Taube, Henry (1915-2005), a Canadian-born American scientist, won the 1983 Nobel Prize for chemistry for discovering important features of the behavior of atoms and molecules in chemical reactions. Taube clarified how electrons are transferred between atoms when they link up or separate.
The work for which Taube received the Nobel Prize was carried out in the late 1940’s at the University of Chicago. Taube studied the transfer of electrons between atoms. Metals often form complexes, in which other atoms cluster around the metal atom. For example, six molecules of water can cluster around atoms such as copper or iron. The atoms transfer and share electrons among themselves, which is how they are bound together. Taube discovered that during a reaction, a temporary “bridge” of atoms often forms between metal atoms. Electrons can be transferred across this bridge, speeding up reactions that would otherwise happen only slowly or not at all. Taube studied the phenomena of electron transfer in detail. His ideas proved to be relevant beyond his own field of study–for example, in biochemical processes such as respiration.
Henry Taube was born on Nov. 30, 1915, in Neudorf, Saskatchewan, Canada, and studied at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. He gained a doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States. He took American citizenship in 1942. He worked at a number of American universities, and was professor of chemistry at Stanford University in California from 1962 until 1990, when he became professor emeritus. Taube died on Nov. 16, 2005.
