Honoring a Nobel Laureate

Hauptman, president of Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute (HWI) and UB professor of structural biology, was the first mathematician to win the Nobel in chemistry.

On April 29, HWI will mark the 25th anniversary of Hauptman’s Nobel Prize with a commemorative event. Nearly 200 people, including donors, HWI board members and members of the UB and HWI scientific communities, are expected to attend.

The event will take place at 5 p.m. at HWI, 700 Ellicott St. on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, and will include a cocktail reception and presentation of a commemorative plaque to Hauptman’s wife, Edith.

Hauptman, who is 94 and has been slowed by Parkinson’s disease, will not attend.

Alexander N. Cartwright, PhD, UB vice president for research, will give a brief presentation during the program, which also will feature a performance by UB music students.

The cost is $50. For more information or to RSVP, call Jill Szczesek at 898-8597.

“I think it’ll be a very powerful event. People really love Herb,” says Eaton Lattman, PhD, HWI CEO and executive director. “It will be, I think, a wonderful moment to remember him and how he helped put the institute on the map in a huge way.”

Hauptman and Jerome Karle received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in October 1985 for their pioneering research in the 1940s and 1950s on the development of direct methods for determining the structure of crystalline solids, a crucial element in the creation of new drugs that treat a variety of diseases.

The direct methods approach has made it possible for researchers to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to determine that structure.

Lattman points out that while Hauptman was trained as a mathematician, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

“He won it for really solving a tough math problem, but it had huge practical implications,” he says.

Lattman explains that most of the pictures of molecules that students see in chemistry books are derived from experiments using a method called X-ray crystallography. When a beam of X-rays strikes a crystal, the beam is diffracted into numerous directions. The pattern of the diffracted rays is then plotted onto a film. But that’s only part of the equation.

“The problem is that the diffraction pattern registers only the intensity of the waves. To work back to the molecular structure, it’s necessary to also know the relative timing when each wave hits, called ‘phase data’—the position of the wave crests and troughs relative to each other,” according to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. “Without the phase data, it often takes years of painstaking trial-and-error work relying on informed intuition to hit on the right structure.”

While the process of X-ray crystallography had been around long before Hauptman’s research, his mathematical solution made the process so much easier. “What he did was to make it 10 times easier. It’s become a routine part of science,” Lattman says.

“I like to tell people that when I was in school they said atoms were too small to see. It surely wasn’t true then and it isn’t now, and he’s one of the people who’s made it easiest for us to see atoms and molecules.”

Edith Hauptman vividly recalls the excitement that day when her husband received word he has won the Nobel Prize. Although he had been nominated for the prize for a number of years, Hauptman did not believe he would one day receive the honor.

“That week in Stockholm was really exciting,” she says. “There were a lot of events connected with it, and we were treated beautifully.”

She recalls the pride she felt watching her husband accept the award. “It seemed like there were a million people at the banquet, and there he was, up there giving the talk, which was nice.”

Born in New York City in 1917, Hauptman received three math degrees: a bachelor’s from the City College of New York (1937), a master’s from Columbia University (1939) and a doctorate from the University of Maryland (1955).

He joined the crystallographic group of the Medical Foundation of Buffalo, now known as HWI, in 1970 and became its research director in  1972.