Louise Johnson

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dame Louise Napier Johnson , DBE (born September 26, 1940 in Worcester , † September 25, 2012 in Cambridge ) was a British biochemist . She researched and taught at the University of Oxford for over 40 years , dealing with the X-ray structure analysis of proteins , in particular glycogen phosphorylase . In recognition of her achievements, she was admitted to the Royal Society , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences , among others , and received several honorary doctorates .

Career

Louise Johnson was born in Worcester in 1940 and moved with her family across the UK as a child following the posting of her father who served in the Royal Air Force . So she attended schools in Aberdeen and London before studying from 1959 at University College London , where her mother had already graduated. Louise Johnson received her Bachelor of Science degree in physics there in 1962 before moving to the Royal Institution of Great Britain . Under the direction of David Phillips , she first came into contact with her later field of research and received her Ph.D. in 1965. She also published her results together with Phillips in the journal Nature .

In 1966 Johnson spent a year abroad at Yale University before returning to her homeland in 1967 and from then on worked at the University of Oxford , where David Phillips set up a new laboratory for molecular biophysics . From 1973 she lectured in biophysics at Somerville College before she succeeded the retired David Phillips in 1990, received a full professorship at the University of Oxford and took over the direction of the laboratory. She held this position until her retirement in 2007. At the same time, she was Director of Life Sciences at Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire from 2003 to 2008 .

Louise Johnson passed away in Cambridge on September 25, 2012, the day before her 72nd birthday . The journals Nature and The Lancet dedicated an obituary to her .

Scientific work

During her scientific career, Johnson mainly dealt with the X-ray structure analysis of proteins . In her doctoral thesis, she already described the structure of lysozyme and how it interacts with N-acetylglucosamine , so that she made decisive contributions to the understanding of the key-lock principle of enzymes . Later she turned to the enzyme glycogen phosphorylase , the structure and regulation of which she was able to demonstrate via reversible phosphorylation . Another focus of her work was proteins that are involved in the cell cycle , especially cyclin-dependent kinases . In addition, she was one of the first to use synchrotron radiation in structural analysis, and in this context worked on the Diamond Light Source .

In total, she published over 180 scientific articles and, together with Tom Blundell, wrote the standard work Protein Cristallography . She also acted temporarily as the editor of FEBS Letters .

Honors

In 1990 Johnson was accepted into the Royal Society and was a member of its councils from 1998 to 2001. In addition to a number of other awards, she was awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of St Andrews (1992), Bath (2004), Cambridge (2010) and Imperial College London (2009). In 2003, the biochemist was ennobled as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) and has since had the suffix " Dame ". In addition, she was elected as an external honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007) and the National Academy of Sciences (2011).

Personal

In 1968 Johnson married the theoretical physicist Abdus Salam (1926–1996), who received the 1979 Nobel Prize . The couple had a son and a daughter.

Web links

  • Obituary on the website of the University of Oxford

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e Elspeth F. Garman: Johnson, Dame Louise Napier (1940–2012). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford, January 2016.
  2. ^ Professor Dame Louise Johnson obituary. diamond.ac.uk, accessed August 17, 2016 .
  3. ↑ a b Mark Sansom: Obituary: Louise Johnson (1940-2012) . In: Nature , 2012, edition 490, p. 488, doi : 10.1038 / 490488a .
  4. ^ Geoff Watts: Obituary: Louise Napier Johnson . In: The Lancet , 2012, edition 280, No. 9854, p. 1642, doi : 10.1016 / S0140-6736 (12) 61938-2 .
personal data
SURNAME Johnson, Louise
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Johnson, Dame Louise Napier (full name); Johnson, Louise N .; Johnson, LN
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH September 26, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Worcester , UK
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 2012
Place of death Cambridge , UK