William Standish Knowles (1917–2012)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bill Knowles passed away on June 13, 2012 at his home in Chesterfield, Missouri at the age of 95.His Nobel Prize brought the importance of industrial and applied chemistry to the forefront.William was born on June 1, 1917 in Taunton, Massachusetts and grew up in nearby New Bedford.His father was the owner of a cotton mill and he could have gone into the family business but didnt want to do that.He was educated at private schools and thinking that he was too young to go to college, spent a year at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he won the Boylston prize (US$ 50) in chemistry.After this, Knowles went to Harvard where he specialized in organic chemistry, even though his ability to do mathematics had led his advisors to suggest a physical chemistry pathway.Louis Fieser was the main influence in the move to organic chemistry.He obtained his AB degree in 1939.Bill obtained his PhD from Columbia University in 1942, working on steroid chemistry with Robert Elderfield.While performing one experiment, which required the distillation of diazomethane, he had an explosion that destroyed a hard-fought intermediate and he had to remake it.The war aided the short time to get his degree.He then joined the Monsanto Company at their facility in Dayton, Ohio, moving to St. Louis in 1944.The reason he chose Monsanto was because it was the farthest west of the companies that offered him a job.Chemists were in short supply during the war.The work at Monsanto covered many topics, starting with the manufacture of hexamethylenetetramine for the explosive cyclonite and mite repellents, and benzyl benzoate for soldiers clothing.Another project involved the synthesis of vanillin from catechol, and this was to have an influence later in Bills career, even though this chemical route was superseded by an isolation of lignin from paper waste.He also studied a manufacturing route to the antibiotic chloramphenicol, which was taken off the market because of aplastic anaemia developing in a few patients.However, this did not stop him from mixing some of this antibiotic with an ointment of other drugs that were being administered to his dog suffering from a fungal infection.The dog was better in two days and lived to be 17.Monsanto also looked at the synthesis of cortisone, and Bill was nominated to join this effort from his PhD work on steroids.This allowed him to return to Harvard and work in the labs of Professor R. B. Woodward, whom he grew to admire for his encyclopedic knowledge of chemistry and ability to look at problems from new angles.The first manufacturing project Bill had that involved a hydrogenation was the reduction of .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.152 | 0.092 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".