Bookmark and Share

James Lynn Hoard (1905-1993)

James Lynn Hoard, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Cornell U. died after a brief illness in Ithaca, NY at the age of 87. Hoard, a native of Seattle, WA, majored in chemistry at the U. of Washington and graduated magna cum laude. He earned his Ph.D. from the California Inst. of Technology where he studied with L. Pauling and participated in the early development of the field of organometallic structure determination and analysis.

The square-pyramidal coordination group in the Methoxylum(III) Mesoporphyrln, Hoard et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 87,2312-2319 (1965).

A list of 45 crystal structure determinations by Hoard included in the Cambridge Structural Database reveals the breadth of his contributions to the field of metal coordination and organometallic crystallography. He conducted X-ray analysis of early examples of zirconium, cobalt, silver, vanadium, magnesium, molybdenum, palladium, iron, neodymium, chromium, tin, nickel, thorium, lanthanum, and rhodium containing compounds. In a series of 16 careful studies of iron, silver, zinc, nickel and cobalt complexes of porphyrin, Hoard elucidated the relationship between the spin state of iron, its displacement from the porphyrin plane, and its role in oxygen capture and transport by hemoglobin.

Hoard, whose crystallographic studies contributed to understanding the basic chemistry of boron, was engaged in the Manhattan Project, the US effort to develop the first atomic bomb. In recognition of his many scientific achievements Hoard was elected to membership in the US National Academy of Sciences. Hoard is survived by his wife and their sons, Tomas, David, and Laurence.