By Janis Siegel , JTNews Correspondent
In May 2011, one of the foremost materials scientists in the world, Seattleite Dr. John Werner Cahn, received a letter, then a call, and finally a visit from five members of Japan’s Inamori Foundation, who informed him after a five-hour interview that he would be one of three recipients of this year’s 27th Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology.
Cahn, an 83-year-old German Jew born in Cologne in 1928, received the prestigious award in November for his work in alloy metals at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Wash., D.C., in the late ‘70s and for his contribution to the theory of Spinodal Decomposition in Alloys, a method that allows scientists to study the rate at which the structure of an alloy coarsens during aging.
“It was such a total surprise and I was in a bit of disbelief,” Cahn told JTNews upon his return to the Pacific Northwest. “This is something I did 50 years ago. The NIST has won four Nobel Prizes, several National Medal of Science awards, and now, the Kyoto Prize.”
Although Cahn’s award for Fundamental Contributions to Materials Science is recognition for research he did decades ago, his work is still being cited by researchers today — about 100 times a year, Cahn said. His work has been applied to many devices today, including smart phones and mobile computers.
“What we’ve done is open fields up and show that there are principals that apply to a certain subject, publish it, and then people started applying these principals to make inventions and to use it,” Cahn said.
In addition to being recognized for his own achievements, Cahn also played a significant role in the career of 2011 Nobel Prize recipient Prof. Dan Shechtman at the Technion–Israel Institute of Science. Shechtman is Israel’s 10th Nobel laureate and its fourth award winner for chemistry. He was recognized for his 1982 discovery of quasicrystals, which led to the development of ultra-strong materials now used in several industries.
Cahn first met Shechtman when he was a visiting professor at the Technion and Shechtman was a graduate student. During his second teaching assignment there, Cahn renewed his acquaintance with Shechtman, who was then on the faculty. Cahn invited him to spend a sabbatical at his laboratory.
“He spent two years in my laboratory and that’s where he made the discovery for which he won the Nobel Prize,” said Cahn. “The NIST considers his prize to be the fourth Nobel Prize they’ve gotten since 1988 because this was work on my project, in my laboratory. I’ve just been delighted.”
Cahn was also a co-author on Shechtman’s Nobel-winning paper.
Cahn credits his success to being a “refugee” and the opportunities he was given as a child that exposed him to innovation and change.
As a fledgling lawyer litigating civil cases against the National Socialist Party in 1925, Cahn’s father soon realized he had become a Nazi target.
Believing that the situation would be a temporary one, his father moved the family to Belgium, hoping to wait out the growing anti-Semitic climate.
“We first fled to Belgium because my father was convinced that the Nazis were a temporary aberration and that the German courts would rule the Nazis illegal and that they would be out of power soon,” said Cahn. “We stayed at a summer resort in Belgium until November 1933. My father made a trip to Palestine in 1934 to scout it out, and came back enthusiastically, but my mother was hesitant.”
In 1936, Cahn’s father and mother made another trip to Palestine, which unfortunately coincided with the Arab uprising, so the family moved to Amsterdam instead and stayed there for six years until 1939, when they moved to the United States.
“I had a marvelous childhood,” said Cahn. “I was aware of the fact that my father was in great danger if the Germans ever came, but it didn’t seem any scarier than a Grimm’s fairy tale. Living in four countries before coming to the U.S. gave me a broader understanding of things.”
Today, Cahn conducts ongoing research at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, and still pursues his passion for his work. He’s got two ongoing research projects — experimenting with a glass-like material that may yield something similar to a quasicrystal, and another, looking at the surface between crystals and identifying what happens to it under stress, he explained.
Cahn enjoys retired life in Seattle, with his wife, Anne. The couple has three adult children who live in the area.