Philip Skell

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Philip S. Skell (born December 30, 1918 in Brooklyn , † November 21, 2010 ) was an American chemist. He is considered a pioneer in carbene chemistry.

Skell graduated from City College of New York with a bachelor's degree in 1938 and Columbia University with a master's degree in 1941, and received his doctorate in chemistry from Duke University in 1942 . In 1942/43 he was an assistant at the North Regional Research Labs of the US Department of Agriculture and from 1943 to 1946 he did research on antibiotics (penicillin) at the University of Illinois . In 1946/47 he was an instructor at the University of Chicago and then Assistant Professor at the University of Portland. In 1952 he became an assistant professor and 1960 professor at Pennsylvania State University , where he was Evan Pugh professor in 1974 . In 1984 he retired.

In the 1950s, he investigated short-lived intermediates and radicals with chemical traps, including carbenes, which were still considered hypothetical at the time and their existence was even largely rejected, and carbonium ions (as well as the chemical properties of individual atoms in general). In the chemistry of carbenes, the Skell rule is named after him (according to which there is stereospecific addition to olefins in the singlet state of the carbene, in general not in the triplet state).

He also emerged as a skeptic of neo-Darwinism. In 2008 he responded to a book by the National Academy of Sciences on the theory of evolution and stressed that not all members of the academy were followers of Darwinism.

In 1965 he received an honorary doctorate (LLD) from Lewis College. In 1968 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1974 he received a Humboldt Research Prize , with which he was with the Nobel Prize winner Ernst Otto Fischer at the Technical University of Munich, and in 1977 the CI Noll Award for Teaching Excellence. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1977).

Wolfgang A. Herrmann , Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and President of the Technical University of Munich, was a post-doctoral student with him as a DFG research fellow (1975/76).

He had been married since 1948 and had four children.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Career data based on American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ^ P. Skell, Robert C. Woodworth, Structure of Carbene CH2, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Volume 78, 1956, pp. 4496-4497
  3. ↑ Skell, Why Do We Invoke Darwin? Evolutionary theory contributes little to experimental biology, The Scientist, Volume 19, No. 16, August 2005, p. 10
personal data
SURNAME Skell, Philip
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Skell, Philip S.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn
DATE OF DEATH November 21, 2010