Famous Canadian Chemists

Herbert Henry Dow taught chemistry before venturing into a business career. Though his first company was a failure, his work impressed investors, and he was soon able to establish Dow Chemical, which supplied low-cost bromine to the US markets. He later made auto pistons out of spare magnesium.

Rudolph A. Marcus redefined science with his Marcus theory, which explained electron transfer reactions and thus threw light on reactions such as photosynthesis. The Canadian-American chemist won a Nobel Prize for his work and also contributed to the transition-state theory. He now teaches at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

John Charles Polanyi is a Hungarian-Canadian scientist, who won the Noble Prize in Chemistry for his contribution to the dynamics of chemical reaction. He developed a technique called infrared chemiluminescence, which helped him to study the exchange of chemical bonds and detail how the excess energy is removed during chemical reactions.

German-Canadian physicist Gerhard Herzberg is remembered for his Nobel Prize-winning work on ascertaining the electronic structure of molecules, particularly free radicals. He had escaped to Canada following the rise of the Nazis and later also worked in the U.S. His doctoral students included Japanese chemist Takeshi Oka.

Nobel Prize-winning Canadian-American chemist Henry Taube is best remembered for his research on electron-transfer reactions. Apart from teaching at reputed institutes such as Cornell and Stanford, Taube also became a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was also an ardent fan of classical music and loved gardening, too.

Canadian-American physical chemist Martin Kamen was part of the team that discovered the synthesis of the isotope carbon-14. He was accused of revealing sensitive information to Russian spies while working at the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, and was thus fired from the Radiological Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley.