Harold A. Scheraga

Harold Scheraga starts this interview by recalling his childhood in Monticello, New York and then in Brooklyn, where he attended Brooklyn Boys High School. There he was attracted to Latin and mathematics. Scheraga decided to concentrate on chemistry only when he began attending the City College of New York. In the late thirties, CCNY graduates met some difficulties when trying to continue to graduate school. However, Scheraga was offered a place at Duke University, where the chemistry department was chaired by Paul Gross, himself a CCNY graduate. Along with his graduate research on the Kerr effect, Scheraga contributed to the wartime projects on the frangible bullet and on gas-phase halogenation. Influenced in part by the Cohn and Edsall book Peptides, Amino-Acids and Proteins, Scheraga consolidated his growing interest in biochemical areas by a postdoctoral year at Harvard. From there, he was appointed as an instructor in the chemistry department at Cornell, where he has spent the rest of his career, including a period (1960–1967) as chairman. During the 1970s, he was also a visiting professor at the Weizmann Institute. In the second part of his interview with Bohning, Scheraga describes the development of his research activities He first goes into the hydrodynamic properties of polymer solutions, which then led to his extensive work on protein structure and function. Scheraga also recounts his achievements as departmental chairman, with the construction of the new chemistry building and the appointment of new faculty. International collaboration has always been important to Scheraga, and he details his sabbaticals at the Carlsberg laboratory and his later association with the Weizmann Institute.

Harvard Medical School

1946 - 1947

American Chemical Society Postdoctoral Fellow

Cornell University

1947 - 1950 Instructor, Chemistry

Cornell University

1950 - 1953 Assistant Professor

Cornell University

1953 - 1958 Associate Professor

Cornell University

1958 - 1965 Professor

Cornell University

1960 - 1967 Chairman, Chemistry Department

Cornell University

1965 Todd Professor of Chemistry

Weizmann Institute, Rehovoth, Israel

1970 - 1980 Visiting Professor

James J. Bohning

James J. Bohning is professor emeritus of chemistry at Wilkes University, where he was a faculty member from 1959 to 1990. He served there as chemistry department chair from 1970 to 1986 and environmental science department chair from 1987 to 1990. Bohning was chair of the American Chemical Society’s Division of the History of Chemistry in 1986; he received the division’s Outstanding Paper Award in 1989 and has presented more than forty papers at national meetings of the society. Bohning was on the advisory committee of the society’s National Historic Chemical Landmarks Program from its inception in 1992 through 2001 and is currently a consultant to the committee. He developed the oral history program of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and he was the foundation’s director of oral history from 1990 to 1995. From 1995 to 1998, Bohning was a science writer for the News Service group of the American Chemical Society. He is currently a visiting research scientist and CESAR Fellow at Lehigh University. In May 2005, he received the Joseph Priestley Service Award from the Susquehanna Valley Section of the American Chemical Society.