Gabor A. Somorjai (Budapest, Hungary; 1935) began studying chemical engineering at the University of Budapest, but he has to fled in 1956 when the Soviet Union moved in to crush the Hungarian uprising. In the United States, he enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained his PhD in chemistry in 1960. He became a citizen of the United States in 1962. He began his professional career as a researcher at IBM, but shortly returned to Berkeley, in 1964, as an assistant professor. He was named Associate Professor in 1967, and in 1972 promoted to Professor. Today he continues at the same university as Director of the Surface Science & Catalysis Program in the Materials Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
His output in the last five decades includes over a thousand papers and three university textbooks. In this same period, he has mentored more than 380 doctorate students and postdoctoral fellows, and received just about every major honor in the chemistry field. The American Chemical Society even named an award after him. He has received the National Medal of Science, the Priestley Award, and the Wolf Foundation Prize.
Speech
Basic Sciences, 3rd edition
“Always look to the future, and, if you fail, have the perseverance to try again. Success is the result of perseverance.”
“Always look to the future, and, if you fail, have the perseverance to try again. Success is the result of perseverance.”
TUITEAR
Gabor A. Somorjai, the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge laureate in Basic Sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics), repeats this advice to each group of students. It is a lesson that draws on his vast scientific experience, but also on a personal history which he himself describes as “tumultuous.”
Somorjai is the founder of modern surface chemistry, and the work he has done in the past five decades has contributed vitally to a long list of applications: catalytic converters in vehicles, agricultural fertilizers, new drug development, today’s ever shrinking microchips, magnetic storage systems, bioimplants in medicine… Life today would be very different without the perseverance and forward thinking of Gabor A. Somorjai.
“I was born in 1935 in Budapest, Hungary, just in time to live through the worst ravages of the Second World War,” Somorjai relates. “The front was at that time moving through Hungary. The lives of my mother and sister, and my own, were saved by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Then in the early 1950s, during my high school years, the Russian occupation brought the communist takeover of Hungary’s government, and my ‘bourgeois’ background (my family owned a shoe store) marked us out as ‘class enemies’, which disqualified me from attending the university. However, because I was a good basketball player on my high school team, I was exempted and accepted into the Technical University in 1953, during the darkest period of Stalinist rule.”
Somorjai wanted to be a historian, but his father convinced him that chemical engineering held out better employment prospects. Even so, things were far from easy. The planned socialist economy had room for no more than 50 chemical engineers from each academic year: “The atmosphere was fiercely competitive,” recalls Somorjai. And there were more obstacles to be overcome. In the fall of 1956, the Hungarian Revolution broke out with the active involvement of the country’s students. “After ten days of freedom, the Russian troops reoccupied Budapest, and two weeks later I escaped into Austria with my girlfriend, Judy, now my wife.”
Taking advantage of a first-preference quota for university students, they got seats on a flight arriving in the United States in January 1957. And this same “incredible luck,” as he puts it, got them admitted as students to the College of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. That same year he began working in research, learned to build his own apparatus – something that would prove crucial in his career – and earned his first ever wage from a teaching assistantship. Things were going well, but certain barriers remained. With the rest of his family still in Europe – they would later be reunited – he had to prove his own worth in a new language and environment. And the way to go about that? Somorjai refers back to the advice quoted above: “By always looking to the future, like every migrant does.”
But this is not the only lesson that Somorjai has instilled in his students; over three hundred and fifty – including postdoctoral fellows – in his academic career. The second on his list is: “Have a dream or vision of what you want to accomplish in science that is worth spending your entire life on; not just a strategy to raise money for the next experiment.” Somorjai’s “vision” has been to understand and control the behavior of molecules on surfaces. In 1960 he obtained his Ph.D. and decided to take a break from teaching and join IBM Research in New York. His move coincided with the rise of the transistor – precursor to our chips – and the parallel advance of surface chemistry. Electronic devices were being made smaller and smaller to get them to run faster (the smaller a circuit is, the less time the electrons take to complete their transit), meaning surfaces came to occupy a larger fraction of the whole. “With miniaturization,” as Somorjai puts it, “devices became all surface.”
Most of the important processes in technology, nature and human physiology take place on surfaces. Hence surface chemistry deals with what happens at the interface of solid and gas, solid and liquid or two solids. These contact planes are present in the skin of living creatures, in the process of catalysis, in such universal phenomena as corrosion, lubrication or adherence. They determine the optical properties of materials – fiber optic data transmission, for instance – and also electrical and magnetic properties.
This explains why the onward march of surface chemistry has thrown up so many applications. Back in the 1960s, however, this potential was largely undiscerned, for the simple reason that the right tools were not yet available. Chemistry was then confined to describing events at the macroscopic scale, with access to molecules just a distant dream. Somorjai made it his life’s work to descend to this molecular scale. And his findings were the keys that opened the door to what experts call “the revolution of surface chemistry”: “All the beauty and potency of surface reactions were suddenly laid out before us. We progressed from a state of ignorance on what was happening with chemical reactions to seeing an unexpected landscape open up before our eyes.”
The work of Somorjai, as such, marks the transition from an empirical, macroscopic brand of chemistry, fundamentally reliant on trial and error, to a chemistry capable of understanding and controlling the world at the molecular scale. “Once you have a molecular view of the surface – its structure, composition, oxidation states, the mobility of molecules at interfaces – applications and technologies can be developed in entirely new directions.”
By 1963, Somorjai had overcome all residual doubts about his research vocation. He returned to the University of California, Berkeley, where he now heads the Surface Science and Catalysis Program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In recent decades his research has focused increasingly on nanotechnology, which aspires to manipulate the structure of matter on a scale of millionths of a millimeter. Somorjai describes this as a new step but in the same direction: “The catalysts – enzymes – that sustain life in the human body, those that produce plastics, those that convert biomass to liquid fuels… these are all nanoparticles. In the field of chemistry and catalysis, the opportunities to make new products and nanoscience and nanomaterial-based technologies are limitless.”
The 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge laureate in Basic Sciences is convinced that all this potential will materialize in new solutions for the most treasured goals of modern chemistry: the development of non-contaminating energy sources, and the use of productive processes based on more specific, selective reactions, which produce just what is wanted with only the barest of waste. “What we are talking about here is ‘green chemistry’. It is one of science’s current frontiers, and surface chemistry has some of the answers.”
