Alexander Rich was a biologist and biophysicist. Alexander Rich was born on Nov. 15, 1924, in Hartford. Rich earned his M.D. in 1949 and decided to go directly into research rather than do an internship. He was accepted into JBC Classic author Linus Pauling's laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Motivated by Pauling, who stated that knowing the structure of molecules led to their properties and function, Rich switched his research to x-ray structural analysis and solved the structure of ferrocene. For a brief period, Rich also tried to obtain x-ray diffraction patterns of DNA, but after hearing that Watson and Crick had solved the structure, he turned his attention to determining whether or not RNA could also form a double helix. In 1995, President Bill Clinton awarded Dr. Rich the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor bestowed by the federal government.