Joseph J. Katz
| Joseph J. Katz | |
|---|---|
| Born |
April 19, 1912 Detroit, Michigan |
| Died | January 28, 2008 (aged 95) Detroit, Michigan |
| Nationality | American |
| Institutions | Argonne National Laboratory |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago |
| Doctoral advisor | Frank R. Mayo |
| Notable students | Michael R. Wasielewski |
| Notable awards | 1992 Rumford Prize |
Joseph J. Katz (April 19, 1912, Detroit – January 28, 2008, Detroit) was a chemist at Argonne National Laboratory whose fundamental research on the chemistry of photosynthesis led to his election to the US National Academy of Science. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia. Neither parent had any formal education.
His college education was in chemistry at the College of the City of Detroit (now Wayne State University). He worked for the next seven years at small companies in Detroit, developing adhesives, metal polishing compounds, lubricants and other specialty chemical formulations used in the automobile industry. While working in Detroit after receiving his bachelor's degree, Katz and several colleagues rented a room in a Detroit office building and used it as a laboratory. They carried out independent research from 1932 through 1939, trying to cure tuberculosis by finding a substance that could dissolve the fatty outer coating of the TB bacillus so that it would be vulnerable to being destroyed by a drug. He and a Detroit colleague published two papers on studies with the bacterium Mycobacterium smegmatis, a fast-growing and non-pathogenic bacillus with similar physical properties to the tuberculosis bacillus.
Unemployed in summer 1939, he followed a suggestion from a former teacher and applied to graduate school in chemistry at the University of Chicago. His thesis research in physical organic chemistry under the supervision of Frank R. Mayo was a study of the mechanism of addition of hydrogen chloride to isobutene in a solvent of low dielectric constant. He received the PhD degree in March 1942. [[]] Fe|By, Tribune staff reporter
He then joined the research group of H. I. Schlesinger and H. C. Brown to synthesize volatile uranium compounds that might be useful for gaseous diffusion of 235U from 238U. As suggested by his colleague Norman Davidson, he introduced himself to G.T. Seaborg. He and Seaborg had the same birth dates. On March 27, 1943 he joined Seaborg's Section C-1 in the Metallurgical Laboratory of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago. His responsibility was to develop methods for the extraction and purification of plutonium halides, especially fluorides, using microgram amounts of 239Pu from neutron irradiated uranium.
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