Donald J. Cram

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Donald James Cram (April 22, 1919 – June 17, 2001) was an American chemist who shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jean-Marie Lehn and Charles J. Pedersen "for their discovery and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity." They were the pioneers of host-guest chemistry.

Early life

Cram was born and raised in Chester, Vermont, with a Scottish immigrant father and a German immigrant mother. His father died before Cram turned four, leaving him the sole male in a family of five. He grew up with the rhyme "Adequate Children" and learned to work at an early age, including fruit picking, tossing newspapers, and painting houses, while waiting for piano lessons. He had worked at least eighteen different occupations by the time he turned eighteen.

Cram attended the Winwood High School in Long Island, New York, from 1938 to 1941, where he served as an assistant in the chemistry department and was instrumental in theater, chapel choir, Lambda Chi Alpha, Phi Society, and Zeta Alpha Epsilon. He became well-known for building his own chemistry equipment at Rollins. He earned a BS in Chemistry from Rollins College in 1941.

He graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln with a MS in organic chemistry in 1942, with Norman O. Cromwell as his thesis advisor. "Amino ketones, chemical studies of heterocyclic secondary amines' reactions with -bromo-unsaturated ketones" was his subject.

Cram obtained a doctorate in organic chemistry from Harvard University in 1947, with Louis Frieser as the advisor on his dissertation, "Syntheses and reactions of 2-(ketoalkyl)-3-naphthoquinones" being the product of "Syntheses and reactions of 2-(ketoalkyl)-3-naphthoquinones.

Personal life

Cram has confessed that his work wasn't without sacrifice. Jean Turner, a Rollins classmate who graduated in 1941, went on to obtain a master's degree in social work from Columbia University. Janet Coleman, Mount Holyoke College's second wife, is a former chemistry professor. "I would either be a bad father or a bad scientist," Cram said.

Cram died of cancer in 2001 at the age of 82.

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Career

From 1942 to 1945, Cram worked in chemical research at Merck & Co laboratories, doing penicillin research with mentor Max Tishler. Postdoctoral work was as an American Chemical Society postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with John D. Roberts. Cram was the originator of Cram's rule, which provides a model for predicting the outcome of nucleophilic attack of carbonyl compounds. He published over 350 research papers and eight books on organic chemistry, and taught graduate and post-doctoral students from 21 different countries.

Cram expanded upon Charles Pedersen's ground-breaking synthesis of crown ethers, two-dimensional organic compounds that are able to recognize and selectively combine with the ions of certain metal elements. He synthesized molecules that took this chemistry into three dimensions, creating an array of differently shaped molecules that could interact selectively with other chemicals because of their complementary three-dimensional structures. Cram's work represented a large step toward the synthesis of functional laboratory-made mimics of enzymes and other natural molecules whose special chemical behavior is due to their characteristic structure. He also did work in stereochemistry and Cram's rule of asymmetric induction is named after him.

In 1973, Cram collaborated on research with Irish chemist Francis Leslie Scott.

Cram was named an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1947, and a professor in 1955. He served there until his retirement in 1987. He was a popular teacher, having instructed some 8,000 undergraduates in his career and guided the academic output of 200 graduate students. He entertained his classes by strumming his guitar and singing folk songs. He showed a self-deprecating style, saying at one time:

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