From Zhitomir to London to Chicago
Herbert Charles Brown was born Herbert Brovarnik in London on May 22, 1912. His parents, Charles Brovarnik and Pearl Gorinstein, had both been born in Zhitomir in Ukraine and came to London in 1908, as Brown later wrote, as part of the vast Jewish immigration of the early twentieth century. In June 1914, when Herbert was two, his father moved the family to Chicago to join his own parents and other relatives there. His grandfather’s name had already been anglicized to Brown, and that became the family name.
His father had trained as a cabinet maker, doing delicate inlaid work, but found little demand for those skills in America and turned to carpentry. In 1920 he opened a small hardware store at 18th and State Street on Chicago’s South Side, in a largely Black neighbourhood. The family lived above the shop, and Herbert went to the local Haven School with mostly Black classmates. He did so well that he was moved ahead several times and finished grade school at twelve.
The Depression and a determined girlfriend
In 1926 his father died of an infection, and Herbert left Englewood High School to work in the family store. He later admitted he spent most of his time there reading. His mother eventually took over the store herself and sent him back to school, and he graduated in 1930, having run the humour column of the school paper well enough to win a national prize.
It was the start of the Depression, and he could find no steady job, so he went to college, at first planning to study electrical engineering because he had heard it paid well. A chemistry course changed his mind. When Crane Junior College was closed for lack of funds in 1933, he took night classes while working part-time as a shoe clerk, and joined a few students whom a former Crane instructor had invited to keep studying in his laboratory. There he met Sarah Baylen, until then the brightest chemistry student at Crane. She later wrote that at first she hated him because she could not beat him, so she decided to join him instead. In 1935 they were among the nine members of the first graduating class of Chicago’s new Wright Junior College, and in his yearbook Sarah predicted that he would win a Nobel Prize.
A book about boron
A half scholarship took Brown to the University of Chicago in 1935, where he crammed the last two years of a degree into three quarters and graduated in 1936. He meant to get a job and marry Sarah, but the eminent chemist Julius Stieglitz urged him to go on to graduate school. As a graduation gift Sarah gave him a copy of Alfred Stock’s book The Hydrides of Boron and Silicon. It led him to study with Hermann Irving Schlesinger, one of the few chemists working on boron hydrides. Herbert and Sarah married secretly on February 6, 1937, and he earned his PhD in 1938.
Unable to find a job in industry, he took a postdoctoral post with Morris Kharasch and then became Schlesinger’s research assistant with the rank of instructor. In 1943 he moved to Wayne University in Detroit, and in 1947 he was invited to Purdue University in Indiana as professor of inorganic chemistry. He remained at Purdue for the rest of his life, becoming Wetherill Research Professor in 1960 and professor emeritus in 1978, though he went on working with a large group of researchers long after.
Brown later reflected that he had not planned an academic life at all. At that time a young instructor at Chicago did not get tenure for about ten years, and he had watched colleagues stay nine years only to be forced out. After four years he asked Schlesinger directly about his future, and when the answer was that there was none, he found the post at Wayne through the kindness of Neil Gordon, the founder of the Gordon Research Conferences. The setback preserved his career and set him on the road to Purdue, where he would build a very large research group.
Wartime chemistry and sodium borohydride
During the Second World War, Schlesinger’s group, with Brown, worked for the National Defense Research Committee on volatile uranium compounds. The project needed large amounts of diborane, a rare boron hydride, and in searching for cheaper ways to make their materials they discovered a practical method for producing sodium borohydride, a white powder made of sodium, boron and hydrogen. When they tried to separate it from a by-product using acetone, they found that it reacted with the acetone, chemically reducing it.
That accident pointed to a major use. Sodium borohydride turned out to be a mild, safe and selective reducing agent, able to convert the carbon–oxygen groups called aldehydes and ketones into alcohols without disturbing much else in a molecule. Later, at Purdue, Brown and his students built on it to create a whole spectrum of related reagents, stronger and milder, so that chemists could choose exactly the reducing power they needed. The Swedish Academy noted in 1979 that sodium borohydride had become the reagent of choice for this kind of reduction. It is used today in laboratories and factories around the world, including in the manufacture of medicines.
