Nobel laureate William Lipscomb dies at 91

BOSTON — William Nunn Lipscomb Jr., a Harvard University professor who won the Nobel chemistry prize in 1976 for his work on man-made compounds consisting of boron and hydrogen and the problems of chemical bonding, has died, his son said Friday. He was 91.

Lipscomb died Thursday night at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass., of pneumonia and complications from a fall, said his son, James Lipscomb.

Two of Lipscomb's graduate students and a third who spent time at his lab have won Nobels. Yale University professor Thomas Steitz, who shared the 2009 chemistry prize, said Lipscomb was an inspiring teacher who encouraged creative thinking.

"He was a great mentor, letting us work freely, yet continually putting before us puzzles to be explained," said Lipscomb's first graduate student at Harvard, Roald Hoffman, who was awarded the chemistry prize in 1981.

"From him I learned of the importance of paying attention to experiment for a theoretician (as I was). And not to be afraid of the complexity of the real world," Hoffman, who now teaches at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., told the Associated Press by email.

Lipscomb was born in Ohio and grew up in Lexington, Ky. He graduated from the University of Kentucky and served for four years in the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during WWII. He got a doctorate at the California Institute of Technology under the direction of Linus Pauling, the only person to win two individual Nobels (chemistry in 1954 and peace in 1962).

Lipscomb taught at the University of Minnesota for about 13 years before moving to Harvard, where he taught until he reached the school's mandatory retirement age of 70.

Students affectionately referred to him as "Colonel," in part a reference to his upbringing.

"The other reason he was called the Colonel was because at Harvard that time all the faculty were referred to as Dr. So-and-So or Prof. So-and-So ... and I think he didn't want to be called that and nobody called them by their first names — so we couldn't call him Bill — but the Colonel was sort of different, and so he could have this informal name," Steitz said.

Then-Kentucky Gov. Wendell Ford granted Lipscomb a commission of a Kentucky Colonel in 1973.

Lipscomb encouraged students not to fear the risk of exploring solutions to scientific problems, Steitz told the AP.

"He got me into working on the crystal structures of macro molecules — that was the general area in which I received the Nobel Prize in chemistry," Steitz said.