Mizushima San'ichirō

Mizushima San'ichirō ( Japanese 水 島 三 一郎 ; * March 21, 1899 in Tokyo ; † August 3, 1983 ibid) was a Japanese physical chemist who was a pioneer of Raman spectroscopy (with work from the 1920s) and pioneer of organic physical chemistry in Japan.

Mizushima was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962 and 1964.

Life

Mizushima was the son of a wealthy trader in kimono fabrics. He received a good education but was supposed to get into the family business. When it was not flourishing, he studied chemistry at Tokyo University , his favorite subject at school. He graduated in 1923 from the physical chemist Katayama Masao , whose assistant he became. His first work provided a confirmation of Debye's theory of the temperature and frequency dependence of dielectric properties of polar molecules and his experiments were mentioned in Debye's monograph Polar Molecules from 1929. For his experiments he developed radio transmitters with which he irradiated the macromolecules he was studying. In 1927 he became an assistant professor and from 1929 to 1931 went to the University of Leipzig to study with Peter Debye. In 1938 he succeeded Katayama as professor of physical chemistry in Tokyo. He also did research for RIKEN . In 1959 he retired (at the age of 60, as was usual at the time) and then went into industrial research. He founded and directed the Tokyo research laboratory of the Yahata steel company.

In the 1930s he combined different forms of spectroscopy (infrared, with radio waves, Raman spectroscopy, electron diffraction) to study organic molecules and found rotational isomerism around CC single bonds (he called gauche in 1940 ) and later in other single bonds such as CO, CN, CS and SS. This led to invitations to the USA soon after the Second World War, for example to the University of Notre Dame in 1951, where he also became a visiting professor. After the war he also turned to protein chemistry. In 1961 he was awarded the Order of Culture . In 1962 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and in 1970 to the National Academy of Sciences .

He was related to the imperial family through his wife (she was an aunt of Empress Michiko ).

Fonts

• Raman Effect, in Handbuch der Physik , Volume 26, 1958
• Structure of Molecules and Internal Rotation, Academic Press 1954
• A history of physical chemistry in Japan, Annual Review of Physical Chemistry, Volume 23, 1972, pp. 1-14
• The Scientific Papers of Professor S. Mizushima, University of Tokyo 1959

literature

• S. Noma (Ed.): Mizuushima San'ichirō . In: Japan. An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, 1993, ISBN 4-06-205938-X , p. 993.
• Yoshiyuki Kikuchi: San-Ichiro Mizushima . in Dictionary of Scientific Biography

annotation

1. ↑ Mizushima was Catholic, which is why this Catholic university suited him.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 水 島 三 一郎 . In: デ ジ タ ル 版 日本人 名 大 辞典 + Plus at kotobank.jp. Retrieved April 28, 2014 (Japanese). 
2. ↑ San-ichiro Mizushima - Nomination Database

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Mizushima is the family name, San'ichirō the first name.