John B. Fenn

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John B. Fenn (2005)

John Bennett Fenn (born June 15, 1917 in New York City , † December 10, 2010 in Richmond , Virginia ) was an American chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 together with Kōichi Tanaka and Kurt Wüthrich .

Life

John B. Fenn was born in New York City and grew up in Hackensack , New Jersey, and after the family moved to Berea , Kentucky. He earned at Berea College the bachelor of arts degree and a doctorate in 1940 in chemistry at Yale University .

During his studies, he married Margaret Wilson who died in a car accident in New Zealand in 1992 . They had three children together.

Fenn received his PhD in 1940 under Gösta Åkerlof at Yale University and then worked for three years in a research department at Monsanto Chemical Company in Anniston , Alabama and then in the research department for Sharples Chemicals in Wyandotte , Michigan. In 1945, he started for the company experiment, Inc on Project Bumblebee to work, one of the United States Navy commissioned the development of a antiaircraft missile with ramjet . From 1952 he headed Project SQUID at Princeton University , a project sponsored by the State Office of Naval Research (ONR) to research improved rocket propulsion systems . In 1955 he took over the position of a liaison officer in the London office of the ONR for a year before continuing to work in Princeton on Project Bumblebee .

Finally, Fenn took up a professorship at Yale University in 1962 , during which he carried out his later Nobel Prize-winning research on macromolecules . In 1983 Fenn received the Humboldt Research Prize for his work in the field of molecular beam physics and chemistry. This award resulted in a twelve-month collaboration with Jan Peter Toennies at the Max Planck Institute for Flow Research in Göttingen . In doing so, they researched a further development of jet technology. From 1994 Fenn was Professor of Analytical Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University .

He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences .

John Bennett Fenn died on December 10, 2010 in Richmond, Virginia.

Scientific achievement

In 2002 Fenn received half of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry together with Kōichi Tanaka “for the development of methods for the identification and structural analysis of biological macromolecules” . The other half of the prize was awarded to the Swiss Kurt Wüthrich "for his development of magnetic nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in order to research the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution".

Fenn's merit is undisputed, since mass spectrometry, which was common up until then, was unsuitable for substance analysis to determine large biomolecules : mixtures of substances are first evaporated, then electrically charged and then exposed to electrical fields . However, the evaporation method used would destroy large biomolecules.

Fenn first dissolved the macromolecules in water in order to expose them to a 3000-volt field and to let the water slowly evaporate, whereby the electrically charged molecules were now accessible for further investigation, and after acceleration of the undestroyed charged molecules their mass by calculating the "Flight time" could be calculated over a known route. His method known as electrospray ionization (ESI) published it in 1988. First results that are related to this publication, however, were already in 1983/84 in Germany in collaboration with Jan Peter Toennies at the Göttingen Max Planck Institute for Flow Research developed .

The relevance for practical application can hardly be overestimated, as complex pharmacological substances can now also be researched and manufactured, as was already shown in the mid-1990s with the development of HIV protease inhibitors to combat AIDS .

The patent rights for electrospray ionization became the subject of legal proceedings between Fenn and Yale University that had been ongoing since 1996 . Fenn was convicted in 2005 of paying Yale over one million dollars in compensation and surrendering portions of its patent rights.

Awards

plant

  • John B. Fenn, Engines, Energy, and Entropy - a Thermodynamics Primer , 1982, San Francisco, ISBN 0-7167-1281-4

literature

Web links

Commons : John Bennett Fenn  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ VCU News: Nobel Laureate John Fenn, VCU Professor of Chemistry, Dies at 93
  2. ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of John B. Fenn at academictree.org, accessed on February 4, 2018.
  3. ^ Idw : Again Nobel Prize to Humboldtians
  4. ^ Book of Members
  5. ↑ Yale Daily News : Fomer prof loose ruling over patent , February 14 of 2005.
personal data
SURNAME Fenn, John B.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fenn, John Bennett (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist, 2002 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
DATE OF BIRTH June 15, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York
DATE OF DEATH December 10, 2010
Place of death Richmond , Virginia