Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1994

George A. Olah was born on May 22, 1927 in Budapest, where he graduated from high school and, having survived the ravages of war in Budapest, studied chemistry at the Technical University of Budapest, subsequently becoming a research assistant to Professor Geza Zemplen, the senior professor of organic chemistry in Hungary, who himself was a student of Emil Fischer in Berlin.

Zemplen was a carbohydrate chemist, much interested in glycosides, whose interests didn’t really matched the one of his young assistant, who finally obtained the permission to create a laboratory on an open balcony, in order to pursue his interests in fluorine chemistry.

In 1954 Olah was invited to join the newly established Central Chemical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where he established a small research group in organic chemistry (which included his wife Judith Lengyel, married in 1949).

In October 1956 Hungary revolted against the Soviets, and a few months later Olah decided to look for a new life in the West with his family and most of his co-workers. They moved first to London, where he was able to establish personal contact with some of the organic chemists whose work he knew and admired - as Christopher Ingold and Alexander Todd - and subsequently moved on to Canada in the spring of 1957.

On May 1957 he was offered a position in the new laboratory of Dow Chemical, located in Sarnia, Ontario, where he started his work on stable carbocations. Later he was promoted to company Scientist, the highest research position without administrative responsibility.

In the spring of '64 he moved to Dow's Eastern Research Laboratories in Framingham, Massachusetts. One year later he was invited to join Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and returned to academic life as professor and Department Chairman. Subsequently he was asked to serve as the Chair of the joint department born from the chemistry departments of Western Reserve University and the neighboring Case Institute of Technology . "These" recalls Olah, "were probably some of my most productive years". In 1976 he was asked to join the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he moved in 1977 with some members of his research group, and where he still works. As USC had limited chemistry facilities, a research institute in the broad area of hydrocarbon was established with generous support by Mr. & Mrs. D.P. Loker, friends and great supporters of the University. In 1991 Olah became director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute. In 1994 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry "for his contributions to carbocation chemistry".

Olah contributions to the research in the field of hydrocarbons, and especially on positive charged hydrocarbons - what chemists call "carbocations" - have been immense, and contributed to change the oil refining process in order to produce unleaded gasoline.

In the early 1960s Olah and co-workers discovered that stable carbocations could be prepared through the use of a new type of extremely acid compounds, far stronger than "classical" acids, that became generally known as "superacids". Olah’s discovery managed to give the short-lived carbocations a long life transforming completely the scientific study of these elusive compounds.

Olah has also shown how basic knowledge on superacids and carbocations can be applied to the facile synthesis of new and important organic compounds, and that a number of small organic molecules, with widespread use as starting material in many large scale synthesis, can be produced in a simple and inexpensive way using superacids as catalysts.

Many carbocations of great structural variation have now been studied, and the results have brought many surprising and important contributions to our understanding of chemical bindings.

He has authored or co-authored more than 1000 scientific papers and 20 books, and he holds more than 100 patents. He is member of the U.S. National Academy of Science, and in addition to the Nobel Prize has won numerous awards, including the Chemical Pioneer Award of the American Institute of Chemists.

Olah now lives with his wife Judith in Beverly Hills and has two sons, both of whom are USC graduates and live in the area.