George Wallace connoisseur

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George Wallace Kenner (born November 16, 1922 in Sheffield , † June 26, 1978 in Birmingham ) was a British chemist ( organic chemistry ).

Life

Kenner was the son of chemist James Kenner (1885–1974), a Fellow of the Royal Society. He attended the Manchester Grammar School and studied from 1939 chemistry at the University of Manchester with a bachelor's degree in 1942 and a master's degree with Alexander Robertus Todd . At that time he was working on the synthesis of purines such as ATP . In 1944 he became a lecturer at the Institute for Organic Chemistry at Cambridge University , where he followed Todd, where he also received his doctorate in 1946 (Ph. D.). In 1948/49 he was a visiting scientist with Vladimir Prelog in Zurich. From 1957 he was Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Liverpool . In 1976 he was Royal Society Research Professor.

In 1951 he married Jillian Bird, with whom he had two daughters.

plant

In 1954 he synthesized the first cyclic peptide . From the mid-1950s on he was involved in the synthesis of porphyrins , finding new ways at lower temperatures than Hans Fischer . He synthesized around 20 porphyrins, including those that are of biological interest as the building blocks of chlorophyll and the heme group in the blood.

In 1964 he clarified the structure of the gastrin peptide hormone gastrin and synthesized it. He worked with the professor of physiology at the University of Liverpool Roderic Alfred Gregory (1913-1990) together. Most recently he worked on the synthesis of lysozyme , which with 129 amino acids was even more complex than gastrin with 17 amino acids, but could not finish it. The synthesis of biologically functional lysozyme was first achieved by Stuart B. Kent and his group at the University of Chicago in 2007.

Honors

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society from 1964 and held its Bakerian Lecture in 1976 . In 1974 he was President of Section B of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1951 he received the Mendola Medal and in 1957 the Corday Morgan Medal .

A prize for organic chemistry combined with a lecture are named after him at the University of Liverpool.

Fonts

  • with H. Gregory, PM Hardy, DS Jones, RC Sheppard: The antral Hormone Gastrin: Structure of Gastrin , Nature, Volume 204, 1964, pp. 931-933.
  • with KL Agarwal, J. Beacham, PH Bentley, RA Gregory, RC Sheppard, HJ Tracy: Isolation, structure and synthesis of ovine and bovine gastrins , Nature, Volume 219, 1968, pp. 614-615
  • with J. Beacham, PH Bentley, RA Gregory, JK MacLeod, RC Sheppard: Synthesis of human gastrin I , Nature, Volume 209, 1966, pp. 585-586.
  • The Bakerian lecture. Towards synthesis of proteins , Proc. Roy. Soc. B, Volume 197, 1977, pp. 237-253

literature

  • Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, p. 234
  • Alexander Todd in Biographical Memoirs Fellows Royal Society, Volume 25, 1979, pp. 390-420

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Biographical data, publications and academic family tree of George Wallace Kenner at academictree.org, accessed on February 15, 2018.
  2. ↑ T. Durek, VY Torbeev, SB Kent: Convergent chemical synthesis and high-resolution x-ray structure of human lysozyme , Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, Volume 104, 2007, pp. 4846-4851.
personal data
SURNAME Connoisseur, George Wallace
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British chemist (organic chemistry)
DATE OF BIRTH November 16, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Sheffield
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 1978
Place of death Birmingham