Christian Anfinsen

Origins and early life

Christian Boehmer Anfinsen was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania, on 26 March 1916, the son of Norwegian immigrants, a mechanical engineer and his wife, Sophie Rasmussen. He studied chemistry at Swarthmore College, where he graduated in 1937, and took a master's degree in organic chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1939. After a stay at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen that the war cut short in 1940, he took his doctorate in biochemistry at Harvard Medical School in 1943 and taught there until 1950.

Work and career

He then headed the laboratory of cellular physiology at the National Heart Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, where he studied the enzyme ribonuclease with colleagues including the young Israeli scientist Michael Sela. In 1961 he showed that ribonuclease, once unfolded, folds back by itself into its active form, proof that the amino-acid sequence alone determines a protein's shape, an idea known as the thermodynamic hypothesis.

Through Sela he formed a lasting bond with the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, where he spent 1958 and 1959 and whose board of governors he joined in 1962.

Recognition

In 1972 he received half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, “for his work on ribonuclease, especially concerning the connection between the amino acid sequence and the biologically active conformation”, the other half going to Stanford Moore and William Stein.

Personal life

In 1979 he married Libby Shulman Ely and at the same time converted to Orthodox Judaism, a commitment he kept for life, though he wrote in 1987 that his feelings still reflected fifty years of orthodox agnosticism and that he found Judaism an extremely interesting philosophical package.

Later years

He joined Johns Hopkins University in 1982, worked through the National Academy of Sciences for persecuted scientists abroad, and died of a heart attack in Randallstown, Maryland, on 14 May 1995.