Elkan Blout

Elkan Rogers Blout (born July 2, 1919 in Manhattan , New York City , † December 20, 2006 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was an American biochemist .

Life

Blout was the son of a representative and the family suffered financially from the Great Depression . He graduated from school at the age of 14, but was unable to study for reasons of age and attended the Phillips Exeter Academy for a year , which relatives financed. He was one of the few Jews admitted to Princeton University in 1935 , for which he was awarded a scholarship. He received his bachelor's degree in 1939 and received his PhD in chemistry from Columbia University in 1942 with Robert Elderfield . As a post-graduate student , he did research with Robert B. Woodward at Harvard , with whom he became friends. From 1943 he was with the Polaroid Company, whose Vice President and Research Director he became in 1958. He also carried out research in the field of tumor biology at Children's Hospital in Boston. In 1959 he decided to switch entirely to medical research at Harvard Medical School , where he had been researching since 1957 and where he became Professor of Biological Chemistry in 1962 and Edward S. Harkness Professor in 1964 . He was later dean of the Harvard School of Public Health . In 1990 he retired and was then a scientific advisor to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Blout played a leading role in the development of instant photography at Polaroid . The black and white version came onto the market in 1948 and the development of the color version was practically complete in 1954 (but was not ready for the market until 1960), so that Blout bought Polaroid shares on credit for $ 25,000 and enforced stock options for himself and other scientists. Inspired by the theoretical work of Linus Pauling , he later dealt with the synthesis of polypeptides of high molar mass in order to research the protein conformation (relationship between structure and amino acid sequence). That he began in the mid-1950s in collaboration with Paul M. Doty , while N - carboxy - anhydrides used by amino acids as building blocks. He used spectroscopic methods of optical activity to detect helix formation ( Cotton effect ).

In 1969 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , of which he was treasurer for a long time, and received the National Medal of Science in 1990 . From 1955 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1976 he received an honorary doctorate from Loyola University and received the Ralph F. Hirschmann Award in Peptide Chemistry and he received the John Phillips Award from the Phillips Exeter Academy . He was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences .

He was one of the founders of Biopolymers magazine .

In 1939 he married Joan Dreyfus, from whom he divorced in 1984 and with whom he had three children. In 1984 he married Gail Ferris and they adopted an orphan from Kazakhstan.

literature

• Lubert Stryer: Biographical Memoirs Fellows National Academy. 2009, PDF

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Elkan R. Blout, Scientist at Harvard, Dies at 86 .
2. ↑ His grades were not good enough for Princeton. According to Lubert Stryer (Biographical Memoirs National Academy), this may have been because he was too devoted to the game of poker .