Penn profs, students in Nobel Hall of Fame

Six Penn professors and former students were inducted into the Hall of Fame last week.

The Chemistry Nobel Prize Hall of Fame, that is.

On Thursday afternoon, 200 graduate and post-doctoral students joined faculty and administrators to recognize the efforts of six Nobel prize winners who either graduated from or taught at the University.

The Hall, which is actually a wall located in the atrium of the Chemistry Building, is decorated with framed portraits of its six recent inductees.

One of those portraits is of Penn Chemistry Professor and 2000 Nobel Prize winner Alan MacDiarmid.

MacDiarmid said the Hall of Fame reflects the education offered at Penn, since all of the Nobel laureates attended Penn for some part of their education.

"It stresses the importance of teaching and recognizes the excellent supporting role the University has had throughout the years in chemistry," he said. "Our teaching of chemistry must have been pretty good."

"You can have the most magnificent laboratories and buildings, but if you don't have excellent people in it, they mean nothing," he added.

MacDiarmid won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery that plastics can conduct electricity as part of a three man team. The other two were former Penn Physics Professor Alan Heeger and former Penn Chemistry Professor Hideki Shirakawa, who is also honored in the Hall of Fame.

Distinguished faculty members, including University President Judith Rodin, delivered brief remarks to inaugurate the Hall of Fame.

Rodin said that in reading the biographies of the six laureates, she was struck by the extent to which they attributed their success to the University.

"I am proud to belong to an academic family that has produced the excellence we honor today," Rodin said. "This is a great day for all Penn's conquistadors of chemistry, and I am honored to be a part of it."

Out of the 184 Nobel Prizes awarded in chemistry, five have been associated with Penn. One of those was shared between two people, giving the department six laureates to claim as its own.

"The presence of both faculty and alumni is a testament to Penn's longstanding commitment to world-class research and world-class education," School of Arts and Sciences Dean Samuel Preston said. "This Hall of Fame not only honors the six Nobel laureates, but the collectivity that supports them."

The idea for the Hall came from Chemistry Department Chairman Hai-Lung Dai, who had been considering the project for years. When MacDiarmid won the Nobel Prize last year, it presented the perfect opportunity for Dai to realize his vision.

In his speech, Dai gestured to the blank wall on the opposite side of the room, saying there's plenty of space for more portraits. And Dai says portraits of new Nobel Prize winners may fill those empty walls within the next decade.

"We have some real shots," he said. "These are not just wishes, but real hopes."

Dai took advantage of the occasion to announce the endowment of the Alan MacDiarmid Chemistry Term Chair through the generosity of Roy Vagelos, a 1950 Penn graduate.

In addition to MacDiarmid and Shirakawa, the other laureates in the Hall of Fame include Michael Brown, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1985 for his findings concerning the regulation of cholesterol metabolism, and Christian Anfinsen for his 1972 Nobel in Chemistry, which recognized his work on how active enzymes are formed in living cells.

Also featured are Ahmed Zewail, who won the 1999 Chemistry Prize after unraveling the dynamics of fundamental chemical processes, and Stanley Prusiner, whose discovery of a new class of disease-causing agents called "prions" earned him the 1997 prize in Medicine.

Students said they felt proud to be working in a department with such impressive distinctions.

"The Nobel Prize is the highest distinction you can have in any endeavor and to have six winners in three decades out of one department -- it's humbling," second-year Chemistry graduate student Jude Clapper said.

Along with Rodin and Preston, Provost Robert Barchi, Medical School Dean Arthur Rubenstein, MacDiarmid and Vagelos participated in the ceremony and unveiled the portraits.

Dai said that the Hall of Fame will serve as a recruitment tool to attract the best candidates to the Chemistry Department. He said he had that in mind when he decided to establish the hall so the portraits would be hanging once recruitment begins in March.

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