Donald Cram

Donald Cram (April 22, 1919 ’Ŭ June 17, 2001) was an American chemist who won the National Medal of Science and shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research that has yielded significant new insights into chemical reactions that take place within human cells, an extraordinary achievement that enables scientists to duplicate important life processes, bridging the gap from the physical organic world to issues of molecules that are important for life itself. He was a founder of the field of host-guest chemistry. Cram grew up on Aid to Dependent Children and worked at a series of jobs at an early age. He graduated from Rollins College in Florida and the University of Nebraska before earning his doctorate in organic chemistry at Harvard in 1947. He went on to become a popular teacher at UCLA where he taught 8,000 undergraduates in his career and guided 200 graduate students. Cram published over 350 research papers and eight books on organic chemistry. He addressed the students at the 1988 Achievement Summit the year after earning the Nobel Prize.