Chemist and Professor.

Born in Germany to Hungarian parents, Polanyi was in England at the beginning of the Second World War. His father was a professor of Chemistry at the University of Manchester. He decided to send his son to safety in Toronto during the war.

After his education in Canada and later in England, Polanyi joined the National Research Council in Ottawa ON. Polanyi was particularly interested in studying how newly born products of chemical reactions moved. He joined the faculty of the University of Toronto in 1956 and has been there ever since.

Polanyi's research question was: How do you make a chemical reaction happen? Do you tickle the molecules or do you slam them together? It turns out that in some cases tickling works; in other cases, you just have to slam them against each other.

"The importance of this work," Polanyi says, "was that we had a picture of reacting atoms in the transition state."

This led to some findings about infrared that he called "chemiluminescence" - how light is emitted by an atom or molecule when it is in an excited state. This finding was particularly relevant to another that occurred at the same time (mid-1960s) and which has since come to be known as the laser.

Of course, the vibrational laser has become a common aspect of science, medicine, and industry in the last thirty years. And vibrational and chemical lasers are the most powerful sources of infrared radiation ever developed. This is the best known application of Polanyi's research. However, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to him and others in 1986 because his discoveries widened our understanding of how all chemical reactions can be studied.

Continuing on with his work, he now studies "spectroscopy," the science that analyzes the light spectrum. The "molecular dance" of chemical reactions refers to how chemicals change partners under different conditions.

Like David Suzuki, Polanyi has also become well known for his views on science policy - how scientific research is conducted and how its findings are applied by society. Polanyi is also famous for his interest in the relationship between science and artistic creativity.