Joseph J. Katz

Joseph J. Katz (April 19, 1912, Detroit – January 28, 2008, Chicago) was a chemist at Argonne National Laboratory whose fundamental research on the chemistry of photosynthesis led to his election to the US National Academy of Science. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia. Neither parent had any formal education.
Education and independent research.
His college education was in chemistry at the College of the City of Detroit (now Wayne State University). He worked for the next seven years at small companies in Detroit, developing adhesives, metal polishing compounds, lubricants and other specialty chemical formulations used in the automobile industry. While working in Detroit after receiving his bachelor's degree, Katz and several colleagues rented a room in a Detroit office building and used it as a laboratory. They carried out independent research from 1932 through 1939, trying to cure tuberculosis by finding a substance that could dissolve the fatty outer coating of the TB bacillus so that it would be vulnerable to being destroyed by a drug. He and a Detroit colleague published two papers on studies with the bacterium Mycobacterium smegmatis, a fast-growing and non-pathogenic bacillus with similar physical properties to the tuberculosis bacillus.
Unemployed in summer 1939, he followed a suggestion from a former teacher and applied to graduate school in chemistry at the University of Chicago. His thesis research in physical organic chemistry under the supervision of Frank R. Mayo was a study of the mechanism of addition of hydrogen chloride to isobutene in a solvent of low dielectric constant. He received the PhD degree in March 1942.