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WASHINGTON Albert Crewe, prominent physicist
Albert Crewe, a University of Chicago physicist whose ingenious contributions to electron microscope development made it possible to see the previously unseen and yielded photographs of individual atoms, died Nov. 20 at his home near Chicago. Crewe was 82; his death was attributed to Parkinson's disease.
In 1970, Crewe was hailed for his striking, unusual photos of atoms. In 1976, he was praised as a pioneer when he made motion pictures of atoms. Such achievements aided progress in areas of science including computers, catalysis and cell biology.
Just as light waves form images in optical microscopes, beams of electrons create images in electron microscopes. Electrons are particles, but like light, they have the properties of waves.
A key step by which Crewe created his images of atoms was his development of a special electron source that made available electrons with nearly identical wavelengths. That made it possible to focus the electron beam, like a laser, on targets as tiny as single atoms.
Albert Victor Crewe was born into poverty Feb. 18, 1927, in Yorkshire, England, and rose through the academic ranks, obtaining a physics doctorate at the University of Liverpool in 1951.
He worked with atom smashers; their operation, like that of the electron microscope, entails the control of beams of particles.
Offered a post at the University of Chicago, he joined the physics faculty in 1956 and retired 40 years later as professor emeritus. From 1971 to 1981, he was dean of physical science.
He was also director of the particle accelerator unit at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago from 1958 to 1961 and of the entire lab from 1961 to 1967.
Named to a top post at the government-supported lab before attaining citizenship, he received expedited processing, took a one-question test - Who presides over the Senate? - and became an American, his son David said.
Crewe is survived by his wife of 60 years, Doreen, four children and 10 grandchildren.
Understatement distinguished Crewe's 1970 report in which he wrote that "the bright spots" in his photos were "probably single atoms."
And relative calm prevailed the day Crewe obtained the images, said Chicago co-worker Roger Hildebrand. His colleagues knew he could do it, Hildebrand said. Besides, he added, high-fiving in the lab "is not the way real science works."
But the nature of the feat was made evident by some of the reaction outside the lab.
For example, Dr. Crowe's daughter Jennifer recalled that when she told her middle-school teacher what her father had done, the teacher said, "Impossible." Washington Post
Lester Shubin,Kevlar vest developer
Lester Shubin, the Justice Department researcher who turned a DuPont fabric intended for tires into the first truly effective bulletproof vests, saving the lives of more than 3,000 law enforcement officers, died after a heart attack at his Virginia home. He was 84.
Shubin was working at the National Institute for Justice, the research and development branch of the Justice Department, in the early 1970s when DuPont came out with a fabric that was to replace steel-belting on high-speed tires.
Nicholas Montanarelli, who worked for the Army's Land Warfare Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, told about this new substance, Kevlar, which was said to be "stronger than steel, lighter than nylon." Montanarelli obtained a couple of samples of what Shubin called "this funny yellow fabric," and the men took it and some handguns to a firing range.
"We folded it over a couple of times and shot at it. The bullets didn't go through," Shubin later told a Justice Department report on the National Institute for Justice's accomplishments.
Attempts at body armor have been around for thousands of years. Medieval knights clothed themselves head to toe in metal armor. By the World War II-era, there were cloth flak jackets with metal inserts.
Kevlar was different; it worked by deforming the bullet, spreading its energy as it hit the body armor. It wasn't perfect. It protected against 80 to 85 percent of the handguns then on the market, not rifles, and a wearer could suffer bruises or broken bones. But it saved lives.
Shubin went back to the Justice Department to wrest $5 million in research money out of the bureaucracy, and Montanarelli began developing the tests. They wanted their vest to be not only strong but also lighter than earlier versions and flexible enough so that police officers and soldiers could work in it.
They put their new vest over a gelatin mold to determine how a human body might react to the impact of a handgun bullet and then drafted, as test subjects, a series of unfortunate goats.
When Shubin and Montanarelli were satisfied with the performance of the body armor, they had to contend with manufacturers worried about getting sued if the products failed.
"That was almost a bigger problem than developing the body armor," Montanarelli, of Bel Air, Md., said in a phone interview.
Shubin got what was then the National Bureau of Standards to come up with specifications that reassured manufacturers. Using federal money, 500 vests were made to be given away. But many police departments wouldn't take them, and those that did had trouble persuading street cops to use them - until 1975. That was the year a Seattle police officer wearing a Kevlar vest walked in on an armed robbery in a convenience store and was shot at point-blank range.
He survived to complain about doctors who kept him in the hospital over Christmas Eve because they found it hard to believe that he had only bruises.
Shubin, a native of Philadelphia, served in the Army during World War II and was among the troops that liberated the Dachau concentration camp, said his son, Harry Shubin.
After the war, Shubin became a chemist, working for various companies in Philadelphia before joining the Justice Department in 1971. He retired in 1992.
In addition to his son, survivors include his wife of 50 years, Zelda Loigman Shubin, and two grandchildren.
Shubin also was among the first people to suggest that law enforcement use dogs to find explosives. Skepticism about bomb-sniffing dogs evaporated after an incident at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami: A dog pawed at a wall and found a spent cartridge from a rivet gun. About the same time, another dog found a bomb on an American Airlines flight in New York, and a third, assigned to a federal drug interdiction agency, found $100 million in heroin.
"We learned that basically any dog could find explosives or drugs, even very small dogs like Chihuahuas, whose size could be an advantage," Shubin once said. "Who is going to look twice at someone in a fur coat carrying a dog?" Washington Post
