Nobelist Henry Taube Dead at 89

Henry Taube, the inorganic chemist who won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering studies of electron-transfer reactions, died on Nov. 16.

Just shy of his 90th birthday, Taube was still an active researcher and continued to go to his lab at Stanford University every day.

Chemists expressed sadness at the loss of their colleague. “He will be greatly missed at Stanford and by the international community,” says Stanford chemistry professor Edward I. Solomon. “Henry is a unique person in the history of inorganic chemistry.”

“He was in a class by himself, a role model and leader whom we all admired and loved,” Harry B. Gray, chemistry professor at California Institute of Technology, agrees.

“Henry Taube was an inspirational scientist and a warm and generous colleague who took a genuine interest in the scientific development of his younger colleagues,” says professor Robert M. Waymouth, another of Taube’s chemistry professor colleagues at Stanford.

Taube developed numerous ingenious experiments that illustrated the mechanisms of redox reactions. A paper describing the correlation between the rates of ligand-exchange reactions and the electronic configuration of coordination compounds, published in Chemical Reviews in 1952, is considered “one of the true classics in inorganic chemistry,” according to an article Gray wrote about Taube’s Nobel Prize-winning research in Science in 1983.

Taube was born on Nov. 30, 1915, in Neudorf, Saskatchewan. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1935 and his master’s degree in 1937, both from the University of Saskatchewan. He received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1940.

After several years as an instructor and assistant professor at Cornell University, Taube spent 15 years as a professor at the University of Chicago. He then went to Stanford, where he had been ever since. He became an emeritus professor in 1986.

Taube was an avid gardener. He also collected old phonograph recordings.

He is survived by his wife, Mary, with whom he lived in a house on the Stanford campus since the 1980s, and by his children, Linda, Heinrich, and Karl. Another daughter, Marianna, died in 1997.