Christian Boemer Anfinsen

The Nobel Prize winning chemist, Christian B. Anfinsen, was a successful chemist with many accomplishments. Anfinsen was said to have been one of the greatest protein chemists of his era. His life before winning the Nobel Prize was filled with years of college study and hours upon hours of research. His research was primarily based on ribonuclease but he was also involved in the study of the polypeptide chains.

Christian Anfinsen was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania in 1916. Dr. Anfinsen earned his bachelors degree from Swarthmore College in 1937, and he also received a masters in organic chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1939. He later received a Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School and then spent the next seven years of his life as an instructor and then as an assistant professor of Biochemistry at Harvard. He left Harvard a few years later to become Chief of the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Metabolism at the National Institutes of Health. Anfinsen, author of 200 scientific articles and one book, The Molecular Basis of Evolution (1959) which talks about the two relationships that help to understand evolution, also spent one year as a senior fellow

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Although Christian B. Anfinsen was born in a small town in Pennsylvania, he proved to his country and to the world that a small town boy can make a huge difference in this big world. His work provided the starting foundation for the future experiments of other great men. Though a chemist by profession, he had a great sense of public purpose. He was able to go before Congress in 1988 to give his opinion against the use of biological weapons. He may have been a

of the American Cancer society from 1947-1948, in Sweden. He retired from the National Institutes of Health in 1981, and joined the faculty of John Hopkins University in 1982 as biochemist and biology professor.1

a humanitarian. His stand against biological weapons gave him the opportunity to present his argument before Congress in 1988.1

Anfinsen received many more honors other than the Nobel Prize. Some of these honors include; the Rockefeller Foundation Public Service Award,

his winning of the Nobel Prize of 1972. In the lecture he presented on December 11, 1972, Anfinsen discussed the process of the folding of the prot

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