Carbon Catalyst for Half a Century - NYTimes.com
A Conversation With Mildred Dresselhaus
Carbon Catalyst for Half a Century
1948 A tribute at Hunter High School.
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: July 2, 2012
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus, a professor of physics
and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walks with
a very large carbon footprint, and in her case it’s a good thing.
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M.I.T. Mildred Dresselhaus with a bottle of vapor-grown carbon fiber.
For more than half a century, Dr. Dresselhaus has studied the
fundamental properties of carbon — carbon as graphite, the dark, flaky
mineral with which our pencils are pointed, and carbon as liquid, the
element with the highest melting point in nature; carbon that is
insulator one moment, superconductor the next.
She invented breakthrough techniques for studying individual layers of
carbon atoms. She discovered ways to capture the thermal energy of
vibrating particles at well-defined “boundaries,” and then to use that
heat to make electricity.
She devised carbon fibers that are stronger than steel at a fraction of
steel’s weight. Her research helped usher in the age of nanotechnology,
the wildly popular effort to downsize electronic circuits, medical
devices and a host of other products to molecular dimensions.
Dr. Dresselhaus recently won the 2012 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience,
a $1 million honor that matches the purse size and Scandinavian
provenance of a Nobel, if not quite the status. The new award joins a
very long list of laurels, among them the National Medal of Science, the
Enrico Fermi Award, the presidencies of the American Physical Society
and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 28 honorary
doctorates and a stint in the Department of Energy under President Bill
Clinton.
Dr. Dresselhaus has also been a prominent advocate for women in physics
and engineering, disciplines that are still short on high-ranking female
faces and that were outright hostile to women when she began her career
in the late 1950s. Even before entering science, she was well
accustomed to hostility and hard times, having grown up impoverished in a
rough part of the Bronx.
Today, at 81, the woman nicknamed the Queen of Carbon still works long
hours in the lab, publishes prolifically, gives talks around the world
and plays violin and viola in chamber groups. Married to a fellow
physicist, Gene Dresselhaus, she is the mother of four and grandmother
of five, including a granddaughter who is coming to M.I.T. this fall to
study nanotechnology.
I spoke with Dr. Dresselhaus in her trapezoid-shaped office, under the
vivid presence of a Venezuelan sunburst tapestry that covered much of
one wall.
Your parents were immigrants from Poland, and
your father often couldn’t find work. You’ve talked about how as a child
you had no toys, sometimes no food and a single set of clothes that
your mother washed for you each night. Now, with the Kavli award, you’re
a bona fide member of the 1 percent club. How does that feel?
You know, It’s a funny thing. Being a scientist, you don’t get a big
salary, but it’s more than you need. When you’re busy enjoying what
you’re doing, you don’t spend a lot of money. I wasn’t expecting prizes.
You were born in Brooklyn. So how did you end up in the Bronx?
My older brother was a musical prodigy, and he got a scholarship to the
Bronx House Music School. We moved to the Bronx when I was 4 to be close
to his music school. Then I got a music scholarship myself, at the age
of 6, but that was for a school down in Greenwich Village. I had to take
the elevated train and then the subway to get there. I can’t tell you
how many times I fell down those subway stairs. I was carrying too much,
my violin, my schoolbooks. I would trip and lose my balance.
You were traveling downtown on your own at age 6?
The scariest part was coming home and getting off the train in the
Bronx, when I had to walk through that dangerous neighborhood. But I
survived.
I want to read this little passage about you, when you were
Mildred Spiewak. “Any equation she can solve; every problem she can
resolve. Mildred equals brains plus fun. In math and science she’s
second to none.”
Where did you get that from?
It’s from my mother’s 1948 yearbook for Hunter High School. She
was a classmate of yours, although she says she didn’t know you at the
time.
Hunter High School was a real turning point for me. I found out about
its existence through the music school. Nobody I knew had gone to one of
these special high schools, and my teachers didn’t think it was
possible to get in. But Hunter sent me a practice exam, and I studied
what I needed to know to pass the exam. It was an excellent school with
excellent teachers.
By the end you were already known as a science and math whiz. Yet you didn’t think a science career was possible.
At that time there were only three kinds of jobs commonly open to women:
teaching, nursing and secretarial work. I went on to Hunter College
thinking I would be an elementary schoolteacher.
But then you met Rosalyn Yalow, the future Nobel laureate.
I took her class in elementary nuclear physics. It was a tiny class,
maybe 3 students, maybe 10. She was a real leader and a very domineering
person. You met her and she said, “You’re going to do this.” She told
me I should focus on science. She left the exact science unspecified but
said I should do something at the forefront of some area. After that,
she was always in my life, writing letters of recommendation for me,
keeping up with my progress. She died just a year ago. I was the first
speaker at her memorial symposium.
You studied with other scientific giants, like Enrico Fermi.
That was at the University of Chicago, where I did my graduate work, and
at the time it was the best university in physics. Fermi was like
Rosalyn Yalow in a couple of ways: He had very few students and took a
personal interest in all of them. We both lived near the university, and
we ended up walking together early in the mornings. He had such a sharp
mind. I learned how to think about physics from him.
You did your doctoral research on superconductivity, where
electric current flows through a material and the electrons meet almost
no resistance, right?
Superconductivity helped broaden my professional phase space. When I
started my work, it was already known that magnetic fields could quench
superconductivity. I found that the transition was not continuous, that
superconductivity was initially enhanced in the presence of magnetic
fields, then it would suddenly fall off. That was a little surprising,
and so my graduate thesis attracted a bit of attention.
Didn’t you and your husband end up at M.I.T. because it was the one institution without nepotism rules?
M.I.T. and I.B.M. both lacked nepotism rules, and both offered us
positions. When I came to M.I.T. in 1960, only 4 percent of the students
were female. Today it’s about 40 percent of undergraduates. At Lincoln
Lab, they had 1,000 men and two women. But we had a very good boss, and
he treated us just like everybody else.
What inspired you to study carbon?
I thought it was an interesting material and it was amenable to the
laboratory capabilities we had, in magneto-optics. I also liked having a
problem that was not too popular. I had young children at the time. If
one day I had to be at home with a sick child, it wouldn’t be the end of
the world.
Everybody else was working on semiconductors. They thought carbon was
too hard and not a fruitful area of study. The number of papers
published on carbon when I started was essentially zero, and it’s been
going up, up, up my whole career.
You paved the way for research that yielded two Nobel Prizes, for buckyballs in 1996 and carbon nanotubes in 2010. Do you feel a tiny bit slighted at not being among the winners?
Not at all. In both cases, they had ideas I missed, and they did great
work. I’ve received a lot of recognition for my contributions, and I was
a special guest at the Nobel ceremony in 2010.
How did you manage a high-powered career with four children?
A good husband is a vital part of it, somebody who understands what
you’re trying to do and encourages it. I also had a good baby sitter.
She worked for me for 29 years.
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