Donald Glaser

Origins and early life

Donald Arthur Glaser was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 21 September 1926, the son of William Glaser, a businessman, and of his wife Lena, who had both come to the United States as children from the south of the Russian Empire, in today's Ukraine.

Work and career

They had left, he later said, because there were pogroms against Jews, and when he won the Nobel Prize the Jewish Telegraphic Agency described him as a Jewish scientist and a regular contributor to the United Jewish Appeal. A viola player with the Cleveland Philharmonic, he graduated in physics and mathematics from the Case School of Applied Science in 1946, then studied cosmic rays under Carl Anderson at Caltech. In 1949 he began teaching at the University of Michigan, and in 1952, seeking a faster way to record short-lived particles, he built the first bubble chamber, a small vessel of superheated ether in which a charged particle leaves a trail of bubbles to be photographed.

The popular story that the idea came over a glass of beer was, he said, totally wrong; with colleagues in Chicago he then showed that liquid hydrogen would work, and such chambers let physicists see what happened to the beams of the accelerators.

Recognition

He moved to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959, and in 1960, at thirty-four, received the whole of the Nobel Prize in Physics, for the invention of the bubble chamber. From 1962 he turned to molecular biology, showing with his students how certain mutations make cells so sensitive to ultraviolet light that they can turn cancerous, the same defect behind the human disease xeroderma pigmentosum. In 1971 he and two friends founded Cetus, the first biotechnology company, and he later moved on to neurobiology, building computer models of human vision to study how we perceive motion and depth. He died in his sleep at his home in Berkeley on 28 February 2013, at the age of eighty-six.