1963 Seaborg Award: Martin D. Kamen

Kamen was born on August 27, 1913, in Toronto, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He grew up in Chicago. Interested in classical music, he initially entered the University of Chicago as a music student before changing his major from music to chemistry. Although he gave up music as a career, Kamen continued to play the viola at a high professional level during the rest of his life. His love of music did create a problem for him during the war years when he was fired and blacklisted after having a conversation in public with a Soviet consul staffer about music. Kamen was allowed back into the laboratory world near the end of the war, but this would follow him when he would be subjected to McCarthy-era blacklisting (1948-55) until he was able to establish his innocence and prove that he had been unjustly blacklisted as a security risk.

Kamen received a BS in chemistry (1933) and PhD in physical chemistry (1936) from the University of Chicago. His PhD work was with William D. Harkins on “Neutron-Proton Inter-action: The Scattering of Neutrons by Protons.”

Kamen together with Sam Ruben, co-discovered the synthesis of the isotope carbon-14 on February 27, 1940, at the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Berkeley. He also confirmed that all of the oxygen released in photosynthesis comes from water, not carbon dioxide, in 1941.

Kamen was the first to use carbon-14 to study a biochemical system, and his work revolutionized biochemistry and molecular biology, enabling scientists to trace a wide variety of biological reactions and processes.

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