Wallace Carothers took his own life by swallowing cyanide on 29 April 1937, at the age of forty-one. He had long suffered from clinical depression, which at that time was poorly understood and practically untreatable. Still, he had accomplished more in his short life than many people who live their full measure of years.

One can imagine how much more would have been accomplished had he lived. Paul J. Flory, the physical chemist whose groundbreaking theories on the physical behavior of macromolecules earned him the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1974, began his work at DuPont under the mentorship of Carothers. Many people, Flory among them, felt that had Carothers lived longer he would have been awarded the Nobel Prize instead.

In addition to starting Flory down the road to unlocking the secrets of macromolecular physical chemistry, Carothers was also turning his interests toward biochemistry. In a lecture given in 1935, he proposed a revolutionary idea, hypothesizing about how the body synthesizes proteins.

"But if the reaction is preceded by adsorption at an interface, as it might be biologically, the molecule is no longer free to assume its spatially probable conformation. Its head, tail, and middle are fastened to a surface and the only terminal approaches possible may be intermolecular."

-Wallace Carothers^1,2

Proteins are made by joining amino acids together in long chains, but no one knew just how. The idea he suggested is that proteins are built when amino acids are held down on a surface and forced to join together. This vague idea turned out to be not only how proteins are made from an RNA template, but how DNA and RNA are themselves replicated.

Of course, Carothers never lived to pursue this theory. It was another twenty years before the workings of proteins, RNA, and DNA would be more fully understood, opening the way for the biotechnological wonders of today.²

The death of Carothers was a loss for humanity. In Carothers was a rare, powerful, and creative mind which saw further than others and made real what no one else could even imagine.

 

1. Carothers, Wallace. Transactions of the Faraday Society, 1936, 32, 43.

2. Hermes, Matthew. Enough for One Lifetime: Wallace Carothers, Inventor of Nylon. Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society; Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 1996, pp. 246-7.