Arne Tiselius
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Arne Wilhelm Kaurin Tiselius
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1948
Born: 10 August 1902, Stockholm, Sweden
Died: 29 October 1971, Uppsala, Sweden
Affiliation at the time of the award: Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Prize motivation: “for his research on electrophoresis and adsorption analysis, especially for his discoveries concerning the complex nature of the serum proteins”
Prize share: 1/1
Life
Arne Tiselius grew up in Stockholm, Sweden. After his father, who was a mathematician, suddenly died of a heart attack, Tiselius' family moved to the city of Gothenburg, where his father's relatives could provide them with support. After graduating from high school, Tiselius moved to Uppsala, where he began working at The Svedberg Laboratory after completing his studies. Tiselius maintained his ties with Uppsala for the rest of his life. His laboratory came to be very important to the Swedish pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Tiselius was married with two children.
Work
If an electrical charge is laid over a sheet of damp paper on which lie a few drops of a solution containing electrically charged molecules, then the molecules will begin to migrate along the electric field. During the 1930s Arne Tiselius developed a method called electrophoresis, which makes use of this phenomenon to separate different substances from one another. This is possible because different molecules migrate at different speeds, depending on the strength of the charge. This method is an important tool in chemical analysis.
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