BOSTON: William Nunn Lipscomb Jr., a Harvard University professor who won the Nobel chemistry prize in 1976 for his research on the structure of molecules and on chemical bonding and mentored several other future Nobel laureates, has died. He was 91. Lipscomb, himself a protege of two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, died Thursday night at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of pneumonia and complications from a fall, said his son, James Lipscomb. Two of William Lipscomb's graduate students and a third who spent time at his lab went on to win Nobels. Yale University professor Thomas Steitz, who shared the 2009 chemistry prize, recalled Lipscomb as an inspiring teacher who encouraged creative thinking. Said Lipscomb's first graduate student at Harvard, Roald Hoffman, who was awarded the chemistry prize in 1981: “He was a great mentor, letting us work freely, yet continually putting before us puzzles to be explained.” “From him I learned of the importance of paying attention to experiment for a theoretician (as I was). And not to be afraid of the complexity of the real world,” Hoffman, who now teaches at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, told The Associated Press by e-mail. Lipscomb was awarded the Nobel for his studies on the structure and bonding mechanisms of compounds known as “boranes,” a combination of boron and hydrogen molecules. He continued Pauling's work in the 1940s at the California Institute of Technology. His lab made some of the earliest advances in discovering the structures of large proteins and other complex molecules, including the anticancer agent vincristine.
