Kurt Wüthrich

Kurt Wüthrich
Wüthrich at the 2012 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting
Born (1938-10-04) October 4, 1938
Aarberg, Switzerland
Residence Shanghai, China
Nationality Swiss
Alma mater
Known for NMR of proteins
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Doctoral advisor Silvio Fallab
Website www.scripps.edu/wuthrich

Kurt Wüthrich (born October 4, 1938 in Aarberg, Canton of Bern) is a Swiss chemist/biophysicist and Nobel Chemistry laureate, known for developing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods for studying biological macromolecules.[1][2][3] [4][5]

Education and early life

Born in Aarberg, Switzerland, Wüthrich was educated in chemistry, physics, and mathematics at the University of Bern before pursuing his Ph.D. supervised by Silvio Fallab[6] at the University of Basel, awarded in 1964.[7][8]

Career

After his PhD, Wüthrich continued postdoctoral research with Fallab for a short time before leaving to work at the University of California, Berkeley for two years from 1965 with Robert E. Connick. That was followed by a stint working with Robert G. Shulman at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey from 1967 to 1969.

Wüthrich returned to Switzerland, to Zürich, in 1969, where he began his career there at the ETH Zürich, rising to Professor of Biophysics by 1980. He currently maintains a laboratory at the ETH Zürich, at The Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, California and at the iHuman Institute of ShanghaiTech University. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh (1997-2000), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (where he was an Honorary Professor) and Yonsei University.[9]

During his graduate studies Wüthrich started out working with electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, and the subject of his Ph.D. thesis was "the catalytic activity of copper compounds in autoxidation reactions". During his time as a postdoc in Berkeley he began working with the newly developed and related technique of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study the hydration of metal complexes. When Wüthrich joined the Bell Labs, he was put in charge of one of the first superconducting NMR spectrometers, and started studying the structure and dynamics of proteins. He has pursued this line of research ever since.

After returning to Switzerland, Wüthrich collaborated with, among others, Nobel laureate Richard R. Ernst on developing the first two-dimensional NMR experiments, and established the nuclear Overhauser effect as a convenient way of measuring distances within proteins. This research later led to the complete assignment of resonances for among others the bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor and glucagon.

In October 2010, Wüthrich participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students will get to engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize–winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch.[10] Wüthrich is also a member on the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board.[11], and a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reform in the United Nations.[12]

Awards and honors

He was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1991, the Otto Warburg Medal in 1999 and half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for "his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution". He received the Bijvoet Medal of the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research of Utrecht University in 2008[13]. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2010.[14]

Personal details

On April 2, 2018, Mr. Wüthrich established permanent residency in Shanghai, China, after obtaining a Chinese permanent residence card. [15][16]

References

  1. ↑ Kurt Wuthrich faculty page Archived 2004-08-02 at the Wayback Machine. at ETH Zürich
  2. ↑ 'An Interview with Kurt Wuthrich Freeview video by the Vega Science Trust
  3. ↑ Wuthrich Nobel Prize Lecture
  4. ↑ "Welcome to the Wüthrich Laboratory". Scripps Institute. Archived from the original on 2013-07-04.
  5. ↑ Historical Dictionary of Switzerland entry
  6. ↑ "Wüthrich's CV". The Scripps Research Institute. Retrieved 9 December 2016.
  7. ↑ Wüthrich, Kurt (2003). "Kurt Wüthrich: biographical note". Journal of Biomolecular NMR. 27 (1): 1–12. doi:10.1023/A:1024756526171. ISSN 0925-2738.
  8. ↑ Palmer, Arthur G; Patel, Dinshaw J (2002). "Kurt Wüthrich and NMR of Biological Macromolecules". Structure. 10 (12): 1603–1604. doi:10.1016/S0969-2126(02)00915-2. ISSN 0969-2126.
  9. ↑ "Wüthrich's CV". The Scripps Research Institute. Retrieved 9 December 2016.
  10. ↑ Usasciencefestival.org lunch with a laureate Archived 2010-04-21 at the Wayback Machine.
  11. ↑ Usasciencefestival.org Archived 2010-04-21 at the Wayback Machine.
  12. ↑ "Overview". Campaign for a UN Parliamentary Assembly. Retrieved 2017-10-27. |first1= missing |last1= in Authors list (help)
  13. ↑ "Bijvoet Medal". Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
  14. ↑ "Fellows of the Royal Society". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-03-16.
  15. ↑ "Nobel Prize winner becomes permanent Shanghai resident". chinaplus.cri.cn. Retrieved 2018-04-02.
  16. ↑ "Nobel Prize laureate becomes permanent Shanghai resident - SHINE". SHINE. Retrieved 2018-04-02.
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