About Jerome Karle
Jerome Karle (born Jerome Karfunkle; June 18, 1918 – June 6, 2013) was an American physical chemist. Jointly with Herbert A. Hauptman, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985, for the direct analysis of crystal structures using X-ray scattering techniques. == Early life and education == Karle was born in New York City, on June 18, 1918, the son of Sadie Helen (Kun) and Louis Karfunkle. He was born into a Jewish family with a strong interest in the arts. He had played piano as a youth and had participated in a number of competitions, but he was far more interested in science. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, and would later join Arthur Kornberg (awarded the Nobel in Medicine in 1959) and Paul Berg (a winner in Chemistry in 1980), as graduates of the school to win Nobel Prizes. As a youth, Karle enjoyed handball, ice skating, touch football and swimming in the nearby Atlantic Ocean. He started college at the age of 15 and received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1937, where he took additional courses in biology, chemistry and math in addition to the required curriculum there. He earned a master's degree from Harvard University in 1938, having majored in biology. As part of a plan to accumulate enough money to pay for further graduate studies, Karle took a position in Albany, New York with the New York State Department of Health, where he developed a method to measure dissolved fluoride levels, a technique that would become a standard for water fluoridation.
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