Dunitz, Jack D.

Jack David Dunitz was born on March 29, 1923 in Glasgow, Scotland. He attended primary and secondary school in Glasgow, where he established himself as an intelligent child and a capable rugby player. It was during this time that he first became interested in chemistry, leading him to pursue a Bachelor's Degree in Chemistry at Glasgow University in 1940. Due to the strains of World War II, Dunitz's studies at Glasgow were condensed into three years and, following graduation, he entered the university's doctoral program under the supervision of John Monteath Robertson. Largely due to the pressures of Robertson's official responsibilities, Dunitz's experience as a doctoral student was primarily one of self-motivated learning and informal collaboration with other students. It was during this time that he began to work intensively with x-ray crystallography. He was assigned to the determination of the crystal structures of acetylenedicarboxylic acid dihydrate and diacetylenedicarboxylic acid dihydrate - a difficult and tedious process that took three years to complete.

At Glasgow Dunitz became familiar with the work of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, an internationally known crystallographer. Upon receiving his Ph.D., he took a position at Oxford as a postdoctoral researcher under Hodgkin's supervision. During his time in her laboratory, Dunitz met some of the most influential figures in twentieth century science including Sir Lawrence Bragg, John Desmond Bernal, and Max Perutz. There, he embarked on an extensive research program that included determining the structure of a calciferol derivative - a molecule that, at the time, was the most complex structure ever determined through means of x-ray crystallography - and the study of a tetraphenylcyclobutane structure. Through this work, he was introduced to Verner Schomaker who suggested that Dunitz begin gas-phase electron diffraction studies and helped to equip Dunitz with a research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. After completing his work at Oxford, Dunitz left England for California where, in 1948, he began his work at Caltech. There, he met many of the scientists responsible for developing the field of modern structural chemistry including Linus Pauling and Robert Corey.

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