William N. Lipscomb Jr., who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for research into how atoms join together to form molecules and who also devoted attention to the psychological foundations of scientific success, died April 14 in a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 91.
Lipscomb, a Cambridge resident and a longtime professor in the chemistry department at Harvard University, died of pneumonia and complications of a fall.
A scholar who traced an interest in his field to the chemistry set presented to him as a boy, Lipscomb also concerned himself with the mental processes that underlay discovery, including the development of scientific self-confidence and the fostering of creativity.
In addition, he could also be viewed as a member of an aristocracy of science, with titles that were passed from one generation to the next, based not on blood kinship but on personal achievement and on the ability to point the way to others.
One of his scientific mentors was Linus Pauling, himself a winner of two Nobel Prizes. Lipscomb not only was awarded the prize in 1976 but taught and influenced students of his own who received the Nobel.
Among the lessons he learned from Pauling, he once said, was the need to be bold and to overcome the fear of error.
He told interviewer Joanna Rose in 2001 that he recalled Pauling’s assertion that in science “sometimes you are wrong.”
To publish something mistaken was not a disgrace, he said he was told, and was preferable to reporting work that was “not very interesting.”
The vaunted scientific method, often considered to imply a methodical series of carefully considered steps, was “not such an orderly process,” he said in the interview. Sometimes, he said, discovery “involves your intuition.”
The ability to push back frontiers, he said, entailed a lot of reading, thinking and knowledge. And an ability, perhaps related to artistic creativity, to examine conventional wisdom and say, ‘ ‘That’s wrong.”
For most of the last century, it was recognized that atoms, the fundamental units of the elements, join in certain ways to form molecules, the fundamental units of compounds.
But details of how particular atoms bond, and how molecules are shaped and structured, often resisted easy explanation.
Lipscomb pursued understanding of the formation of compounds of boron and hydrogen, known as boron hydrides. He was also known for working on the structures of proteins, compounds that make up living tissue. Molecules of these compounds were intricate and often oddly shaped.
“We had to accept them as they were, learn to overcome the natural prejudice of scientists for simplicity and learn to love the complexity out of which comes function,” said Roald Hoffmann, who studied with Lipscomb.
Hoffmann, who himself received a Nobel Prize, wrote in an e-mail: “You can’t run the body with small symmetrical molecules.”
Lipscomb’s share of the 1976 chemistry Nobel was tied to his work on bonding and the boranes. Insights such as those he gained were said to enhance the predictive power of chemistry, helping to avoid the inefficiency of experiments based on trial and error.
His work was credited with helping scientists to understand how molecules react with each other and how they could be transformed into new and desirable compounds.
William Nunn Lipscomb Jr. was born Dec. 9, 1919 in Cleveland and grew up in Lexington, Ky., where he attended the University of Kentucky.
After earning his Ph.D. in 1946 at Cal Tech, he taught at the University of Minnesota before joining Harvard, where he was a professor of chemistry from 1959 to 1990.
At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus in Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.
Survivors include his wife, Jean Evans, and their daughter, Jenna. His 1944 marriage to Mary Adele Sargent Lipscomb ended in divorce in 1983. She died in 2007. Their daughter, Dorothy Lipscomb Wright, and their son, James Sargent Lipscomb, survive, along with a sister, Dorothy Conrad, three grandchildren and five great grandchildren.
The big things he tried, Lipscomb once claimed, did not work out. But, he said in a matter-of-fact explanation of his achievements, “I set intermediate goals.”