Glaser, Donald Arthur


Glaser, Donald Arthur,

1926–2013, American physicist, b. Cleveland, Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, 1950. He was a professor at the Univ. of Michigan from 1950 to 1959, when he joined the faculty at the Univ. of California, Berkeley. Glaser was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics for his 1952 invention of the bubble chamberbubble chamber,
device for detecting charged particles and other radiation by means of tracks of bubbles left in a chamber filled with liquid hydrogen or other liquefied gas. It was invented in 1952 by Donald Glaser.
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, which enabled scientists to examine the subatomic particles produced in high-energy accelerators. The bubble chamber provided a window into these minute particles by causing them to leave behind a trace of their presence and collisions in bubbles, which could be photographed. While groundbreaking at the time of its invention and a major improvement over the cloud chambercloud chamber,
device used to detect elementary particles and other ionizing radiation. A cloud chamber consists essentially of a closed container filled with a supersaturated vapor, e.g., water in air.
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, the bubble chamber has since been replaced by other particle detector technologies. After winnning the Nobel, Glaser switched fields, turning to molecular biology and doing research on bacteria and viruses. In 1971 he was a founder of the Cetus Corp., one of the earliest biotechnology companies, which developed the cancer therapies interleukin-2 and interferon. During the 1980s Glaser turned to the neurobiology of vision, studying the human perception of motion and developing mathematical models of the process.

Glaser, Donald Arthur

 

Born Sept. 21, 1926, in Cleveland. American physicist. Member of the American Academy of Sciences (1962).

Glaser graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1949. From 1949 to 1959 he was a professor at the University of Michigan. He has been a professor at the University of California since 1959. His scientific works are devoted to the physics of cosmic rays and nuclear physics. In 1952 he built a bubble chamber run with liquid hydrogen—an instrument for studying high-energy elementary particles. Glaser was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1960.