Oral history interview with Gábor Somorjai
- 2014-Jan-30 – 2014-Jan-31
Gábor Somorjai was born in Budapest, Hungary, during World War II and lived an comfortable, integrated life until Anti-Semitic laws impacted the family. His paternal grandfather had converted to Judaism. His mother’s family was in the shoe business. Anti-Semitic laws cost Somorjai’s father, a math genius, his bank job, whence he was conscripted and sent to the Russian front. The elder Somorjai was interned eventually in Mauthausen concentration camp and returned with typhoid. Like many Hungarians, the Somorjais were rescued by Raoul Wallenberg and eventually returned to their home, but the Russian occupation forbade school, so Gábor played chess and read history until he eventually matriculated in Minta Gimnázium. From there his basketball coach got him into Budapest University of Technology and Economics, where he studied chemical engineering, interested in polymers and catalysis. When the Russian tanks rolled into Budapest, Somorjai and his girlfriend, later his wife, escaped to Austria. In Vienna he met Cornelius Tobias and learned about Charles Tobias at the University of California, Berkeley. The two immigrated to the United States, eventually accepted, provisionally, by Berkeley. At Berkeley Somorjai switched to chemistry, working with Richard Powell on his long-lived dream of catalysis. During this time he also married.
PhD in hand and dream in heart, Somorjai accepted a job at International Business Machines (IBM). He built an instrument for his research into low-energy electron diffraction (LEED), and observed that catalytic reactions take place on surfaces. His interest in surfaces extended from electrical to chemical reactions, and he began to study platinum and then oxide-metallic interfaces. This led to the study of nanotechnology and the development of the scanning tunneling microscope. Interesting even to laymen are his explanation of why ice is slippery and his discussion of contact lenses, which he points out are polymers; both have their effectiveness on the surface. He is called the father of surface science. Moving at last to catalysis, he began consulting on catalytic converters for General Motors Company. Though he says that instruments magically appear when needed, in fact he has developed most of his own. There are three types of catalysis: heterogeneous, homogeneous, and enzyme. Somorjai is working on heterogenizing homogeneous catalysis to yield hybrid catalysis, and attempting to figure out how to do enzyme catalysis in a hybrid model with heterogeneous catalysis, and then working out how multiple catalysts work. He maintains that the “discovery of [his] life” is that catalytic reactions are controlled by the size and shape of nanoparticles; when two-dimensional they form a Langmuir-Blodgett film, and when three-dimensional they are useful to industry.
Somorjai explains how he brought his parents to the United States while he was at IBM. He talks about Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All. He wants to do science as long as he can, he says, stressing the importance and explosive increase of science in United States and the change of science research from industry to academia. Somorjai says that finding and placing students is important; he always looked for those with the dream and attempts to place them in the best possible situations. Somorjai has published many articles and books and won many, many awards. He and his wife have established at Berkeley the Somorjai Award and the Somorjai Professorship.
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Rights | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License |
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About the Interviewer
Hilary Domush was a Program Associate in the Center for Oral History at CHF from 2007–2015. Previously, she earned a BS in chemistry from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine in 2003. She then completed an MS in chemistry and an MA in history of science both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her graduate work in the history of science focused on early nineteenth-century chemistry in the city of Edinburgh, while her work in the chemistry was in a total synthesis laboratory. At CHF, she worked on projects such as the Pew Biomedical Scholars, Women in Chemistry, Atmospheric Science, and Catalysis.
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Oral history number | 0910 |
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Interviewee biographical information
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Education
Year | Institution | Degree | Discipline |
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1956 | Budapesti Műszaki Egyetem | BS | Chemical Engineering |
1960 | University of California, Berkeley | PhD | Chemistry |
Professional Experience
International Business Machines Corporation
- 1960 to 1964 Research Staff
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- 1964 to 2017 Faculty Senior Scientist
University of California, Berkeley
- 1964 to 1967 Assistant Professor of Chemistry
- 1967 to 1972 Associate Professor of Chemistry
- 1972 to 2017 Professor of Chemistry
Honors
Year(s) | Award |
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1969 | Guggenheim Fellowship |
1969 | Visiting Fellow, Emmanuel College, United Kingdom |
1972 | Unilever Visiting Professor, University of Bristol, United Kingdom |
1976 | Kokes Award, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland |
1976 | Elected Fellow, American Physical Society |
1977 | Emmett Award, American Catalysis Society |
1978 | Miller Professorship, University of California, Berkeley |
1979 | Member, National Academy of Sciences |
1981 | Colloid and Surface Chemistry Award, American Chemical Society |
1982 | Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science |
1982 | Distinguished Scholar for Exchange with China |
1983 | Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences |
1986 | Henry Albert Palladium Medal |
1989 | Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry, American Chemical Society |
1989 | Senior Distinguished Scientist Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation |
1989 | E.W. Mueller Award, University of Wisconsin |
1990 | Honorary Membership in Hungarian Academy of Sciences |
1994 | Adamson Award in Surface Chemistry, American Chemical Society |
1995 | Chemical Pioneer, American Institute of Chemists |
1997 | Von Hippel Award, Materials Research Society |
1998 | Wolf Prize in Chemistry |
2000 | American Chemical Society Award for Creative Research in Homogeneous or Heterogeneous Catalysis |
2000 | Linus Pauling Medal for Outstanding Accomplishment in Chemistry, American Chemical Society, Puget Sound, Portland and Oregon Section |
2002 | National Medal of Science |
2003 | Cotton Medal, Texas A&M University |
2006 | Remsen Award from the Maryland Section of the ACS |
2006 | Honorary Fellow, Cardiff University |
2007 | Langmuir Prize from the American Physical Society |
2008 | Priestley Medal from the American Chemical Society |
2009 | Senior Miller Fellow, Miller Institute, University of California, Berkeley |
2009 | Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Award |
2009 | Excellence in Surface Science Award from the Surfaces in Biointerfaces Foundation |
2009 | Fellow of the American Chemical Society |
2009 | Honorary Membership, Chemical Society of Japan |
2011 | Honda Prize |
2011 | BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences |
2013 | National Academy of Sciences Award in Chemical Sciences |
2015 | William H. Nichols Medal of the New York Section of the American Chemical Society |
2015 | Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Society of Chemistry |
2017 | ENI New Frontiers of Hydrocarbons Prize |
2017 | Richard Award, Harvard University |
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somorjai_g_0910_updated_full.pdf
The published version of the transcript may diverge from the interview audio due to edits to the transcript made by staff of the Center for Oral History, often at the request of the interviewee, during the transcript review process.