A lawyer’s son in Budapest
George Andrew Olah, born Oláh András György, came into the world in Budapest on May 22, 1927. His parents, Gyula (Julius) Oláh, a lawyer, and Magda Krasznai, were Jewish. As far as he knew, no one in his family had ever been interested in science. He grew up between the two world wars and received the solid, humanities-heavy schooling of a middle-class Hungarian child at the Piarist Gymnasium, one of the best schools in the city, run by a Roman Catholic teaching order. It meant eight years of Latin, plus German and French, and a lifelong love of history and literature.
In his Nobel autobiography he said he could not remember any special interest in chemistry as a schoolboy. He remained a voracious reader all his life, and he believed that becoming attached to one field too early shortchanged a broad education, adding that few scientists can find time for the classics later in life.
War and a balcony laboratory
Olah’s last school years coincided with the destruction of Hungarian Jewry in 1944 and 1945. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, he survived the final months of the Second World War in hiding in Budapest. After the siege of the city he helped pull bodies from bombed buildings so that the dead could be buried properly, and then, seeing how hard life would be in a small, war-torn country, he chose to study chemistry at the Technical University of Budapest for the variety it offered.
He became an unpaid research assistant to Géza Zemplén, the leading organic chemist in Hungary and a former student of Emil Fischer. Olah wanted to work with fluorine, an unpopular and dangerous idea in a country where even basic chemicals such as hydrogen fluoride and boron trifluoride could not be bought. He made them himself. With no fume hoods to spare, Zemplén let him enclose an open balcony at the back of the institute, where Olah installed two old hoods and set up what everyone called the balcony laboratory. His papers from there caught the eye of the German chemist Hans Meerwein, who sent him a precious cylinder of boron trifluoride. In 1949 he married Judith Lengyel, whom he had known since youth; she later studied chemistry and worked alongside him for decades. In 1954 he set up a research group at the new Central Chemical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Refugee
In October 1956 Hungary rose against Soviet rule, and the revolt was crushed with great loss of life. Some 200,000 Hungarians fled, and in early December Olah, his wife, their two-year-old son and much of his research group joined them. They reached London, where British chemists including Christopher Ingold and Alexander Todd went out of their way to help a young, practically unknown refugee, kindness he said he never forgot. In 1957 the family moved to Canada, carrying two cardboard boxes that held all their possessions, and Olah joined a new exploratory laboratory of Dow Chemical in Sarnia, Ontario.
Dow treated him well and gave him wide freedom to follow his own ideas; he was eventually promoted to company scientist, its highest research rank without management duties. The couple’s second son, Ronald, was born in Sarnia in 1959. In 1964 Olah moved to Dow’s laboratory near Boston, and in 1965 he returned to academic life as professor and department chairman at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. When Western Reserve merged its chemistry department with that of the neighbouring Case Institute of Technology in 1967, he led the combined department until 1969, and Judith rejoined his research. He later called the Cleveland years some of the most productive of his life.
Catching a fleeting ion
Many of the reactions that turn crude oil into petrol, plastics and medicines pass through carbocations, molecules in which a carbon atom has lost electrons and carries a positive charge. They are so reactive that they exist for only a tiny fraction of a second, which made them almost impossible to study. Chemists argued for decades about their structures without being able to see them.
At Dow in the late 1950s, and then at Western Reserve University in Cleveland from 1965, Olah found a way to make them sit still. He used superacids, mixtures billions or even trillions of times stronger than concentrated sulphuric acid. In such an environment, there is nothing for the carbocation to react with, so it survives long enough to be examined with nuclear magnetic resonance and other instruments. One of his strongest mixtures, of fluorosulphuric acid and antimony pentafluoride, became known as Magic Acid after a laboratory colleague found it could dissolve candle wax. With these tools Olah and his students mapped the structures of carbocations, including the unusual ones in which a carbon atom is bonded to five neighbours, and opened the whole field of superacid chemistry.
