science · 30 November 1915 · 109 years ago
birth
Born 30 Nov 1915; died 16 Nov 2005 at age 89.
Canadian-born American chemist who in 1983 won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his extensive research into the properties and reactions of dissolved inorganic substances, particularly oxidation-reduction processes involving the ions of metallic elements. Metals often form complexes, in which other atoms cluster around the metal atom, transfering and sharing electrons among themselves to bind together. Taube discovered that during a reaction, a temporary "bridge" of atoms often forms between metal atoms. He studied the electron transfer across this bridge, speeding up reactions that would otherwise happen only slowly or not at all. His ideas are relevant beyond his own field of study, for example, in biochemical processes such as respiration.
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