Joseph S. Fruton

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joseph Stewart Fruton (born May 14, 1912 in Częstochowa as Joseph Fruchtgarten ; † July 29, 2007 New Haven , Connecticut ) was a Polish-American biochemist and chemical historian.

Life

His father was a Jewish grain dealer, his mother a French teacher. The family emigrated to the USA in 1913, where they lived in New York City, but moved to Minsk in April 1917 , then to Warsaw and Berlin, and again to New York City in 1923, where the family changed their name to Fruton. Fruton attended James Madison High School with graduation in 1927 and graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor's degree in 1931. Under his teacher John M. Nelson , he turned to biochemistry. ER received his PhD in biochemistry from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons under Hans Thacher Clarke in 1934. As a post-doctoral student , he was Max Bergmann's assistant at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, where he also worked with Leonidas Zervas . His main research focus was protein chemistry: he synthesized small stereospecific peptides and examined the behavior of enzymes on them (e.g. various proteases ). He also discovered a synthetic peptide substrate that reacted to pepsin (contrary to the general opinion at the time that pepsin did not act on short proteins). Pepsin was also his main research topic at Yale in the 1960s. From 1945 he taught as an assistant professor and from 1950 as a professor at Yale University in the Department of Physiological Chemistry (and from 1950 also in the chemistry faculty of Yale). In 1948 he visited Europe (with Hugo Theorell in Stockholm, Kaj Linderstrøm-Lang in Copenhagen, Alexander Todd in Cambridge). In 1952 he became chairman of the Faculty of Physiological Chemistry, which was renamed Biochemistry. Here, too, he mainly dealt with proteolytic enzymes (proteinases, peptidases) and chemical synthesis of peptides. 1959 to 1962 he was director of the science department at Yale. Here there were conflicts with the Provost Kingman Brewster over the organization of biochemistry, the emerging molecular biology and biophysics at Yale. In 1962/63 he was again on trips abroad. In 1982 he retired. He died in New Haven in 2007 just two days after his wife.

He had been concerned with the history of chemistry, particularly the history of biochemistry and molecular biology, since the late 1940s.

With his wife of the biochemist Sofia Simmonds (1917-2007) he published an influential textbook on biochemistry in the USA. They married in 1936. Fruton, unlike many other faculties at Yale, promoted women academics early on.

In 1993 he received the Dexter Award and in 1973 the Pfizer Award (for Molecules and Life ). In 1943 he received the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry from the ACS and in 1990 the John Frederick Lewis Award from the American Philosophical Society. In 1952 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences , 1953 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and 1967 the American Philosophical Society .

Fonts

  • with Sofia Simmonds: General Biochemistry, 1953, 1958
  • Molecules and Life: Historical Essays on the Interplay of Chemistry and Biology, Wiley 1972
  • A Bio-bibliography for the History of the Biochemical Sciences since 1800, 1982, 1985, 1994
  • Contrasts in Scientific Style: Research Groups in the Chemical and * Biochemical Sciences, 1990
  • A Skeptical Biochemist, 1992
  • Eighty Years, 1994
  • Proteins, Enzymes, Genes: The Interplay of Chemistry and Biology, 1999
  • Methods and Styles in the Development of Chemistry, 2002
  • Fermentation - vital or chemical process?, History of Science and Medicine Library 1, Brill 2006
  • Eighty Years, New Haven 1994 (privately printed, autobiography)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Maxine Singer, Obituary Biographical Memoirs American Philosophical Society, p. 453
personal data
SURNAME Fruton, Joseph S.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fruton, Joseph Stewart (full name); Fruchtgarten, Joseph (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-American biochemist and chemical historian
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Czestochowa
DATE OF DEATH July 29, 2007
Place of death New Haven , Connecticut