A Cleveland boy with a viola
Donald Arthur Glaser was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 21, 1926, to Lena and William J. Glaser, Jewish immigrants from Russia; his father was a businessman. He grew up in Cleveland Heights and went through the public schools there, a bright, musical boy who would keep two passions, science and music, all his life.
He studied physics and mathematics at the Case School of Applied Science, now Case Western Reserve University, while also playing the viola with the Cleveland Orchestra. His bachelor’s thesis, a study of thin metal films using electron diffraction, was his first original research. He graduated in 1946, taught mathematics at Case for a semester, and that autumn went west to the California Institute of Technology.
Cosmic rays and a frustrating problem
At Caltech Glaser did his doctoral work under Carl Anderson, the discoverer of the positron, measuring the momentum of cosmic ray particles at sea level. He finished in 1949 and received his PhD in 1950. Almost in passing he also attended the seminars that the physicist turned biologist Max Delbrück was holding on the genetics of bacteria and viruses, an experience that would shape the second half of his career.
In 1949 he joined the physics department of the University of Michigan. Particle physics was entering a new era. Accelerators were starting to produce particles at energies that had previously been seen only in cosmic rays, and a whole family of new, short-lived “strange” particles was turning up. The trouble was seeing them. The standard tool, the cloud chamber, recorded particle tracks as trails of droplets in a gas, but gas is thin, so fast particles passed through without leaving much of a record, and the chambers could not keep up with the pace of accelerator beams. Glaser built diffusion cloud chambers and spark counters, and concluded that something new was needed.
The bubble chamber
His answer, worked out in 1952, was to use a liquid instead of a gas. A liquid can be heated above its boiling point without boiling if the pressure is held high and then suddenly released; for a moment it is superheated and unstable. If a charged particle passes through at that instant, it leaves a trail of ionised atoms along which tiny bubbles begin to form. Photograph the chamber a split second later and the particle’s path appears as a line of bubbles. Because a liquid is hundreds of times denser than a gas, particles interact far more often inside it, and the tracks are sharp and easy to measure.
Glaser’s first prototype was a small glass vessel only about an inch across, filled with ether. A popular story says he got the idea from watching bubbles rise in a glass of beer. He denied that in a talk in 2006, though he admitted that beer was one of the liquids he tried in early experiments. He later described the bubble chamber, with characteristic understatement, as “a pressure cooker with windows.”
He scaled the idea up quickly. In 1954 he and his graduate student David Rahm took a 15-centimetre propane bubble chamber to the Cosmotron accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and he tested liquid hydrogen as a filling while visiting the University of Chicago. With students and colleagues at Michigan and later at Berkeley, he used his chambers at Brookhaven and at the Bevatron in California to measure the lifetimes, decay patterns and spins of several of the new strange particles.
A window on the particle zoo
The bubble chamber transformed particle physics. Laboratories around the world built ever larger chambers filled with liquid hydrogen and heavier liquids, and for two decades they were the main instruments for exploring the subatomic world. Millions of photographs were taken and scanned by teams who measured every track. As the Berkeley physicist Herbert Steiner put it, the bubble chamber “was a major breakthrough and led to the discovery of a zoo of new particles.”
That zoo, in turn, forced physicists to look for order beneath it, and the patterns found among the new particles led to the idea that protons, neutrons and their relatives are built from smaller constituents, the quarks. The Standard Model of particle physics, which today underpins everything from the design of accelerators to the physics of medical radiation, rests in part on the evidence gathered in bubble chambers.
Glaser moved to the University of California, Berkeley, as professor of physics in 1959. The following year, at the age of 34, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the bubble chamber.
A second career in biology
Glaser might have spent the rest of his life building bigger detectors. Instead, in 1962, he walked away from physics. Particle experiments were becoming enormous enterprises involving large teams, administration and travel, and he wanted to work on a smaller scale and on questions that had fascinated him since Delbrück’s seminars. He spent time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in Copenhagen with the microbiologist Ole Maaløe, then returned to Berkeley’s Virus Laboratory and in 1964 became professor of molecular biology.
In his new field he studied how bacteria control the copying of their DNA, and he and his students showed that certain mutations in cultured hamster cells made them abnormally sensitive to ultraviolet light, a defect that could turn them cancerous. The same genes are involved in xeroderma pigmentosum, a human condition in which sunlight causes skin cancer. True to his background as an instrument builder, he also designed automated equipment for growing and analysing large numbers of cells.
Founding the biotechnology industry
Around 1970 Glaser noticed that molecular biology was producing a flood of detailed knowledge that was hardly being applied to medicine or agriculture. In 1968 he had co-founded a small company, Berkeley Scientific Laboratory, to automate diagnostic tests. In 1971 he joined Ronald Cape, Peter Farley and the investor Moshe Alafi to found Cetus Corporation in Berkeley, the first company built to turn the new biology into products. Glaser chaired its scientific advisory board.
Cetus became one of the most important companies in the history of biotechnology. It developed interleukin-2, approved in 1992 as the cancer drug Proleukin, and worked on beta interferon, later approved to treat multiple sclerosis. Above all, it was at Cetus that the chemist Kary Mullis conceived the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, a way of copying a stretch of DNA millions of times. PCR is now used in almost every biology laboratory, in medical diagnosis, in forensic science and paternity testing, and it became the standard test for COVID-19. Cetus was sold to Chiron Corporation in 1991, and its PCR patent rights went to Hoffmann-La Roche.
Studying how we see
In the 1980s, as molecular biology became more industrial, Glaser changed fields once more, to neurobiology. He spent a sabbatical at the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and began experiments on human vision. The visual system is the best mapped part of the brain, and Glaser built computer models of how it processes motion and depth, then tested their predictions in experiments on human perception. In 1989 he became professor of physics and neurobiology at Berkeley, a title that summed up his unusual career.
He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1962 and later to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he advised many government bodies, companies and non-profit groups.
Jewish roots and private life
Glaser’s parents were Russian Jewish immigrants, part of the great wave of Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire to the cities of the American Midwest. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1960 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency hailed him as a young Jewish Nobel winner, and the Jewish Virtual Library lists him among Jewish Nobel laureates in physics. He did not speak publicly about religious practice, and the record says little about his personal faith.
In 1960 he married Ruth Bonnie Thompson; they had two children, Louise, a paediatrician, and William, who became a technology executive. In 1975 he married Lynn Bercovitz, a painter and musician. Colleagues remembered him as kind and curious, a man who loved to build things and was never afraid to start over in a new field.
Legacy
Donald Glaser died in his sleep at his home in Berkeley on February 28, 2013, at the age of 86. His family asked that gifts go to the Donald A. Glaser Advanced Lab in Berkeley’s physics department, which trains students in experimental work.
Few scientists have changed two fields so deeply. His bubble chamber opened the subatomic world to direct view and helped lead physicists to the quarks. The company he co-founded helped create the biotechnology industry and gave the world PCR, a technique that has touched medicine, criminal justice and public health. Through both, a boy from Cleveland who played the viola left a mark on how we understand matter and how we diagnose and treat disease.
Sources & further reading
Donald A. Glaser, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Physics Nobelist and biotech pioneer Donald Glaser dies at 86, Berkeley News · Donald A. Glaser, Wikipedia · Cetus Corporation, Wikipedia · Polymerase chain reaction, Wikipedia · Donald Glaser, Jewish Virtual Library · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.