Navy Civilian Nobel Laureates Advanced Military Innovation

Jerome Karle and Herbert Hauptman were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1985 while working at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.

Their award was for inventing direct methods to determine complex crystal structures using X-ray diffraction analysis. Scientists use this method to determine the structure and shapes of complex molecules, a process that once took months or years. Researchers can now find structures of molecules containing thousands of atoms in a matter of hours.

Their work paved the way for important advances in medicine, pharmaceuticals, explosives and many other scientific fields used by the military and industry.

"It is almost impossible to give an example in the field of chemistry where this method is not being used," said a judge for their Nobel Prize.

After earning his doctorate in physical chemistry in 1942, Karle worked on the Manhattan Project in Chicago, focusing on the extraction and purification of plutonium.

Karle joined the NRL in 1944 and retired in 2009 as chief scientist of the laboratory for the structure of matter.

Isabella Karle also worked on the Manhattan Project with her husband, Jerome, and joined him at the NRL in 1946. She assisted him with analyzing molecular structures, and her contributions were so significant that he said his wife should have shared in his Nobel Prize. She retired from the research laboratory with him. In 1995, Isabella received the National Medal of Science from former President Bill Clinton.

Jerome Karle died June 6, 2013, at the age of 94, and Isabella died Oct. 3, 2017, at the age of 95. The couple is survived by three daughters - two chemists and one a geologist - and four grandchildren.

Hauptman was a weather forecaster in the Navy and served in the Southwest Pacific during World War II. He worked at the NRL from 1947 to 1970.

He later joined the crystallographic group of the Medical Foundation of Buffalo in New York. In 1972, he became the foundation's research director, and in 1994 it was renamed the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in honor of him and Helen Woodward Rivas, a donor to the biomedical research facility.

Hauptman died Oct. 23, 2011, at age 94, and his wife, Edith, died Sept. 11, 2012. They are survived by two daughters.