Henry Taube
Taube, Henry (1915-) was a Canadian-born American chemist who discovered important features in the behavior of atoms and molecules, specifically how electrons are transferred when they link up or separate. Taube won the 1983 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work.
Taube was born in Neudorf, Saskatchewan, Canada, the son of immigrants from the Ukraine. He enrolled at the University of Saskatchewan, earning a B.S. degree in 1935 and an M.S. degree in photochemistry in 1937. He earned a Ph.D. degree in 1940 from the University of California, Berkeley. He worked as an instructor at Berkeley until 1941, when he became an assistant professor at Cornell University.
In 1946, Taube joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, and was chair of the chemistry department there from 1956 to 1959. Early on, he was selected to develop a course in advanced inorganic chemistry, but he could find few textbooks on the subject. While researching complex metals, he realized that earlier work he had done on substitution of carbon in organic reactions could be related to inorganic complexes. In 1952, he published a paper on the relation of the rates of chemical substitution to electronic structure, which has since served as a planning guide for experiments that depend on the differential in substitution rates.
Taube became a professor at Stanford University in 1962, and in 1990 became professor emeritus. At Stanford he continued his research on substitution rates. In complex metals, other molecules cluster around the metal molecule. Those molecules transfer and share electrons among themselves, which binds them together. Taube noticed a change in the electrical charge and shape of the molecules, and discovered that before electron transfer occurs, molecules often build a “chemical bridge.” The transfer of electrons across this bridge speeds up reactions that otherwise would occur slowly, if at all. This intermediate step also explained why similar metals and ions have different rates of electron exchange. His discovery also proved useful in biochemical processes such as respiration.
Taube died on November 16, 2005, in Palo Alto, California.