Physical Chemist. Gilbert Newton Lewis, an American physical chemist, received recognition for the discovery of the covalent bond and his concept of electron pairs; his Lewis dot structures and other contributions to valence bond theory, which have shaped modern theories of chemical bonding. He successfully contributed to thermodynamics, photochemistry, and isotope separation, and is also known for his concept of acids and bases. He received his bachelor's degree in 1896, taught in an academy for a year before returning to the classroom, and in 1899 earned his doctorate from Harvard University. He served as an instructor in chemistry at Harvard until 1900. After a year in Leipzig, Germany, he was in charge of the laboratories of the United States Bureau of Weights and Measures in the Philippine Islands in 1904 to 1905. He became assistant professor of physiochemical research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1907 and full professor in 1911. In 1912 he accepted the chairmanship of a small chemistry department at the University of California at Berkeley, where he remained until his death. In 1916 he published his well-received paper "The Atom and the Molecule." During World War I in 1917, he received a commission as a major in the United States Army, serving in the Chemical Warfare Service in France. He was appointed Chief of the Defense Division of the Service. Two months before the war's end, he was sent to Washington D.C. to head the training Division of the Chemical Warfare Service, and was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. For his military service, he received the Cross of the Legion of Honor from the French Government and the Distinguished Service Medal from the Congress of the United States. After the war, he returned to Berkeley and co-authored a treatise on thermodynamics, which was published in 1923; in the same year he published "Valence and the Structure of Atoms and Molecules." Three years later he published "The Anatomy of Science," comprising the Silliman Lectures given at Yale University. He is also the author of 140 scientific papers. At Berkeley from 1937 to 1939, he had a young laboratory assistant, Glenn Seaborg, who received the 1951 Nobel Prize; the two co-authored three papers on acids and bases. Other students who received the Nobel Prize were Harold Urey in 1934, William F. Giauque in 1949, Linus Pauling in 1954, Willard Libby in 1960, and Melvin Calvin in 1961. Starting in 1922, Lewis received 44 nominations for the Nobel Prize candidacy, yet never received the coveted award. Although most of his nominations were in the 1930s, he received the last nomination in 1946 before his death. He received honorary doctorate degrees from United States universities as well as Spain and England. He belonged to numerous prestigious scientific societies. Although not receiving the Nobel Prize, he was awarded the Nichols Medal, the Willard Gibbs Medal, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society, the Fourth Gold Medal of the Society of Arts and Sciences, the Theodore William Richards Medal by the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society, and in June of 1939 he was awarded the Arrhenius' Gold Medal by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1912 he married the daughter of a Harvard professor, and the couple had two sons and a daughter. On March 23, 1946, a graduate student found Lewis's lifeless body under a laboratory workbench at Berkeley. Lewis had been experimenting with liquid hydrogen cyanide, and apparently deadly fumes from a broken line had leaked into the laboratory. The coroner ruled that the cause of death was coronary artery disease, while others considered his death an accident or suicide, whichever, he was doing what he loved. Lewis Hall on the Berkeley campus is named in honor of him. He was recognized as the head of one of the most powerful and creative college chemistry departments in the world.