istration, will be consolidated in a bureau of regulatory compliance. FDA's bureau of medicine—recently reorganized to handle new responsibilities under the Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendments of 1962—was left unchanged in the reshuffle. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Anthony J. Celebrezze, sees the upgrading of science as one of the main features of the new setup. "I expect the reorganization to improve FDA operations all along the line and thereby provide more effective protection of the consumers' interests," he says. H E W turned down the citizens advisory committee's proposal to establish a food and drug institute to serve as focal point for all FDA scientific activities. An FDA source tells C&EN that the idea of a separate, near-autonomous scientific institute didn't seem to fit into FDA's scheme of things. He says that FDA's scientific activities should support its enforcement activities. H E W officials feared that such a scientific institute might pursue investigation into scientific areas not pertaining to FDA's primary mission. Among the key personnel changes at FDA, Dr. Kenneth L. Milstead, formerly deputy director of the bureau of enforcement, has been named special assistant to the commissioner for national advisory council and special projects. Assistant Commissioner Winton B. Rankin is now assistant commissioner for planning, and Dr. O. L. Kline, formerly assistant commissioner for science, adds the word "resources" to his present title. Assistant commissioner for regulations, J. Kenneth Kirk, and Malcolm R. Stephens, director of enforcement, become assistant commissioners for operations and for regulations, respectively. Deputy director Dr. Daniel Banes will serve as acting director of the bureau of scientific research. Dr. Ralph G. Smith wall do the same in the bureau of medicine. E. S. Roe, director of the bureau of biological and physical sciences, becomes director of the new bureau of scientific standards and evaluation. Allan E. Rayfield moves from director of field administration to director of regulatory compliance. According to FDA Commissioner George P. Larrick, the new plan "is a foundation for progressive strengthening of consumer protection . . . over the next 10 years." 22
C&EN
NOV. 11, 1 9 6 3
Prof. Karl Ziegler Organometal catalysts
Prof. Giulio Natta Isotactic polymers
Ziegler and Natta Share Nobel Prize The 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded jointly last week to Prof. Karl Ziegler, Max Planck Institute of Coal Research, Mulheim, Germany, and to Prof. Giulio Natta, director of the Industrial Chemical Institute at Milan's Institute of Technology, Italy. Awarding of the prizes by Sweden's Royal Academy of Sciences will be followed by a formal presentation by Sweden's King Gustav VI Adolph at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10. Prof. Ziegler and Prof. Natta, who will share equally in the $51,000 prize, were cited for their work in macromolecular chemistry. Particularly, the academy referred to their work in the controlled polymerization of hydrocarbons through the use of organometallic catalysts. These catalysts and related processes are used throughout the world to make low-pressure-process, linear polyethylene, isotactic polypropylene, and the like. Prof. Ziegler's early work was on the reactions between organometallic compounds—lithium-based, especially —and butadiene. These efforts led to the discovery that the behavior of aluminum with ethylene parallels that of lithium with butadiene. These studies, in turn, led to the discovery of a low-pressure process for making polyethylene: In the presence of aluminum alkyls, ethylene undergoes an addition reaction that yields long-chain aluminum alkyls, which, in the presence of water, decompose to polyethylene. This catalyst system was improved through the use of mixed organometallic catalysts, such as aluminum and titanium compounds.
Prof. Ziegler also developed a continuous electrochemical process to form tetraethyllead directly from lead (a lOOVc conversion), hydrogen, and ethylene in the presence of an alkylaluminum catalyst. He has, among other things, studied the chemistry of free radicals with trivalent carbon and the synthesis of many-membered rings, including cantharadin. Prof. Ziegler was born in 1898 near Kassel. He received his doctorate at the University of Marburg and later taught at several German universities. He became a director of the Max Planck Institute in 1943. Prof. Natta was born in 1903 at Imperia, near Genoa. He received a doctorate in chemical engineering from Milan's Polytechnic Institute. He taught general, physical, and industrial chemistry at several Italian universities before returning to Milan. For more than 30 years, Prof. Natta served as a consultant to Montecatini. His early work led to new syntheses for methanol and formaldehyde. But since about 1950, most of his work has been in polymer chemistry. In 1954, Prof. Natta revealed that he had prepared a highly crystalline polypropylene by fractionation from an amorphous polypropylene mixture. His wife, who has a degree in letters, proposed that the term "isotactic" (same shape) be used to describe his polypropylene, which is symmetrical in three dimensions. Further work in this field resulted in his finding stereospecific catalysts for making isotactic polypropylene and gave rise to much of the present work in stereospecific catalysis and stereoregular polymers.
