Robert B. Corey

Robert Brainard Corey (born August 19, 1897 in Springfield , Massachusetts , † April 13, 1971 ) was an American biochemist .

His father was an engineer at General Electric in Schenectady and later at another company in Pittsburgh . Corey, who suffered from polio in his youth and was therefore partially disabled, grew up in Edgewood and studied at the University of Pittsburgh with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1919. He then received his doctorate in 1924 at Cornell University , where he was an instructor in analytics Chemistry became. He took an interest in X-ray diffraction and in 1928 went to Ralph Wyckhoff at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University ), where he became an associate in 1930. With Wyckhoff, he studied proteins (and initially simpler organic molecules) using X-ray crystallography . When Wyckhoff moved to the National Institutes of Health in 1937 , Corey went to Linus Pauling at Caltech , who had begun investigating the structural chemistry of biologically interesting molecules. In 1938 he became Senior Research Fellow , in 1946 Research Associate and in 1949 Professor of Structural Chemistry. In 1968 he retired. At that time his health was already deteriorating.

At Caltech he formed a successful team with Pauling, who stood out in public and excelled as a theorist and through stimulating lectures, while Corey carried out the X-ray structure analyzes. Her work on the secondary structure of proteins around 1951 ( alpha helix , β sheet ) became particularly well known . Herman Branson , an African-American professor of physics and chemistry from Howard University , who was a visiting researcher at Caltech in the late 1940s, also participated in the work on the alpha helix .

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1970). In 1964 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh.

Fonts

• with Pauling, Branson: The Structure of Proteins: Two Hydrogen-Bonded Helical Configurations of the Polypeptide Chain, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 37, 1951, pp. 205-211, PNAS

Web links

• Richard E. Marsh, Biographical Memoirs National Academy, 1997