Isabella was born in Detroit in 1921 to parents from Poland, Zygmunt Lugoski and Elizabeth Graczyk. Her father painted numbers and letters on trolley cars. Her mother ran a restaurant and worked for the auto
Isabella was born in Detroit in 1921 to parents from Poland, Zygmunt Lugoski and Elizabeth Graczyk. Her father painted numbers and letters on trolley cars. Her mother ran a restaurant and worked for the auto industry.
Married Jerome Karle in 1942. They were married 71 years, until he died in 2013.
They had three daughters: Louise Karle Hanson, Jean Karle Dean, and Madeleine Karle Tawney.
She passed away in 2017.
As a girl, Isabella was interested in chemistry and was inspired by a biography of Marie Curie. But she was also told chemistry was not an appropriate field for women.
Bachelor's in Chemistry from University of Michigan in 1944 at age 19, where she met her husband. Went on to earn her PhD.
Worked for the Manhattan Project in WWII.
Joined the Naval Research Laboratory in 1946, where her husband also worked. They worked side-by-side until both retired in 2009.
Jerome Karle shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in chemistry with the mathematician Herbert A. Hauptman, also a colleague at the NRL. Isabella Karle was not named as a recipient of the prize, although she had participated in much of the work. Jerome Karle said he hoped the honor would be extended to his wife.
"Before the prize-winning work that the Karles pursued with Hauptman in the 1950s, scientists could discern molecular structure only through the time-consuming and painstaking process of X-ray crystallography, in which X-rays were reflected off a molecule and their patterns the