Taube, Henry

Taube, Henry, 1915–, American inorganic chemist, b. Saskatchewan, Canada. He earned his Ph.D. at Berkeley, became a professor of chemistry at Univ. of Chicago (1952), and then moved to Stanford Univ. in 1962. He won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering research in inorganic chemistry and the study of the rates and mechanisms of transition-metal coordination compounds. Taube determined that certain octahedral complexes containing transition-metals are inert while others are labile, depending upon whether they undergo ligand-substitution reactions rapidly or slowly.

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Taube, Henry (1915–  ) chemist; born in Neudorf, Saskatchewan, Canada. After taking his B.S. and M.S. at the University of Saskatchewan, he went on to take his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of California: Berkeley (1940). He became a U.S. citizen in 1942. While teaching at Cornell (1941–46), he worked during World War II at the National Defense Research Committee (1944–45). He then taught at the University of Chicago (1946–61). In 1962 he joined the faculty of Stanford University, becoming the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Chemistry in 1976 (emeritus in 1988). During his career he was the recipient of many of the highest awards his profession of inorganic chemistry offers, including the National Medal of Science (1977), the Welch Award (1983), and the Priestly Medal of the American Chemical Society (1985). He won the 1983 Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering the basic mechanism of chemical reactions that lie behind everything from enzymes to batteries. He was specifically cited for his work in electron transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes, work that has applications in the chemical industry, but it was also noted that he had made at least 18 major discoveries in his field.