Jerome Karle

Origins and early life

Jerome Karle was born Jerome Karfunkle in Brooklyn, New York, on 18 June 1918, the son of Louis Karfunkle and Sadie Helen Kun, into a Jewish family with a strong interest in the arts. He grew up on Coney Island; his father's family came from near Kraków and his mother's from Georgia, and his mother, a pianist and organist, hoped he would become a concert pianist. He was fourteen in his final year at Abraham Lincoln High School, graduated from City College in 1937 alongside Herbert Hauptman, and took a master's degree in biology at Harvard in 1938.

Work and career

In Albany, for the New York State Health Department, he devised a way of measuring fluorine in drinking water that became a standard method. At the University of Michigan he met Isabella Lugoski on his first day of physical chemistry; they married in 1942, both took doctorates under Lawrence Brockway, and then worked on the Manhattan Project in Chicago. In 1946 the couple settled at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, where Karle and Hauptman showed how the phases lost in X-ray diffraction could be recovered from the measured intensities, in a monograph of 1953.

Many scientists did not believe a word of it, he later wrote, until Isabella Karle's symbolic addition procedure made these direct methods practical, and they went on to serve in work on drugs, hormones and antibiotics.

Recognition

In 1985 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Herbert Hauptman for their outstanding achievements in the development of direct methods for the determination of crystal structures. He founded the Laboratory for the Structure of Matter there in 1968, presided over the International Union of Crystallography from 1981 to 1984, and retired with Isabella in 2009. He died in Annandale, Virginia, on 6 June 2013, at the age of ninety-four, survived by Isabella and their three daughters, Louise, Jean and Madeleine.