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Professor Ron Brown was interviewed in 2008 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge.
The following summary of Brown's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract discusses some of the molecules that he was instrumental in identifying. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Ron Brown was born in Melbourne in 1927. He studied at the University of Melbourne, where he received a BSc in 1946. He completed a PhD at Kings College, University of London, in 1952. He then was an assistant lecturer in chemistry at University College London from 1952 to 1953.
In 1953, Brown returned to the University of Melbourne as a senior lecturer in general chemistry and became a reader in theoretical chemistry in 1959. In that same year he became foundation professor of chemistry at Monash University and remained in this position until his retirement in 1992.
Over a long career, Brown worked in many areas of chemistry including spectroscopy, theoretical chemistry, astronomy, molecules and life in space. His early years were mainly spent studying the electronic structure of molecules as a way of understanding their chemical properties. He was one of the earliest people to use quantum mechanics to understand chemical reactions. He then studied the fundamental properties of molecules using microwave spectroscopy and later used this technique to search for interstellar molecules. Among other things he discovered the tricarbon monoxide molecule and another called propadienone, which was kinked when it had been predicted to be straight.
Brown received many awards during his career including three from the Royal Australian Chemical Institute: the Masson Memorial Scholarship Prize (1948), the Rennie Memorial Medal (1951) and the HG Smith Medal (1959). In 1959 he received the David Syme Prize for Research from the University of Melbourne. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2002 and received the Australia Centenary Medal in 2001.
Brown was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1965 and was awarded the Academy’s Matthew Flinders Medal in 1988.
Ron, would you like to sum up some of the highlights of your life in science?
It’s difficult to pick things out, because I seem to have done a motley array of things, but in retrospect I suppose I am proudest that I achieved competence in theoretical chemistry unassisted. I was a sort of ‘solo job’ – whereas other people had relied on being linked to older scientists who had got involved in quantum mechanics and so on, I had to do it just from books. So that’s one little highlight.
To get microwave spectroscopy going was another highlight because, again, we were on our own in Australia. There was no-one we could turn to and say, ‘Could we look at your spectrometer?’ We had to work it out for ourselves. We ultimately were working in ranges that no-one else was. We were using an insignificant-looking little gadget called a klystron, which generates very short wavelength microwaves, millimetre waves. The waves have to come out of the output cavity through a rectangular hole, and their wavelength therefore has to be small enough to go through that very little hole. With klystrons of this sort – and we had a whole range of them to cover all different frequencies – we could cover the millimetre and centimetre range very completely, and that made us very versatile.
I am rather proud of that and some of the highlights in that area, such as that we were able to identify another oxide of carbon. It’s perhaps rather trendy to mention that achievement now, when everyone is concerned about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Another two other oxides of carbon were known, carbon monoxide and carbon suboxide, but we managed to add a fourth molecule to that little ‘triumvirate’, as you might say: C3O, three carbon atoms and one oxygen. It is a very unstable oxide. You can’t put it in a bottle and store it on a shelf to show people. We would expect it to be colourless, so you wouldn’t see much. And it’s a gas, as far as we know, at room temperature. For me it was a highlight to identify that by microwaves, to show that it is definitely C3O and to know its shape - atoms in a line.
One of the little 'holy grails' in microwave spectroscopy was to get the spectrum of an amino acid. All the different microwave groups wanted to get the frequencies that are transmitted by an amino acid in space - so they can hunt for it, of course. After much trying, we finally succeeded in getting the first signals from any amino acid: the simplest one, glycine. While we were trying, I visited various microwave groups around the world and several of them confessed to me that they’d tried in vain and had given up; it was beyond them to do it. But we managed to do it and feel rather proud of that.
There are several other molecules that we were pleased to identify this way. One that chemists know but other people wouldn’t is benzyne. (That is not ‘benzene’ badly pronounced; it’s a different molecule with less hydrogen in it than benzene.) We were able to get the microwave spectrum of benzyne, to identify it; in other words, to show conclusively that benzyne existed as a sixmembered ring, with six carbons in a ring and four hydrogens. That was a triumph for us – and in saying so I use the plural because all of this work is done with a team. The team at that stage had an extremely able post doctoral fellow who came out from Switzerland to work with us. Thanks to his skill and persistence, apart from anything else, I think, he managed to succeed in doing that.
Another molecule that I am rather proud we produced is hydrogen isocyanide. Everyone who reads Agatha Christie knows that all respectable murderers who are going to poison someone use hydrogen cyanide, HCN. But you can rearrange the hydrogen, the carbon and the nitrogen so that the nitrogen is in the middle, the hydrogen at one end and the carbon at the other. That is a different molecule from hydrogen cyanide. We were able to generate that in the lab in a way that no-one had used before – very simply, in fact, just by heating hydrogen cyanide, except that you have to heat it to about 1,000 degrees centigrade and you have to spray it out of little nozzles so that it’s chilled by supersonic expansion, and then you can detect its spectrum. We not only did that but went to radio telescopes and identified the different isotopic forms of carbon isocyanide. So that was another highlight.
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
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