Adam Heller

Adam Heller was born in 1933 to Jewish parents in Cluj, Kingdom of Romania. In 1944, following the Second Vienna Award, the Hungarian administration confiscated his family's property, and they were forcibly relocated along with more than 18,000 other Jews to the Kolozsvár Ghetto within the walls of the Iris Brickyard.[9]^: 129 In late May of the same year, the prisoners of the ghetto at Kolozsvár were transported out of the ghetto as part of the Nazi Final Solution. Heller and his immediate family survived on Kastner's train.[10][11] In 1945, he arrived in British Mandate Palestine, which became the State of Israel in 1948.

Heller received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from Hebrew University in 1961, where he studied under Ernst David Bergmann.[12] In 1962-1963 he was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at University of California, Berkeley and in 1963-1964 he was a Postdoctoral Member of the Technical Staff of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

With James J. Auborn and Kenneth W. French, Heller showed that unlike in water metallic lithium does not corrode in the boiling inorganic oxychlorides thionyl chloride or sulfuryl chloride.[13] The metal's  surface is passivated against corrosion by a thin film of lithium chloride.[13] They introduced in 1973 the 3.6 V non-rechargeable lithium thionyl chloride battery,[1] one of the  first to be mass manufactured. Because of its lightweight lithium metal anode and its carbon cathode on which the thionyl chloride or sulfuryl chloride  solvent of the electrolyte is electrocatalytically reduced, the battery's energy density is uniquely high, 1210 Wh/L and 720 Wh/kg. The  battery's shelf-life of over 20 years derives of  absence of lithium corrosion in thionyl chloride and in sulfuryl chloride. As of December 15, 2021, its manufacture continued.

In 1996, Heller co-founded with his son Ephraim Heller TheraSense, a company acquired by Abbott Laboratories in 2004 for $1.2 billion. The company is now Abbott Diabetes Care. Heller was the first Chief Technical Officer of TheraSense and as of December 2021 continued to consult to Abbott Diabetes Care. TheraSense introduced in 2000 the FreeStyle™ micro-coulometer, painlessly measuring the blood glucose concentration in 300 nanoliters of blood[2]. The world's most widely used FreeStyle Libre™ continuous glucose monitoring system of Abbott Diabetes Care was introduced in 2016. Its subcutaneously implanted amperometric sensor utilizes concepts of  Heller's glucose concentration to electron current transducing electrically wired  glucose oxidase electrode maintaining a  constant sensitivity through a polymeric membrane that controls the inflow of glucose.4-8

Heller serves as Chief Scientific Officer of Synagile Corporation, a venture developing a continuous oral L-DOPA systems for managing advanced Parkinson's disease.

Heller showed in 1966 that the cause of radiationless relaxation of excited rare earth ions in solutions was energy transfer to hydrogen atom containing solvents that vibrate at high frequencies. By dissolving neodymium salts in selenium oxychloride, he created the first inorganic liquid lasers.[14][15]

At Bell Laboratories (1975-1988), where he headed the Electronic Materials Research Department (1977-1988) and  King L. Tai developed high-speed electronic and optoelectronic interconnection  technologies, his personal studies centered on  semiconductor liquid junction solar cells. His electrical power and hydrogen generating photoelectrochemical solar cells were  the first to reach solar conversion efficiencies of 10%.[14][15][16][17][18][19] At The University of Texas at Austin Heinz Gerischer and he showed in 1989-1991 that the rate of photo-assisted oxidation of organic compounds on titanium dioxide was not controlled by the rate of photogeneration of electron hole pairs, but by the rate of reduction of adsorbed oxygen by trapped electrons[20]. With the floating  titanium dioxide coated cenospheres, the residues of  coal combustion, he and colleagues catalyzed the sunlight assisted oxidation of thin films of crude oil on water (1992-1995),[21][22][23] then with Yaron Paz he made in 1993-1995 transparent titanium dioxide films on window glass that under  sunlight catalytically oxidized organic contaminants. [24]

After discovering in 1987 at Bell Labs with Yinon Degani that the glycoprotein of glucose oxidase can be made electron conducting by covalently binding to it redox functions through which electrons hopped,[25][26][27] Heller and his colleagues designed at the University of Texas between 1989 and 2005  electron conducting redox hydrogels, the first and only aqueous phases that conducted electrons, yet  also dissolved ions and substrates and products of enzyme catalyzed reactions.[4] Their hydrogels conduct electrons by collisional electron transfer between reduced and oxidized water-swollen polymer segments. By electrostatically bonding electron conducting gels having polycationic polymers and enzymes with polyanionic domains, they  prevented the phase separation of differing macromolecules,[5] then crosslinked on electrodes multilayers of  electrically wired enzymes.[28][29][30] To maintain the selectivity of the enzymes for their substrates and avoid electrooxidation of spurious biochemicals in biological fluids, the redox potentials of the hydrogels were kept neat the potentials of the reaction centers of the enzymes. Miniature electrodes coated with wired glucose oxidase transduced the concentration-dependent substrate flux to an to an electrical current, the current representing the turnover rate of reaction centers of the  enzyme.[5]

The absence of leachable matter from wired enzyme electrodes enabled their use in the blood of animals and in their subcutaneous fluid.[6][7] To maintain the constancy of the transduction of substrate concentration into an electrical current, Heller and his coworkers overcoated the “wired” enzyme electrodes with a stable polymer films that controlled the influx of the substrate and with  a non-fouling hydrogel.[7][31][32] These elements of design, first tested with a subcutaneously “wired” glucose oxidase electrode in a diabetic chimpanzee in 1998,[33] were later improved on  and became applied in the subcutaneously implanted glucose monitoring  FreeStyle Libre™ systems of Abbott Diabetes Care, the most widely used for managing diabetes.

Heller's 2018-2020 studies revealed the presence of potentially pathogenic endogenous hydrated calcium oxalate crystals and exogenous titanium dioxide crystals in the substantia nigra of Parkinson's disease patients[34] and in the entorhinal cortex of deceased Alzheimer's disease patients.[35]