Nobel Prize

My forebears all came from the United Kingdom. On my father’s side, they migrated from London and County Derry in Northern Ireland to Londonderry, New Hampshire. When the American Revolution came, they, as loyalists, moved on to Canada. My father, grandfather and great-grandfather were born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. In 1865, my grandfather, Andrew…

An important step in biochemical research was taken in 1980 when Hartmut Michel managed to crystallize a membrane protein (bacteriorhodopsin) after having solubilized the lipid bilayer of the membrane with a detergent. Detergents, which are structurally similar to membrane lipids, form micelles in water. They bind to membrane proteins with their fatty, hydrophobic tails creating…

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Scientific American, (1987) Vol 256:6, 42-48. Trends in Biochemical Sciences, (1987) 12, 321-326. Nature (1985) 318, 618-624. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, (press release).  

1771 Joseph Priestley, England, discovers that plants can “purify” air that has been “burned out” by a candle. 1779 Jan Ingenhousz, The Netherlands, demonstrates that the plant in Priestley’s experiment is dependent on light and its green parts. 1782-1804 Several researchers show that carbon dioxide and water are stored as organic matter by plants. 1845…

Contents: Based on materials from the 1988 Nobel Poster for Chemistry.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry to       Dr Johann Deisenhofer University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, USA Professor Robert Huber Max-Planck-Institut für Biochemie, Martinsried, FRG Dr Hartmut Michel Max-Planck-Institut für Biophysik, Frankfurt/Main, FRG     for the determination of the three-dimensional structure of…

In 1984, after having analyzed the X-ray diffraction pattern from the reaction center crystals, Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber and Hartmut Michel could present the 3-dimensional structure of the reaction center, the first high-resolution structure of a membrane protein and also the most complex molecular structure which had been solved.     The reaction center is composed of…

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