Herbert Charles Brown was a pioneering chemist born in London on May 22, 1912, who immigrated to the United States at age two and grew up in Chicago. He earned his B.S. from the University of Chicago in 1936 and completed his Ph.D. in organic chemistry there in 1938, focusing on the reduction of carbonyl compounds with diborane. Unable to find an industrial position initially, he began his academic career at the University of Chicago, where he served as an instructor from 1939 to 1943 before becoming Assistant Professor at Wayne University in 1943. Brown was promoted to Associate Professor at Wayne in 1946 and subsequently accepted a professorship at Purdue University in 1947 as Professor of Inorganic Chemistry, where he would establish his enduring legacy in chemical research.
Dr. Brown's groundbreaking research revolutionized synthetic organic chemistry through his innovative work with boron compounds, culminating in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1979, which he shared with Georg Wittig. His most significant discovery came in 1956 when, working with postdoctoral researcher B.C. Subba Rao, he developed the hydroboration reaction that allowed unsaturated organic molecules to be readily converted to organoboranes. This methodology opened entirely new pathways in organic synthesis and became fundamental to the production of numerous pharmaceutical compounds including Prozac and Lipitor. Over his prolific career, Brown published 1,266 scientific papers and seven influential books that established boron chemistry as an essential tool for synthetic chemists worldwide.
Beyond his personal research achievements, Professor Brown mentored an extraordinary number of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, including two future Nobel laureates, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki, who studied with him in the 1960s. His leadership transformed Purdue's chemistry department, which named its primary facility the Herbert C. Brown Laboratory of Chemistry in recognition of his contributions. Brown received 14 honorary doctorates and numerous prestigious awards including the National Medal of Science in 1969 and the Priestley Medal in 1981, cementing his status as one of the leading American chemists of the 20th century. Though he formally retired in 1978, he remained actively engaged in research until his death on December 19, 2004, leaving an enduring legacy that continues to shape modern organic synthesis methodologies.
