the present. When told by my
first college chemistry professor, Dr. Guy Waddington, that he
thought I would make a good industrial investigator - but probably
not a good academic one - I determined upon an academic research
career in chemistry.
Out of 17 applications for teaching
assistantships to go to graduate school, three offers came. I
accepted the University of Nebraska's, where an MS was granted
in 1942. My thesis research there was done under the supervision of
Dr. Norman O. Cromwell. By then, World War II was upon us, so I went
to work for Merck & Co., ultimately on their penicillin project,
where my search for excellence was symbolized by Dr. Max Tishler.
Immediately after the war ended in 1945, Max arranged for me to
attend Harvard
University, working for Professor L.F. Fieser. The work for my
Ph.D. degree on a National Research Council Fellowship was in hand
in eighteen months.
At Harvard, scientific excellence was
personified for me by Professors Paul D. Bartlett and Robert B.
Woodward. After three months at M.I.T., working for Professor John
D. Roberts, I set out for the University of California at Los
Angeles on August 1, 1947, and have taught and researched there ever
since, after 1985 as the S. Winstein Professor of
Chemistry.
In retrospect, I judge that my father's death
early in my life forced me to construct a model for my character
composed of pieces taken from many different individuals, some being
people I studied, and others lifted from books. The late Professor
Saul Winstein, my colleague, friend, and competitor, contributed
much to this model. It was almost complete by the time I was 35
years of age. Thus, through the early death of my father, I had an
opportunity - indeed the necessity - to animate that father image
that was slowly maturing in my mind's eye. And, at last, I realized
who in fact this figure was. It was I.
The times and
environment have been very good to me during my forty-six years of
chemical research. I entered the profession at a period when
physical, organic, and biochemistry were being integrated, when new
spectroscopic windows on chemical structures were being opened, and
when UCLA, a fine new university campus, was growing from a
provincial to a world-class institution. My over 200 co-workers have
shared with me the miseries of many failures and the pleasures of
some triumphs. Their careers are my finest monument. My countrymen
have supported our research without mandating its character. Jean
Turner Cram, as my first wife, sacrificed for my career from 1940 to
1968. Dr. Jane Maxwell Cram, my second wife, acted as foil,
unsparing but inspiring critic and research strategist in ways
beyond mention.
My fellow scientists have generously honored
my research program with three American Chemical Society awards: for
Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry; the Arthur C. Cope
Award for Distinguished Achievement in Organic Chemistry; and the
Roger Adams Award in Organic Chemistry. Local sections of the same
society awarded me the Willard Gibbs and Tolman Medals. I was
elected to membership in the National Academy of Science (1961), to become the
1974 California Scientist of the Year, and the 1976 Chemistry
Lecturer and Medalist of the Royal Institute of Chemistry (UK). In
1977, I was given an Honorary Doctor's degree from Sweden's Uppsala
University, and in 1983 a similar one from the University of Southern
California.
I have contributed directly to the teaching
of organic chemistry-about 12,000 undergraduate students-and,
indirectly, by writing three textbooks: Organic Chemistry (with G.S.
Hammond; translated into twelve languages), Elements of Organic
Chemistry (with D.H. Richards and G. S. Hammond; three
translations), and Essence of Organic Chemistry (with J.M. Cram; one
translation), plus the monograph, "Fundamentals of Carbanion
Chemistry" (one translation). I enjoy skiing and surfboarding,
playing tennis, and playing the guitar as an accompaniment to my
singing folk songs. The award of a Nobel Prize at the age of 68
years was ideally timed to enhance rather than divert my research
career.
In the four years that have elapsed since I shared a
Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1987), the effect of receiving this honor
on my life has been profound. Most importantly, the Prize has
extended my career by enough years to allow me to obtain the most
exciting results of my 50 years of carrying out research. The Prize
has also broadened the range of my experiences, most of which have
been both interesting and educational. Finally, the research field
of molecular recognition in organic chemistry gained much impetus by
being recognized by the Nobel Prize. I am grateful that our research
results were chosen as a vehicle for honoring those who know the
joys of carrying out organic chemical research.
From
Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1987,
Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1988
This autobiography/biography
was written at the time of the award and later published in the book
series Les
Prix Nobel/Nobel
Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an
addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always
state the source as shown above.
For more updated biographical information,
see: Cram, Donald J., From Design to Discovery. Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2001.
Donald J. Cram died on June 17, 2001.
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