Emil Thomas Kaiser

Emil Thomas Kaiser , called Tom Kaiser, (born February 15, 1938 in Hungary , † July 19, 1988 ) was an American chemist who dealt with bio-organic chemistry.

Kaiser came to the USA via Canada as a child with his parents (both PhDs in chemistry) . He received his doctorate in 1959 from the University of Chicago under Frank Westheimer with the thesis The hydrolysis of some cyclic esters of sulfuric acid and was a post-doctoral student at Harvard University with Elias J. Corey and Myron Bender . He became an assistant professor at Washington University and in 1963 at the University of Chicago, where he became a professor in 1970. In 1968 he received a research grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ( Sloan Research Fellowship ). In 1981 he became a Louis Block Professor and in 1982 he went to Rockefeller University . In 1986 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Shortly before his death (he suffered from kidney failure), he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1987.

He is known for developing semi-synthetic enzymes that connect the binding sites of one enzyme to the catalytic site of another. For example, he combined the redox properties of the enzyme flavin with the peptidase papain, which provided the binding properties. In another case he modified a protease ( subtilisin ) to thiosubtilisin in such a way that instead of cleaving proteins, it linked protein chains .

Another area that made him known was the role of amphiphilia in the biological effect of the secondary structure of proteins, especially amphiphilic helices, the water-repellent side of which is in lipids of the cell membrane and the hydrophilic side of which faces aqueous solutions. He also dealt early with site-specific mutagenesis .

Web links

• FH Westheimer, biography at NAS

Individual evidence

1. ^ Biographical data, publications and academic family tree of Emil Thomas Kaiser at academictree.org, accessed on February 15, 2018.