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Michael Kasha: The Symmetry Seeker
| Article
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20152 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
3,641 Words |
| Author
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Elizabeth J. Sherman
Elizabeth J. Sherman is editor of the Biographical Memoirs of
the National Academy of Sciences. |
World War II was on and eager 24-year-old Michael Kasha was up to his elbows in plutonium.
"We worked 65 hours a week in an ordinary open room trying to dissolve the first man-made plutonium in hot perchloric acid. The room was radioactive. Our hands were radioactive. On bad days we had to dip them in chromic acid cleaning solution, a corrosive liquid, to get the plutonium off before we could go home.
"When General Electric came to take the project to Hanford, they couldn't believe that we worked in such a laboratory-wooden benches, no gloves, pipetting concentrated plutonium heated on a steam bath, doing spectra in open cells. We were all careless, but strangely enough--except for one tragic death shortly after the project--none of us have shown any sign of ill effects."
Risky? Certainly, but Kasha knows he was born lucky.
"I did something much more dangerous right out of high school. While going to engineering school at night, I worked days at Merck's, the chemical company, handling thousands of gallons of acetone, a carcinogen; and pyridine, which induces sterility in males. Apparently temporary," he adds with a smile. Mike and his Danzig-born wife, Lilli, have one son.
"The team I was on at Merck stirred calves' liver and charcoal into open, 137-gallon kettles in an effort to extract a new growth factor and learn how to synthesize it. It was an important lesson to me on how research is done toward a goal--the enthusiasm, the understanding, the drive. And it worked. Pantothenic acid, as it is now called, is in every slice of bread you eat today.
"My job was to do chemical syntheses and also to do micro bioassays to find whether or not our samples were good. One day I was making up chemical intermediates in the laboratory when the boss, a famous biochemist, said 'Mike, we need a bigger batch. Put it in a big shaker, take it down to the cold room, turn on the shaker, and make me a kilogram. Got it?
"I mixed up a big batch and carried it in my bare hands down to the cold room, turned on the motor, and closed the six-inch thick steel door. A half hour later the shaker exploded, the door was blown off its hinges and down the hall, and the room was
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