Herbert C. Brown

Herbert Charles Brown (May 22, 1912 to December 19, 2004) was a chemist born in London, England, who emigrated to the United States as a child and became a naturalized citizen. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Georg Wittig for developing boron-containing reagents for organic synthesis, most notably the hydroboration reaction, in which a boron-hydrogen compound adds across a carbon-carbon double bond and can then be converted into alcohols or other products under mild conditions. Brown carried out most of this work at Purdue University, and hydroboration became one of the standard tools taught in organic chemistry for controlling the outcome of addition reactions.