2002 Nobel Prize winners with Yale affiliations

Press Release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2002
9 October 2002

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2002

”for the development of methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules”

with one half jointly to

John B. Fenn
Professor, Analytical Chemistry
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia USA,
www.has.vcu.edu/che/people/fenn.html (biographical information)
born 1917 (85 years) in New York City, USA (US citizen).
A.B., Berea College,
PhD in Chemistry 1940 and Professor Emeritus 1987 at Yale University, Connecticut, USA.
Dissertation: The Thermodynamics of hydrochloric acid in methanol-water mixtures, 1940.

Additional Yale engineering information

and

Koichi Tanaka
R&D Engineer at Shimadzu Corp., Kyoto, Japan.
www.shimadzu.com
born 1959 (43 years) in Toyama City, Japan (Japanese citizen).
B. Eng at Tohoku University, Japan.

”for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules”

and the other half to

Kurt Wüthrich
Professor in Biophysics at ETH Zürich, Switzerland and Visiting Professor at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, USA.
www.mol.biol.ethz.ch/wuthrich
born 1938 (64 years) in Aarberg, Switzerland (Swiss citizen).
PhD in Inorganic chemistry 1964 at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

”for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution”.

DETAILS:

Mass spectrometry is a very important analytical method used in practically all chemistry laboratories the world over. Previously only fairly small molecules could be identified, but John B. Fenn and Koichi Tanaka have developed methods that make it possible to analyse biological macromolecules as well.

In the method that John B. Fenn published in 1988, electrospray ionisation (ESI), charged droplets of protein solution are produced which shrink as the water evaporates. Eventually freely hovering protein ions remain. Their masses may be determined by setting them in motion and measuring their time of flight over a known distance. At the same time Koichi Tanaka introduced a different technique for causing the proteins to hover freely, soft laser desorption. A laserpulse hits the sample, which is “blasted” into small bits so that the molecules are released.

The other half of the Prize rewards the further development of another favourite method among chemists, nuclear magnetic resonance, NMR. NMR gives information on the three-dimensional structure and dynamics of the molecules. Through his work at the beginning of the 1980s Kurt Wüthrich has made it possible to use NMR on proteins. He developed a general method of systematically assigning certain fixed points in the protein molecule, and also a principle for determining the distances between these. Using the distances, he was able to calculate the three-dimensional structure of the protein. The advantage of NMR is that proteins can be studied in solution, i.e. an environment similar to that in the living cell.

"Electrospray Ionization for Mass Spectrometry of Large Biomolecules,"
J. B. Fenn, M. Mann, C. K. Meng, S. F. Wong and C. M. Whitehouse, Science 246, 64 (1989)

Press Release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2002
8 October 2002

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2002

jointly to

Raymond Davis Jr.
University of Pennsylvania and Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA
biography and publications
1937 B.S. and 1940 M.S. from the University of Maryland
Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Yale University, 1942.
Dissertation: The ionization constant of carbonic acid and the solubility of carbon-dioxide in water and sodium chloride solutions from 0 to 50 degrees C, 1942.

"for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos"

After his 1942-46 service in the U.S. Army Air Force and two years with the Monsanto Chemical Company, he came to Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1948 to join the staff of the Chemistry Department. He received tenure in 1956 and was named senior chemist in 1964. Retiring from the Laboratory in 1984, Davis joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1985, but maintains an active appointment at Brookhaven as a research collaborator in the Chemistry Department.

and the other half to

Masatoshi Koshiba, University of Tokyo, Japan
http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/2002/koshiba-or.html
and
Ricardo Giacconi, Associated Universities Inc. Washington, DC, USA
http://www.aui.edu/

"for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources"

Search for Neutrinos from the Sun
Raymond Davis, Jr., Don S. Harmer, and Kenneth C. Hoffman
Phys. Rev. Lett. 20, 1205-1209 (20 May 1968)
http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v20/p1205

Evidence for X Rays From Sources Outside the Solar System
R. Giacconi, H. Gursky, F. R. Paolini, and B. B. Rossi
Phys. Rev. Lett. 9, 439­443 (1962)
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v9/i11/p439_1

Solar Neutrinos. II. Experimental
R. Davis, Jr.
Phys. Rev. Lett. 12, 303-305 (1964)
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v12/i11/p303_1

Observation of ^{8}B solar neutrinos in the Kamiokande-II detector
K. S. Hirata et al.
Phys. Rev. Lett. 63, 16-19 (1989)
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v63/i1/p16_1

Observation of a neutrino burst from the supernova SN1987A
K. Hirata, T. Kajita, M. Koshiba, M. Nakahata, Y. Oyama, N. Sato, A. Suzuki, M. Takita, Y. Totsuka, T. Kifune, T. Suda, K. Takahashi, T. Tanimori, K. Miyano, M. Yamada, E. W. Beier, L. R. Feldscher, S. B. Kim, A. K. Mann, F. M. Newcomer, R. Van, W. Zhang, and B. G. Cortez
Phys. Rev. Lett. 58, 1490-1493 (1987)
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v58/i14/p1490_1

The archive of Lars Onsager, who won a Nobel Prize while a member of the Yale Chemistry faculty, is located at Trondheim University: