John Bennett Fenn (1917–2010)

John Fenn was first and foremost genuine and earnest and willing to discuss science and life passionately with anyone. He was a true visionary who understood education, human nature, science, love, and compassion. He died on 10 December at the age of 93. Those who had the privilege of knowing John Fenn are, without question, better for it. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry did not define John Fenn, nor did it change him; he was the same man before and after, always showing a strong sense of humility. He was a one-of-a-kind individual, whose qualities as a person and impact on science are irreplaceable. He had all of this, plus a marvelous sense of humor and a love and great respect for the written word. John Bennett Fenn was born before the Great Depression in New York City to college-educated parents who instilled in their son the critical importance of education. As a result of the Depression, his family lost their home to foreclosure and his father joined the faculty of Berea College in 1928. At the age of 11, John moved from Hackensack, New Jersey, to Kentucky, matriculated in Berea High School in the early 1930s and continued his education at Berea College, where he received his baccalaureate degree just before the age of 17. John always spoke of Berea College with great fondness, because it was from there that he took away several guiding principles that he lived by the rest of his life, including the importance of a strong work ethic, being open-minded in life and in science, understanding and accepting other people's struggles, and being an inspirational educator. John decided to continue his education in chemistry and joined the graduate program at Yale University in 1937, working under the auspices of Professor Gosta Akerlof. His graduate research project was not stimulating to the young Fenn, so in 1940, he decided to pursue a career in industry. He and his new bride moved to Alabama, where he accepted a position at Monsanto Chemical Company. It was there that John met James W. Mullen II, who later founded Experiment Incorporated in Richmond, Virginia, and became a lifelong friend. In 1942, John moved to Sharpless Chemicals in Michigan. Just over a year later he moved his career to Richmond, Virginia, to work at Experiment Incorporated on Project Bumblebee, a research effort on the use of ramjets for aircraft propulsion. In 1949 at the age of 32, he published his first paper. Satisfied to be finally in a situation where he was doing highly stimulating research, he began producing numerous papers and patents. In 1952, Fenn joined the faculty at Princeton University to become the Director of Project Squid (funded be the U.S. Office of Naval Research), which focused on propulsion and proved to be a very positive experience. ![Figure][1] CREDIT: AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR MASS SPECTROMETRY His seminal research at Princeton made him an internationally recognized expert in free jets and molecular beams. These technologies made possible the reactive scattering experiments that contributed to understanding the dynamics of elementary chemical processes that led to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 (which was awarded to Dudley R. Herschbach, Yuan T. Lee, and John C. Polanyi). In 1970, John moved his research program back to Yale University. He used his lifelong scientific experiences coupled with serendipitous encounters with colleagues to carry out the seminal research that led to the electrospray ionization (ESI) revolution. John's development of ESI breathed life into mass spectrometry and has resulted in countless scientific advances across multiple disciplines. It has facilitated revolutionary instrumentation and economic development, and created countless career opportunities for young researchers to whom he was so firmly committed. The true potential of ESI as an analytical and engineering technique has yet to be reached. After mandatory retirement, John moved his research group to Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, Virginia, where he continued to study and advance ESI as an analytical technique. It was while on the faculty–the city where he began his scientific career—that John was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Clearly, John's path to the prize was serpentine and never could have been predicted by anyone, including him. He did not calculate his path to an extraordinary scientific career, but genuinely pursued ideas that were stimulating and of substantial practical value. John was a generous and caring man with a strong sense of humility, who frequently went out of his way to make people feel comfortable. I was his colleague at VCU and remember that he would frequently say, “I learn more from my students than they will ever learn from me,” a true statement from a modest man of outstanding character and vision. He always felt honored to be asked to participate in any endeavor. He loved attending group meetings, taught as a guest lecturer well into his 80s, and was unbelievably talented at making complex subjects (like thermodynamics) understandable—a skill that can be attributed to his ability to tell great stories. He was passionate about dialogue in the classroom and bemoaned the current state of chemical education with >1000-page text books. He would often say, “The problem with education today is that the material goes from the notebook of the Professor to the notebook of the student without going through the minds of either one of them.” John's perspective on education was largely shaped by two key role models in his life, his father and his freshman chemistry teacher Julian Capp. Both were very inspirational to him and the latter excited John about a subject that he most likely would have never studied otherwise. It is hard to capture the breadth and depth of such a unique individual, who not only walked this planet for nearly a century, but also contributed to this world at nearly every turn. John's spirit of innovation, insistence on simplicity both in life and in research, his impact on science, and his genuine friendship will be sorely missed. [1]: pending:yes