James Hillier dies

James Hillier, a physicist who helped to invent the first practical electron microscope and sought ways to make it useful to biologists, died January 15 after suffering a stroke. He was 91.

Hillier's first electron microscope magnified objects 7,000 times -- more than triple the magnification offered by existing optical microscopes at the time. "The electron microscope revolutionized the way we understand how things are put together," Jon Norenburg, president-elect of the American Microscopical Society, told The Scientist. "It's like taking another quantum leap past the light microscope."

Hillier and collaborator Albert Prebus developed the microscope while graduate students at the University of Toronto, building on the work of Ernst Ruska and his colleagues in Berlin. Hillier liked to think of himself as "the problem solver to get [the German concept] to work," his son, J. Robert Hillier, told The Scientist.

One early setback in the microscope's development, said Robert Hillier, was that the electron beam kept wandering off target. Soon his father recognized that it wandered on a regular schedule; an electric trolley ran near the lab, and the magnetic field of passing trolleys interfered with the beam. Problem solved, Hillier and Prebus succeeded in producing a working prototype in 1938.

In an oral history recorded for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), James Hillier said they quickly realized that the powerful electron beam would destroy organic material, unless the sample was thin enough that most electrons would pass right through it. "So we learned how to make extremely thin films of colloid" and to place biological samples on them "without burning them to a crisp," Hiller said.

In 1940 he joined RCA to work on a commercial version of the microscope. There, he refined his design and continued to improve the microscope over the next 13 years, helping increase its magnification power to 200,000. (Today's versions have reached a magnification power of up to 2 million). Much of his work involved developing ways to prepare biological specimens for viewing under the microscope. He worked closely with biologists to promote his invention, and enjoyed the opportunity to "learn some of the language and some of the principles of their science," he said.

In the 1940s, Hillier recalled, biologist Wendell Stanley came into the RCA research laboratory with a bottle of tobacco mosaic virus. Stanley had estimated the size of the virus through a variety of studies, but hadn't been able to see the tiny pathogen with an optical microscope. Together he and Hillier prepared a specimen and viewed the virus for the first time through the electron microscope. "He later got the Nobel Prize for this work," Hillier said. "These were some of the thrills that we got."

In 1958, Hillier became the director of RCA's research laboratories and went on to oversee projects such as the development of the video disc, a precursor to the modern DVD.

Hillier was born in Brantford, Ontario, and became an American citizen in 1945. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Toronto, earning a PhD in 1941. He received the Albert Lasker Award for basic medical research in 1960, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1980. In 1992, he created the James Hillier Foundation to provide scholarships to science-oriented students from his hometown of Brantford. The foundation became his passion in the last years of his life, his son said. "He was both a thinker and a tinkerer," he said. "He was very proud but outwardly very humble."

Hillier's wife, Florence, died in 1992. He is survived by his son, four grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Image (on homepage) from Molecular Expressions.

Kirsten Weir
mail@the-scientist.com

Links within this article:

Jon Norenburg
http://www.gulfbase.org/person/view.php?uid=jnorenburg

Ernst Ruska:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1986/ruska-autobio.html

IEEE History Center: Hillier
http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/history_center/oral_history/abstracts/hillierab.html

C. Cruzan Morton: "Technology advances marking milestones in microscopy," The Scientist, January 20, 1997.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/17370/

Wendell Stanley
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1946/stanley-bio.html

M. D. O'Neill: "Electron microscopy on the runway," The Scientist, February 1, 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23082

Albert Lasker Foundation:
http://www.laskerfoundation.org/

National Inventors Hall of Fame
http://www.invent.org/

Molecular Expressions
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu