Born: 2 December 1921, United States
Died: 3 October 2017
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Isabella Helen Lugoski
The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.
Isabella Karle was an American chemist who was instrumental in developing techniques to extract plutonium chloride from a mixture containing plutonium oxide when she worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Together with her husband, Jerome, they advanced the field of X-ray crystallography by enabling the determination of the structure of crystals, which played a significant role in the development of new pharmaceutical products and other synthesized materials.
In 1985, Jerome Karle and mathematician Herbert Hauptman won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing ways to analyze X-ray data. Many in the crystallography community felt Isabella Karle should have shared the prize.
Karle died in 2017.