Anfinsen, Christian Boehmer

▪ 1996

      U.S. biochemist (b. March 26, 1916, Monessen, Pa.—d. May 14, 1995, Randallstown, Md.), concentrated on research into the structure of enzymes, proteins that serve to promote biochemical reactions, and was co-winner with Stanford Moore and William H. Stein of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for fundamental work on correlating the structural properties of proteins with their physiological functions. Anfinsen, who conducted his research while serving as chief of the laboratory of chemical biology at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, Md., was honoured for having discerned how the protein enzyme ribonuclease folds to form a characteristic three-dimensional structure that determines its biochemical properties. His pioneering thinking on the interrelation of protein chemistry and genetics was set out in his innovative book The Molecular Basis of Evolution (1959). Anfinsen earned (1943) a Ph.D. from Harvard University and held a teaching position there and also at the University of Pennsylvania and the Nobel Medical Institute in Stockholm. He stayed at the NIH from 1950 to 1981 (except in 1962, when he taught at Harvard), when he joined Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md., and began work examining the proteins of hyperthermophilic (extreme heat loving) bacteria taken from hydrothermal vents located on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. He served as editor of the journal Advances in Protein Chemistry and was the author of some 200 original scientific articles.

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