Hydroboration: a new way to build molecules
In the mid-1950s Brown’s co-worker B. C. Subba Rao noticed an unusual reaction: a borohydride had added boron and hydrogen across a carbon–carbon double bond in an organic compound. Brown recognised its importance and pursued it relentlessly. The reaction, called hydroboration, turns simple molecules containing double bonds into organoboranes, compounds in which boron is attached to carbon. These can then be converted into alcohols and many other products. Hydroboration followed by oxidation places a hydroxyl group on the opposite carbon from the one older methods favoured, giving chemists a new and very clean way to make particular alcohols.
Brown and his group spent decades showing what organoboranes could do. The Swedish Academy called them the most versatile reagents ever created in organic chemistry, usable for reductions, rearrangements and additions, and opening many new ways to link carbon atoms together. His work also led to one of the first general methods for asymmetric synthesis, making pure single mirror-image forms of molecules, which matters greatly for medicines, where one mirror-image form of a drug can be helpful and the other useless or harmful. Brown summarized the early work in a short book, Hydroboration, published in 1962.
A teacher of future laureates
Brown supervised a very large number of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers from around the world. Two of them later won Nobel Prizes of their own. In Sapporo in 1962, the young Japanese chemist Akira Suzuki bought Brown’s book Hydroboration in a bookshop and stayed up all night reading it; in 1963 he went to Purdue and spent almost two years in Brown’s laboratory. Ei-ichi Negishi joined Brown’s group as a postdoctoral researcher in 1966 and stayed on as his assistant until 1972.
Both went on to develop palladium-catalysed cross-coupling reactions, and the Suzuki reaction, which joins carbon atoms using organoboron compounds, became one of the most widely used reactions in the pharmaceutical and materials industries. When Suzuki and Negishi shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Swedish Academy said that mankind benefits from this chemistry in the form of medicines, more precise electronics and advanced materials. Brown’s boron chemistry stands at the root of that family tree.
Jewish roots and a lifelong partnership
Brown’s story is a classic Jewish immigrant story: parents from Zhitomir, a long-established centre of Jewish life in Ukraine, a stop in London, a family store in Chicago, and a son who rose through free public schools and junior colleges into science during the hardest economic years America had known. He wrote about it plainly in his Nobel autobiography, placing his parents among the great Jewish migration of their time.
He was quick to credit Sarah, his wife of almost seventy years, with his success: she handled the family finances, the house and the garden so that he could concentrate on research, and he liked to say that after the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm he carried the medal while she carried the prize money. He also joked that his initials, H, C and B, were the chemical symbols of hydrogen, carbon and boron, the very elements he worked with.
Honours, final years and legacy
Brown received the National Medal of Science in 1969 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1979, shared with Georg Wittig of Heidelberg, for developing boron- and phosphorus-containing compounds into important reagents in organic synthesis. His research also ranged widely beyond boron, into steric effects, the behaviour of aromatic compounds and a long, famous scientific debate about the nature of certain charged carbon molecules. Purdue named its chemistry laboratory building after him.
Herbert C. Brown died after a heart attack on December 19, 2004, at a hospital in Lafayette, Indiana, aged 92. Sarah died the following year. His legacy is in the toolkit of every synthetic chemist. The reagents and reactions he developed, and those his students built on them, are used every day to make medicines, agricultural chemicals and materials, quietly making it easier, cheaper and cleaner to build the molecules modern life depends on.
Sources & further reading
Herbert C. Brown, Biographical (autobiography), NobelPrize.org · Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1979, NobelPrize.org · Akira Suzuki, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2010, NobelPrize.org · Herbert Charles Brown, Jewish Virtual Library · Herbert C. Brown, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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