Judith Klinman

Klinman at the National Medal of Science ceremony at the White House on November 20, 2014.

Judith Pollock Klinman (born April 19, 1941 in Philadelphia ) is an American chemist known for her contributions to enzyme kinetics . She is a professor of chemistry , molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley .

Klinman was born Judith Pollock in Philadelphia. She was interested in science as a child and later wanted to study chemistry, but her family could not pay for the tuition fees. A partial scholarship enabled her to study at the University of Pennsylvania , which she received in 1962 with a B.Sc. graduated as the second best of her year. She began her postgraduate studies at New York University , where she met her future husband, Norman Klinman, but returned to the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her Ph.D. in chemistry. In her doctoral thesis she dealt with the imidazole -catalyzed hydrolysis of benzimidazole ( A kinetic study of the hydrolysis and imidazole-catalyzed hydrolysis of substituted benzolimidazoles in light and heavy water ).

After graduating, she was a scholarship holder at the Weizmann Institute for Science in Israel until 1967 . Between 1968 and 1978 she conducted research at the Fox Chace Cancer Center of the National Cancer Institute before moving to UC Berkeley. She was the first woman in the university's chemistry department to teach. From 2000 to 2003 she was chair of the department.

In 1989, together with her research team at UC Berkeley, she provided the first evidence of a proton tunneling effect in enzyme reactions. Klinman and her team found a strong, temperature-independent, kinetic isotope effect in the yeast enzyme ADH , which reduces aldehydes with the help of the coenzyme NADH , which indicates a tunnel effect in the reaction mechanism. Klinman also discovered the so-called quinone enzymes, which act as cofactors to accelerate the oxidation of biogenic amines and alcohols . In 1990 she showed that 6-hydroxydopa-quinone (Topachinon TPQ) sits in the active centers of the copper- containing amine oxidase from bovine plasma as a prosthetic group , with which Klinman ended years of speculation about the nature and active centers of protein- bound cofactors. Together with her research group, she later demonstrated that the extracellular enzyme lysyl oxidase , which catalyzes the cross-linking of collagen and elastin , contains a lysine- based cofactor (lysine- tyrosyl- quinone LTQ) related to TPQ .

Klinman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology , American Chemical Society, and the American Philosophical Society . In 2014 she was awarded the National Medal of Science . For 2017, Klinman was awarded the Willard Gibbs Medal .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Who's who in frontier science and technology: 1984–1985. Marquis Who's Who, Chicago 1985, ISBN 978-0-8379-5701-2 , p. 397.
2. ^ ^{A b c} Ellen Daniell: Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists . Yale University Press , New Haven (Conn.) 2008, ISBN 978-0-300-51084-3 , pp. 256 f.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Judith P. Klinman . Chemical Heritage Foundation, accessed April 9, 2016.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Judith P. Klinman . University of California at Berkeley, College of Chemistry, accessed April 9, 2016.
5. ^ William L. Jolly: From retorts to lasers: the story of chemistry at Berkeley . University of California, Berkeley 1987, p. 245.
6. ^ Biographical data, publications and academic family tree of Judith Pollock Klinman at academictree.org, accessed on February 24, 2018.
7. ^ Margaret W Rossiter: Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World Since 1972 . Johns Hopkins University Press , Baltimore (Md.) 2012, ISBN 978-1-4214-0233-8 , p. 198 .
8. ↑ ^{a b} ASBMB Past Presidents: 1998 - Judith P. Klinman . American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, accessed April 12, 2016.
9. ↑ Jim Al-Khalili, Johnjoe McFadden, Sebastian Vogel: The quantum beat of life: How quantum biology explains the world anew . Ullstein Buchverlage, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-550-08110-1 , p. 124 ff.
10. ↑ Obama Honors 10 With National Medal of Science . In: Inside Higher Education , October 6, 2014.