Isabella L. Karle, chemist who helped reveal structure of molecules, dies at 95
She made incredible advances in science
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Emily Langer.
Isabella L. Karle, who was once told that chemistry was not a “proper field for girls” but went on to help her husband, Nobel laureate Jerome Karle, devise a pathbreaking method for determining molecular structure, died Oct. 3 at a hospice center in Arlington, Va. She was 95.
The cause was a brain tumor, said her daughter Louise Karle Hanson. Dr. Karle spent more than six decades at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., with her husband.
Her biography
- Isabella Helen Lugoski was born in Detroit on Dec. 2, 1921.
- In her youth, the future Dr. Karle drew inspiration, her daughter said, from a female high school chemistry teacher and from a biography of Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who, like Dr. Karle’s parents, was born in what is now Poland.
- A teacher once advised her on the impropriety of chemistry as a topic of study for young women.
- She received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Michigan in 1941.
- Dr. Karle earned a master’s degree in 1942 and a PhD in 1944.
- She met her husband in a physical-chemistry lab where alphabetical seating dictated that the two of them — Karle, Lugoski — would sit next to one another.
- During World War II, she worked on the Manhattan Project.
- Dr. Karle joined the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in 1946, two years after her husband was hired there.
- Early in her career, she studied molecules in the vapor state.
- Both Karles retired in 2009.
Her honors
The late chemist’s honors included:
- 1988 Gregori Aminoff Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
- 1993 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science (worth $250,000)
- Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award
- 1995 National Medal of Science, bestowed by President Bill Clinton
She was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Her work
The Karles worked side by side at the NRL’s Laboratory for the Structure of Matter, accumulating a combined 127 years of federal service.
“I do the physical applications, he works with the theoretical,” she once told The Washington Post. “It makes a good team. Science requires both types.”
Jerome Karle shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in chemistry with the mathematician Herbert A. Hauptman, also a colleague at the NRL, honoring “their outstanding achievements in the development of direct methods for the determination of crystal structures.”
Molecular structure
Before the prize-winning work that the Karles pursued with Hauptman in the 1950s, scientists could discern molecular structure only through the time-consuming and painstaking process of X-ray crystallography, in which X-rays were reflected off a molecule and their patterns then examined.
The Karles’ “direct method” permitted scientists to use mathematics to discover molecular structure via a less circuitous route, saving time and gaining precision.
For many years, the method languished, unnoticed by other scientists.
“It was Isabella’s work that drew attention to its usefulness,” according to a tribute to the couple by the NRL, which credited her with preparing the way for “the analysis and publication of the molecular structures of many thousands of complicated molecules annually.”
Among those molecules were toxins and antitoxins; drugs to treat bacterial infections, malaria and heart ailments; anticarcinogens; and explosives.
“It is almost impossible to give an example in the field of chemistry where this method is not being used,” a judge for the Nobel Prize remarked when Jerome Karle’s award was announced.
When Jerome Karle received the Nobel, he said he hoped the honor would one day be extended also to Isabella.
“I can’t think of anyone,” he told the Associated Press, “who is more qualified than my wife.”
Family legacy
Jerome Karle later died in 2013 after 71 years of marriage.
The couple is survived by their three daughters, who are all scientists, Louise Karle Hanson of Ridge, N.Y., Jean Karle Dean of Vienna, Va., and Madeleine Karle Tawney of Lake Barcroft; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
