Christian Boemer Anfinsen.
The Nobel Prize winning chemist, Christian B. Anfinsen, was a successful chemist with many accomplishments. Anfinsen was said to have been one of the greatest protein chemists of his era. His life before winning the Nobel Prize was filled with years of college study and hours upon hours of research. His research was primarily based on ribonuclease but he was also involved in the study of the polypeptide chains.
Christian Anfinsen was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania in 1916. Dr. Anfinsen earned his bachelors degree from Swarthmore College in 1937, and he also received a masters in organic chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1939. He later received a Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School and then spent the next seven years of his life as an instructor and then as an assistant professor of Biochemistry at Harvard. He left Harvard a few years later to become Chief of the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Metabolism at the National Institutes of Health. Anfinsen, author of 200 scientific articles and one book, The Molecular Basis of Evolution (1959) which talks about the two relationships that help to understand evolution, also spent one year as a senior fellow of the American Cancer society from 1947-1948, in Sweden. He retired from the National Institutes of Health in 1981, and joined the faculty of John Hopkins University in 1982 as biochemist and biology professor.1 .
In the 1950's, he began to look more in depth into the relationship .
2.
between the structure and the function in enzymes. When he studied.
ribonuclease, Anfinsen proposed that the tertiary structure of a protein resides in the chemistry of its amino acid sequence. Many proteins could spontaneously refold to their native forms after the cleavage of disulfide bonds and the disruption of the tertiary structure.
