Kenneth Holmes

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Kenneth Charles Holmes (* 1934 in Hammersmith , London ) is a British molecular biologist and biophysicist .

Kenneth Holmes went to Chiswick to school and studied from 1952 at the University of Cambridge ( St John's College ) with the Bachelor Accounts 1955 and the Master Accounts 1959. In 1959 he was at Birkbeck College of the University of London with Aaron Klug on PhD structure of the tobacco mosaic virus . He had started his work on it under Rosalind Franklin , who died prematurely. In 1960/61 he was a postdoctoral fellow at Boston Children's Hospital , where he began his work on muscle structure with Carolyn Cohen . From 1962 he was at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. From 1968 he was director at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, where he set up the biophysics department. From 1972 he was a scientific member of the Max Planck Society . From 1971 to 1999 he was professor of biophysics at the University of Heidelberg . In 2003 he retired from the MPI.

In 1981 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society , whose Gabor Medal he received in 1997. In 2000 he received the European Latsis Prize . In 1968 he became an EMBO member. In 2001 he received the Gregori Aminoff Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He has been a corresponding member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences since 1997 and of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences since 1994 .

He did pioneering work on the structure of viruses (in particular the determination of the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus with X-ray crystallography) and from 1970 he was a pioneer in the use of synchrotron radiation sources for X-ray structure studies in biology (in this context he founded the branch of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory at Desy in Hamburg). He determined the structure of actin in muscles with X-ray crystallography (and the structure of some other complex proteins), subsequently studied the molecular mechanism of muscles and developed X-ray optical methods for determining the structure of fiber-like molecules (X-ray fiber diffraction).

Holmes is the author of a scientific biography by Aaron Klug that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017 .

His daughter is the actress and singer-songwriter Anna Holmes .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Royal Society: Kenneth Holmes .
  2. ^ Press Office, Michael Schwarz: University of Heidelberg. In: uni-heidelberg.de. November 24, 2000, accessed March 21, 2017 .
  3. ^ Suzy Lidström: The rewards of crystallography: The 2014 Gregori Aminoff Prize in the International Year of Crystallography. In: Physica Scripta. 89, 2014, p. 068003, doi : 10.1088 / 0031-8949 / 89/6/068003 .
  4. ↑ Aaron Klug's biography at Cambridge University Press, accessed January 5, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Holmes, Kenneth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Holmes, Kenneth Charles (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British molecular biologist and biophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Hammersmith , London