John Howard Northrop

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John Howard Northrop 1946

John Howard Northrop (born July 5, 1891 in Yonkers , New York , † May 27, 1987 in Wickenburg , Arizona ) was an American biochemist .

Northrop was born to John I, who was a zoologist and teacher at Columbia University . His mother, Alice R. Northrop, was a botany teacher at Hunter College. John I. died of a laboratory explosion two weeks before his son was born.

John Howard studied at Columbia University , where he received his doctorate in chemistry in 1915. During the Second World War he did research for the US Army Chemical Warfare Service on the production of acetone and ethanol by fermentation .

In 1929, Northrop isolated pepsin . and assigned it to the proteins . In 1938 he was the first to isolate and characterize bacteriophages and identify them as nucleoproteins . Northrop also isolated and crystallized pepsinogen (the proenzyme of pepsin), trypsin , chymotrypsin and carboxypeptidase . In 1932 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina .

For his 1939 book Crystalline Enzymes: The Chemistry of Pepsin, Trypsin, and Bacteriophage , Northrop received the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal of the National Academy of Sciences , of which he was a member since 1934. Since 1938 he was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society . In 1949 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Northrop was employed at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York from 1916 to 1961 . In 1949 he became professor of bacteriology at the University of California, Berkeley and later professor of biophysics.

In 1946, Northrop and Wendell Meredith Stanley received half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for their representation of enzymes and virus - proteins in their pure form”. The second half of the award went to James Batcheller Sumner .

In 1917, Northrop married Louise Walker, with whom he had two children. The son John became an oceanographer, while the daughter Alice married the Nobel Prize winner Frederick C. Robbins . Northrop died of suicide in 1987 in Wickenberg, Arizona.

literature

  • JH Northrop: Crystalline Enzymes (1939), Columbia University Press.
  • AC Economos, FA Lints: Growth rate and life span in Drosophila V. The effect of prolongation of the period of growth on the total duration of life (JH Northrop, 1917) –revisited. In: Mechanisms of aging and development. Volume 33, Number 1, December 1985, pp. 103-113, ISSN  0047-6374 . PMID 3908838 .
  • RM Herriott: John Howard Northrop. In: The Journal of General Physiology . Volume 77, Number 6, June 1981, pp. 597-599, ISSN  0022-1295 . PMID 7021760 . PMC 2215443 (free full text).
  • RM Herriott: John Howard Northrop: July 5, 1891-May 27, 1987. In: Biographical memoirs. National Academy of Sciences (US). Vol. 63, 1994, pp. 423-450, PMID 11615389 .
  • National Academy of Science biography .
  • MA Shampo, RA Kyle: John Northrop - definitive study of enzymes. In: Mayo Clinic proceedings. Mayo Clinic. Volume 75, Number 3, March 2000, p. 254, ISSN  0025-6196 . doi: 10.4065 / 75.3.254 . PMID 10725951 .
  • T. van Helvoort: The controversy between John H. Northrop and Max Delbrück on the formation of bacteriophage: bacterial synthesis or autonomous multiplication? In: Annals of science. Volume 49, Number 6, November 1992, pp. 545-575, ISSN  0003-3790 . PMID 11616207 .

Web links

Commons : John Howard Northrop  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ JH Northrop: Crystalline Pepsin . In: Science (1929), Volume 69, Issue 1796, p. 580, doi: 10.1126 / science.69.1796.580 , PMID 17758437 .
  2. ^ Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal . National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on December 29, 2010. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved January 14, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nasonline.org
  3. ^ Member History: John H. Northrop. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 1, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter N (PDF; 208 kB) American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved April 15, 2011.
  5. ^ Nobelprize.org: John H. Northrop - Biographical
  6. ^ University of California: In Memoriam, 1988: John Howard Northrop, Bacteriology: Berkeley
  7. ^ The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1946 - Preparing Pure Proteins . Retrieved December 14, 2008.
  8. ↑ See p. 440 of RM Herriott: John Howard Northrop: July 5, 1891-May 27, 1987 , In: Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences (US) , Volume 63, pp. 423-50.
personal data
SURNAME Northrop, John Howard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH July 5, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Yonkers , New York
DATE OF DEATH May 27, 1987
Place of death Wickenburg , Arizona