Oscar K. Rice The Lecture in Chemistry Thursday, April 16th, 2015, 12:00 pm Sonya Haynes Stone Center Auditorium Reception starts at 11:15 am Oscar Knefler Rice, 1903-1978 Oscar K. Rice, late Kenan Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina, was born in Chicago on February 12, 1903. He received his BS degree in 1924 and his Ph.D. in 1926, both from the University of California at Berkeley. He was for three years a National Research Council Fellow at the California Institute of Technology and at Leipzig, and then Instructor of Chemistry at Harvard University, 19301935. He was at the University of North Carolina from 1936. He died May 7, 1978. Rice’s scientific work spanned the full range of modern physical chemistry: quantum theory, chemical kinetics, equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics. In each of these fields he was a pioneer, frequently the first to identify and attack a problem of farreaching significance. His early work in unimolecular reaction-rate theory was classic and led to the formulation of unimolecular reaction rates known as the RRKM theory (Rice-Ramsperger-KasselMarcus). The decisive importance of Rice’s contribution was recognized in 1932 by the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry. Rice’s work in molecular quantum mechanics was equally important and included the fundamental theory of predissociation and diffuse spectra. In his work on electronic transitions and the intersection of potential energy surfaces, he was the first to account for the quenching of electronic fluorescence in those terms. His theoretical studies of inelastic molecular collisions and vibrational excitation included the discovery of what is now known as the method of perturbed stationary states. His 1940 book, Electronic Structure and Chemical Binding, was one of the first expositions of this subject for students and had a strong influence in teaching of science. In the early 1960s Rice returned to a long-standing interest in the problem of the kinetics and the mechanism of atomic recombination, and its inverse, diatomic dissociation. He clarified the connection between an equilibrium constant and the ratio of forward and reverse rate constants. Our present understanding of the very meaning of a rate constant was seriously deepened by Rice’s analysis. These important accomplishments were matched in originality by Rice’s work in his last years on phase transitions and critical phenomena. Rice studied the thermodynamics of critical-point and lambda-point phenomena, and described the relationships between compressibility, specific heat, and the shape of coexistence curves. He pointed out the connection between the shapes of coexistence curves and critical isotherms. His address “Secondary Variables in Critical Phenomena” was delivered as the awardee of the American Chemical Society’s 1970 Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry. He authored some of the first work on the fundamental problem of determining intermolecular forces from bulk macroscopic properties. Rice provided the first experimental determination of the rate of vanishing of the interfacial tension near a consolute point, important data in the subsequent development of the theory of interfaces near critical points. He was the author of Statistical Mechanics, Thermodynamics, and Kinetics, W. H. Freeman, 1967, a seminal text on statistical mechanics. Rice died at the age of seventy-five and in the fifty-second year of an extraordinarily productive career. To the end, he thought deeply about science. Eric T. Kool George A. and Hilda M. Daubert Professor, Stanford University Designer DNA Bases: Probing Molecules and Mechanisms in Biology Although highly successful in Nature, the DNA bases are – in chemical terms – quite limited in their properties. The tools of synthesis and physical analysis allow us to design a wide variety of DNA base replacements, conferring properties in nucleic acids that can lead to surprising and useful outcomes. For example, we have designed dozens of novel fluorescent DNA bases, and are incorporating them into short oligomers of thousands of distinct sequences. From these we are developing agents for imaging specific proteins and enzyme activities in living cells and organisms. We have also developed broad classes of these DNA-like molecules as chemosensors that can detect many different molecules and ions in air and water, with applications ranging from biomedicine to environmental remediation. A more complete version of the tribute to Professor Rice, prepared by B. Widom at Cornell University, was published in J. Stat. Phys. 1979, 21, No. 3. The cover photo depicts Professors Oscar K. Rice and Royce W. Murray, deep in discussion about how to organize the volumes of papers and publications enveloping them in the former’s office in Venable Hall. If the calendar behind Professor Rice was kept current, the image was taken in March of 1968.