This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, June 22, 2012 - Apparently, good things do come to those who wait.
William S. Knowles was 84 when he received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2001.
He was 15 years into his retirement from Monsanto, where he spent his entire career, and it had been 30 years since he invented the chemical process for which he received the Nobel: a process that made a drug to treat Parkinson’s disease safer and more plentiful. The procedure would eventually be used to help create as many as half of all pharmaceuticals.
Mr. Knowles was not anticipating the 4 a.m. call he received on Oct. 10, 2001, from the Nobel Prize selection committee, at his home in Kirkwood where he had lived until recent years.
“It came out of the blue to me,” Mr. Knowles said in his National Academy of Sciences profile. “I didn't really expect it would happen to me ... but that probably made it doubly sweet.”
That was her father’s typical modesty, said Lesley McIntire, who lives in Kirkwood.
“He was very proud of his contributions and very honored, but he was in awe of his heroes like Marie Curie and Albert Einstein,” McIntire said.
Mr. Knowles died last week of complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, at his home in Chesterfield. He was 95.
A memorial service will be Sat., June 30, at Church of the Good Shepherd in Town and Country.
The Nobel Prize
Exactly two months after receiving the call, Mr. Knowles, dressed in white tie and tails as the occasion demanded, stood smiling, hands comfortably at his sides, waiting to be the first of the triumvirate of 2001 Nobel Prize winners in chemistry to be introduced at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
Leading a three-man team, he had begun working on the groundbreaking technology in 1968. He and his colleagues, Billy D. Vineyard and M. Jerry Sabacky, developed the process, called asymmetric hydrogenation, used to produce L-Dopa, an amino acid that can diminish tremors and rigidity associated with Parkinson’s disease.
"We knew back then that it was a pioneering discovery," Vineyard told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch shortly after Mr. Knowles received the award.
Mr. Knowles shared the Nobel Prize with Ryoji Noyori of Nagoya University in Japan and K. Barry Sharpless of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., the two men credited with perfecting the molecular transformation technique.
Around 1980, Noyori redesigned part of the chemical catalyst and expanded the range of molecules that could be created using the process. About the same time, Sharpless discovered the means to make the process applicable to virtually every molecule. Building upon Mr. Knowles' original work, his Nobel partners were able to enhance the production of many now widely used medicines, including beta blockers to treat heart disease, antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs.
Mr. Knowles’ invention was being used within six months; it was the reason, he speculated, that he was chosen for the Nobel.
“This was not a laboratory curiosity,” he told the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. “That was unusually fast for a brand-new invention.”
Nobel Laureates receive a diploma, a medal and a cash award. Mr. Knowles’ share of the $943,000 award was more than $200,000. His daughter, Lesley McIntire, said he gave it all away.
“My father was a very generous person who believed in giving back to the community,” McIntire said. “It was something he did all his life.”
Mr. Knowles shared his prize money with his Monsanto collaborators, Sabacky and Vineyard, and donated the rest to his alma maters, Harvard University and Columbia University.
Second time around
William “Bill” Standish Knowles was born June 1, 1917, in Taunton, Mass., the youngest of three sons of George Bourne Knowles, the owner of a textile mill in nearby New Bedford, and Alice Tiffany Knowles.
He graduated from the Berkshire School, a boarding school in western Massachusetts at 17, and was briefly admitted to Harvard; he was advised that he was too socially immature for college. Mr. Knowles said such advice was not uncommon at the time, so he repeated senior year at another boarding school, Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., where he took his first chemistry class and won his first prize: the $50 Boylston prize in chemistry.
He was again admitted to Harvard and this time stayed until he graduated in 1939. After earning a doctorate in chemistry at Columbia University in 1942, he began his career in Dayton, Ohio, at Thomas and Hochwalt laboratories, which had recently become part of Monsanto.
“In those days, industry would hire any chemist that could breathe,” Mr. Knowles wrote in his Nobel biography.
He was transferred to Monsanto in St. Louis in 1944.
He soon met and married the former Lesley “Nancy” Cherbonnier. They met on a double date; he swapped his original date for Nancy and later declared it was the best decision he ever made.
Mr. Knowles was a member of the American Chemical Society and the National Academy of Science. In addition to the Nobel Prize, his awards included the I-R (Industrial Research) 100 Awards for Asymmetric Hydrogenation, the St. Louis American Chemical Society Section Award (ACS) and the ACS Award for Creative Invention, the Monsanto Thomas and Hochwalt Award, the Organic Reactions Catalysis Society-Paul N. Rylander Award and the Peter H. Raven Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Science, St. Louis.
The conservationist
Mr. Knowles was an early devotee of “green chemistry,” which makes industrial and biological chemicals safer for the environment and public, and reduces waste. Despite his successful tinkering with some of Mother Nature’s most intricate patterns, he believed that “nature's still the best chemist.”
He just thought it needed a little help: a catalyst. He felt the same away from the laboratory.
“I have always loved doing things outdoors, including fly-fishing, hiking and biking,” Mr. Knowles wrote in his Nobel biography. “When things are going wrong, I find splitting wood quite therapeutic.”
A cabin in Jackson Hole, Wyo. and a 100-acre farm along the Missouri River near St. Charles provided all the therapy he needed. The farm will be donated to the St. Charles County Parks Department to become a nature park upon his and his wife’s death.
More than a Nobel Prize-winning chemist and early conservationist, Mr. Knowles was also “a wonderful and actively involved father, something uncommon in the 1950s and ‘60s,” his daughter said.
Mr. Knowles was preceded in death by his parents and two brothers, George Bourne Knowles and James Tiffany Knowles.
In addition to his wife of 66 years and his daughter, he is also survived by a son, Peter Knowles (Barbara), of Seattle, Wash., and two other daughters, Sarah Knowles, also of Seattle, and Elizabeth Knowles (Thomas Murtha), of New York, and four grandchildren: William McIntire, Andrew McIntire, Miles Knowles and Brent Knowles.
A memorial service for relatives and close friends of Mr. Knowles will be at 2 p.m., Sat., June 30, at Church of the Good Shepherd, 1166 S. Mason Road, in Town and Country.
In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to one of the following organizations: Missouri Botanical Garden, P.O. Box 299, St. Louis, Mo. 63166; Planned Parenthood of St. Louis, 4251 Forest Park Ave., St. Louis, Mo. 63108, St. Louis Science Center, 5050 Oakland Ave., St. Louis, Mo. 63110, or a charity of the donor’s choice.
Gloria Ross is the head of Okara Communications and the storywriter for AfterWords, an obituary-writing and production service.