Zimm, Bruno

Biography

Born in Woodstock, New York, on October 31, 1920, Bruno Hasbrouck Zimm grew up in an artistic household with his father, a sculptor and his mother, a writer. His education began at Columbia University, where he earned a bachelor's degree of science in 1941, followed by a master's in 1943, and a Ph.D. in 1944, the latter was under the direction of theoretical chemical physicist, Joseph Mayer, with Zimm's thesis on the vapor pressures of alkali halides and lattice energies. Toward the end of World War II, Zimm participated in war-related research on light scattering by smokes under Victor K. LaMer.

After leaving Columbia University, Zimm briefly taught at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he collaborated with polymer scientist Herman Mark. He joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, for four years (1946-1950), and taught as visiting faculty at Harvard University. During his tenure at Berkeley, he continued his work on light scattering, which he had developed while at Brooklyn, and invented the "Zimm Plot" for determining both size and shape factors for large molecules. He then worked at General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, for nine years (1951-1960), during which time he continued to study synthetic polymers.

After a brief period as visiting faculty at Yale University, he accepted a position at the University of California, San Diego (1960), where he helped establish the Department of Chemistry, along with Joseph Mayer, Stanley Miller, David Bonner, and Stanley Mills. He remained at UCSD until his death.

After his arrival at UCSD, Zimm began a long-term experimental project to find the true lengths of native DNA molecules. In order to test these theories, in 1963, he and post-doctoral student Don Crothers devised an apparatus to measure the lengths of long polymers using the viscosity of solutions, namely a rotating cylinder viscometer, although the device took about ten years to fully evolve. This research allowed him, with post-doctoral biologist Ruth Kavenoff, to measure for the first time the size of a DNA molecule in an intact fruit fly chromosome. The research concluded that each chromosome was composed of a single densely folded DNA molecule. Later on in his research career, he focused on theoretical schemes for the counter-ion environment around DNA. Zimm also taught courses on macromolecules in the UCSD Department of Chemistry for graduate and undergraduate students.

Zimm was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1958 and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received numerous honors and awards, including the Bingham Medal of the Society of Rheology in 1960, the American Physical Society High-Polymer Physics Prize in 1963, and the National Academy's Award in Chemical Sciences in 1981.

Bruno Zimm died on November 26, 2005.

References used:

Doolittle, Russell. "Bruno H. Zimm (1920-2005)", PROTEIN SCIENCE, 2006, 15:942-944.

Stockmayer, Walter. "Bruno Zimm on His 65th Birthday", MACROMOLECULES, Volume 18, Number 11, 1985.

From the guide to the Bruno Zimm Papers, 1941 - 2001, (University of California, San Diego. Geisel Library. Mandeville Special Collections Library.)