James Bassham

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James Alan Bassham (born November 26, 1922 in Sacramento, California , † November 19, 2012 in El Cerrito , California ) was an American biochemist. Together with Melvin Calvin and Andrew Alm Benson, he discovered the Calvin cycle of the photosynthetic metabolism of plants.

Bassham studied chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in 1945 and a doctorate (Ph.D.) in 1949 with Melvin Calvin. There at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, the work on the Calvin cycle (or Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle) with Calvin and Benson was done. From 1949 to 1977 he was a member of the bio-organic chemistry group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California. From 1978 until his retirement in 1985 he was department head (Chemical Biodynamics) and in 1988 he retired and was a consultant to the laboratory. He was also a lecturer at Berkeley from 1957 to 1959 and an adjunct professor of biochemistry from 1972 to 1980.

He later dealt with the regulation of metabolism and gene expression in photosynthetic plant cells.

1956/57 he was visiting scholar at Oxford University as a Fellow of the National Science Foundation and 1968/69 visiting professor at the University of Hawaii.

He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

He had been married since 1956 and had five children.

Fonts

  • with Calvin: The path of carbon in photosynthesis , in: Handbuch der Pflanzenphysiologie, Springer 1960, pp. 884–922
  • Mapping the carbon reduction cycle: A personal retrospective , Photosynthesis Research, Volume 76, 2003, pp. 35-52.

Research on the Calvin cycle was carried out in a long series of works by Calvin and colleagues (including Bassham in some cases) from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, for example in J. Am. Chem. Soc., J. Biolog. Chem. Published (under the series title The path of carbon in photosynthesis ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth and career dates Pamela Kalte u. a. American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
personal data
SURNAME Bassham, James
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bassham, James Alan (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH November 26, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Sacramento, California
DATE OF DEATH 19th November 2012
Place of death El Cerrito , California