Olah, George Andrew (1927-2017), a Hungarian-born American chemist, won the 1994 Nobel Prize for chemistry. He was awarded the prize for his work on carbocations << kahr boh KAT eye uhnz >> , a class of carbon-containing molecules that exist only fleetingly in the course of a reaction. Olah learned how to prolong their lives and discovered much about their structure and behavior. His work led to many patents for novel processes, many of them involving the improvement of fuels.
Olah was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 22, 1927. Although his main interests were in the humanities, he entered the Technical University of Budapest to study chemistry. He believed that a career in this subject could best help him to cope with the difficulties of life in Hungary immediately after the devastation of World War II (1939-1945). Olah took up postgraduate research, following unorthodox lines of research with the element fluorine, a gas that readily combines with other chemicals. To work with fluorine, he had to improvise a laboratory on a balcony to guarantee good ventilation.
In 1954, Olah was invited to establish a research group in the new Central Chemical Research Institute in Budapest. In 1956, the Soviet Union crushed an anti-communist uprising in Hungary. Olah fled Hungary as a refugee with his family and many members of his research group. He moved briefly to London and then to Canada, where he joined a new research laboratory set up by Dow Chemical Company, a large U.S. chemical manufacturer, in Sarnia, Ontario. Olah was promoted to company scientist, the highest research grade in Dow. He worked at company laboratories in the United States, and then in 1965 became a professor in the chemistry department at Western (now Case Western) Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The chemistry department there soon joined with the chemistry department of the neighboring Case Institute of Technology. In 1977, he moved, with much of his research group, to a research institute in hydrocarbon chemistry established for him at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. This facility is now called the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute. Olah became a U.S. citizen in 1970.
Olah’s work on carbocations began at Sarnia. Much of Dow’s work involved organic chemistry—chemistry of carbon-containing compounds—as for instance, in the production of fuels and plastics. It was known before Olah’s work that certain organic reactions must proceed by the formation of carbocations as intermediate molecules, rather than in a single step. The lifetimes of these intermediates could sometimes be measured in millionths of a second. They lack some electrons, the negatively charged particles found in the outer parts of atoms, and therefore are positively charged ions. Positively charged ions in general are called cations << KAT eye unhz >> .
Olah found a way to study these short-lived objects. To form carbocations, he dissolved hydrocarbon compounds (combinations of hydrogen and carbon) in cold superacids, which are powerful mixtures of strong acids. Atoms and molecules vibrate more slowly in cold materials, and all chemical reactions go more slowly. Olah’s carbocations survived for weeks and months rather than fractions of a second. In the investigations made possible by this lengthening of life, Olah discovered that carbon atoms could behave in unexpected ways—for example, linking to other atoms by more than the four bonds long known to conventional chemistry. Olah died on March 8, 2017.