Better fuel and better industry
Olah’s chemistry had practical consequences from the start. Dow used carbocation reactions on a huge scale, for example to make ethylbenzene, the raw material for styrene and polystyrene plastics, and he said his work helped improve some of those processes. Superacids proved to be powerful catalysts for rearranging hydrocarbons. His methods for converting straight-chain hydrocarbons into branched ones, which burn more smoothly in an engine, raised octane ratings and helped make cleaner-burning petrol, and his work fed into more efficient oil refining. The same understanding of how carbon ions behave has helped chemists make plastics, pharmaceuticals and other products more efficiently. Over his career he trained close to 300 students and co-workers, and he wrote or co-wrote many of the standard textbooks of hydrocarbon chemistry.
In 1977 he moved with his group to the University of Southern California, where he founded and led what became the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute. In 1994 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contribution to carbocation chemistry, the first Nobel for a USC faculty member. He said the award also belonged to his students and associates and to colleagues around the world.
The methanol economy
After the prize Olah, determined not to slow down, turned to the biggest problem he could see: the world’s dependence on oil, gas and coal, which are finite and which release the carbon dioxide that warms the planet. With his USC colleague Surya Prakash he proposed what he called the methanol economy. Methanol, the simplest alcohol, can be burned as a fuel, used in a fuel cell to make electricity, or converted into ethylene and propylene and from them into petrol, diesel, plastics and medicines. Instead of burying captured carbon dioxide underground, he argued, it could be combined with hydrogen made using renewable or nuclear power to produce methanol, recycling carbon rather than adding more to the air.
The idea moved from paper to practice. His group helped develop a direct methanol fuel cell with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and devised ways to turn methane directly into methanol. In Iceland, the company Carbon Recycling International built a plant at Svartsengi that captures carbon dioxide from a geothermal power station and turns it into renewable methanol; it opened around 2011 and 2012 as the first industrial-scale plant of its kind and was named the George Olah plant. Olah attended the start of construction in 2009 and sat on the company’s advisory board. His 2006 book Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, written with Alain Goeppert and Prakash, set out the plan for a general audience.
Jewish origins
Olah was born to Jewish parents and lived through the Hungarian Holocaust in hiding, but he was educated in a Catholic school and wrote very little in public about religion or about his wartime experience. His Nobel autobiography mentions only that he survived the ravages of war in Budapest. Reference works such as the Encyclopaedia Judaica, reproduced by the Jewish Virtual Library, describe him as a Jewish American chemist. Like many Hungarian Jews of his generation, he lived through Nazi persecution as a teenager and then Communist rule as a young man, and finally rebuilt his life and work in a new country.
Character and later life
Olah stood about six foot five, and his son described a towering personality to match. Colleagues remembered a generous mentor who always shared credit, a renaissance man who could read a thick book in one sitting, and a global citizen whose institute was, in Prakash’s words, a mini United Nations. He became a United States citizen in 1971 and received the Priestley Medal, the highest honour of the American Chemical Society, in 2005.
He died at his home in Beverly Hills on March 8, 2017, at the age of 89, survived by Judith, their sons George and Ronald, and three grandchildren.
Legacy
Olah gave chemists a way to see the most fleeting players in the chemistry of fuels and plastics, and the industries that refine oil and make materials became cleaner and more efficient as a result. Late in life he offered a practical vision for a world after fossil fuels, in which the carbon dioxide we emit becomes the raw material for the fuels and products we need. That idea, once seen as visionary, is now pursued by companies and governments building carbon-recycling and green-methanol plants, including ships and factories that run on methanol made from captured carbon.
Sources & further reading
George A. Olah, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · George Olah, Jewish Virtual Library (Encyclopaedia Judaica) · George Olah, USC scientist who won Nobel Prize in chemistry, dies at 89, Bangor Daily News (Los Angeles Times) · George Olah plant, Carbon Recycling International · George Andrew Olah, Wikipedia · 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.