John W. Cornforth

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John W. Cornforth (1975)

Sir John Warcup "Kappa" Cornforth AC , CBE (born September 7, 1917 in Sydney , Australia , † December 8, 2013 in Sussex , United Kingdom ) was an Australian chemist and Nobel Prize winner .

life and work

Cornforth was born in Sydney in 1917, the second of four children in the family. His mother came from immigrants of German origin and was a nurse, his English father a teacher of English and classical philology. He spent his childhood in Armdale, a rural area in New South Wales .

Since he was ten, Cornforth suffered from otosclerosis , which over the course of a decade led to complete deafness . Despite the illness, he began studying organic chemistry at the University of Sydney at the age of 16 . In 1937, at the age of 20, he successfully completed his studies with a bachelor's degree and received the university medal. At the University of Sydney, he met his future wife Rita Harradence (1915–2012), also an organic chemist, when she broke a valuable Claisen flask in the laboratory and turned to Cornforth, who was known for being able to blow glass. The two married in 1941 and had a son and two daughters. He later worked closely with his wife (she also helped him communicate because of his deafness).

In 1938 he received his master’s degree and in 1939 went to Oxford University with an 1851 Exhibition Overseas Scholarship , where he received his doctorate (Ph.D.) in 1941 under Robert Robinson . His wife won the same scholarship independently and received her PhD from Oxford in the same year. Both were at St. Catherine's College and worked with Robert Robinson. During the Second World War, Cornforth worked under Robinson and Howard Florey with the chemical aspects of penicillin (concentration, purification, structure determination, etc.). He was a co-author of The Chemistry of Penicillin in 1949 . Cornforth moved in 1946 to the National Institute for Medical Research (in Hampstead and later in Mill Hill), where he turned back to the synthesis of steroids , on which he continued to work with Robinson. This is where his collaboration with George Popjak began . He was part of the group of Robert Robinson, who in 1951 succeeded in the first total synthesis of a non-aromatic steroid (epi-androsterone and from it other steroids such as cholesterol), parallel to and in competition with the work of Woodward . In 1962 he became co-director (with Popjak) of the Milstead Laboratory for Chemical Enzymology at the Shell Research Institute in Sittingbourne , of which he was director from 1968 to 1975. He also taught at the University of Warwick from 1965 to 1971, and from 1971 at the University of Sussex. From 1975 to 1982 he was Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Sussex .

By using hydrogen isotopes, which made it possible to determine the locations on the substrate at which an enzyme attacked, he clarified the mechanism of enzyme-substrate reactions, especially in cholesterol biosynthesis.

honors and awards

Cornforth has received many prizes and awards. The Royal Society of Chemistry awarded him the Corday Morgan Medal in 1953 and the Flintoff Medal in 1965 and the Pedler and Robert Robinson lectureship in 1968. The American Chemical Society presented him with the 1968 Ernest Guenther Award . In 1975 Cornforth was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme - catalysis reactions, together with Vladimir Prelog . In 1976 he received the Royal Medal . In 2000 he became a Millennium Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 1972 he was inducted into the Order of the British Empire as Commander and knighted as a Knight Bachelor in 1977 . In 2001 he received the Australian Centenary Medal. In 1977 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sydney. In 1972 he received the Prix Roussel and in 1965 with Popjak the Ciba Medal of the Biochemical Society. In 1975 he was named Australian of the Year .

Cornforth had been a member of the Royal Society since 1953 , which awarded him the Copley Medal in 1982 . He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1973) and the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (since 1978). In 1977 he became a member of the Australian Academy of Sciences and in 1978 a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary in The Guardian , January 12, 2014 (English)
  2. ↑ a b Obituary in The New York Times , December 19, 2013 (English)
  3. ↑ 1001 Australians You Should Know, by Toby Creswell, Samantha Trenoweth . books.google.de. Retrieved December 13, 2009.
  4. ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of John W. Cornforth at academictree.org, accessed on January 28, 2018.
  5. ↑ HME Cardwell, JW Cornforth, SR Duff, H. Holtermann, R. Robinson, Chemistry & Industry, 1951, pp. 389-90
  6. ^ Nobel laureates in chemistry, 1901-1992, by Laylin K. James . books.google.de. Retrieved December 13, 2009.
personal data
SURNAME Cornforth, John W.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cornforth, John Warcup; Cornforth, John Kappa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian chemist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry
DATE OF BIRTH September 7, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Sydney , Australia
DATE OF DEATH December 8, 2013
Place of death Sussex , UK