Herbert Sander Gutowsky (November 8, 1919 – January 13, 2000) was an American chemist who was a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
[5] Gutowsky attended Indiana University Bloomington, where he worked for three years as an undergraduate assistant to astronomer Frank K.
Gutowsky collaborated with George Pake, resulting in the publication of several important papers on the use of NMR to study molecular structure and motion in solids.
[9] The 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by physicists Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell for their independent discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance.
[5][16] Gutowsky's work was essential both in understanding the behavior and capabilities of NMR as a scientific instrument and relating it to core concepts in chemistry.
Gutowsky employed a variety of strategies to ensure that the observed results that he and others were obtaining with NMR were consistently described, understood, and theoretically explained.
"[3]: 24 Requiring a high level of precision and carefully examining observed anomalies were key to Gutowsky's success in searching for the new, the unexpected, and the interesting.
[3]: 71 By April 1950, Gutowsky and Charles J. Hoffman were able to observe proton resonance shifts for compounds containing fluorine nuclei, using both inorganic and organic samples.
In September, when members of his group observed a double resonance in PF3 where it was not predicted, it was at first assumed that it was a result of impurities or an incomplete reaction in preparation.
However, their observations held up under stringent testing,[3]: 45–53 and other researchers were independently reporting related results: Walter D. Knight (Brookhaven National Laboratory), William C. Dickinson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Warren Proctor and Fu Chun Yu (Stanford).
[16]: 144 By 1953, Lee Meyer, Apollo Saika, and Gutowsky were able to associate the chemical shift of protons with functional groups within molecules.
[3]: 66–69 [17] In addition, Apollo Saika and Illinois physicist Charles Pence Slichter used correlations between the electronegativity of atoms bound to fluorine and the chemical shift data from the group's fluorine research, to simplify the formula originally proposed for the chemical shift by quantum physicist Norman Ramsey at Harvard.
[20] Gutowsky and his group had initially assumed that their 1950s observations of double resonance lines were accidental, but re-examined their work after Proctor & Yu at Stanford also reported anomalies.
[3]: 71–74 [16]: 134–140 Gutowsky, McCall and Slichter related the intensities of lines to their binomial coefficients, proposing what turned out to be a correct explanation for such couplings, and suggesting a simple predictive rule that became a basis for further structural research.
[3]: 74 [25] He early postulated that multiplets observed with acids in aqueous solutions might collapse into a single line as a result of increased exchange rates.
[25] Gutowsky and Charles H. Holm studied intramolecular rotational rates of amides, establishing that energy barriers existed between molecular conformations.
[10] Nonetheless, he explored the use of NMR in complex biological systems by working with Eric Oldfield on protein-lipid interactions in membranes.
Gutowsky's group examined the rotational spectra of weakly bound molecules in the gas phase, and was the first to use this method to study trimers, tetramers, and pentamers.
Gutowsky's pioneering work on the spin–spin coupling effect developed this phenomenon into a 'finger print' method for the identification and characterization of organic compounds.