Robert bruce merrifield biography of barack

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References

^ http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Obit_Merrifield.html
^R. He and his coworkers later synthesised ribonuclease A in 1969. In 1963, he reported his method, called ‘solid phase peptide synthesis’. Prior to Merrifield's time, using conventional reactions in solution, peptide synthesis was exceedingly tedious and, for very large peptides, virtually impossible.

The day after graduating on 19 June, 1949, he married Elizabeth Furlong and the next day left for New York City and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.
doi:10.1021/ja00897a025.

Categories: American biochemists | Nobel laureates in Chemistry

Robert Bruce Merrifield

1921-2006

In the 1960s Bruce Merrifield developed the solid-phase technique that revolutionized peptide synthesis. Merrifield solved this problem by attaching the first amino acid to a solid polymer.

Career

At the Institute, later Rockefeller University, he worked as an Assistant for Dr. D.W. Woolley on a dinucleotide growth factor he discovered in graduate school and on peptide growth factors that Woolley had discovered earlier.

Robert Bruce Merrifield was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, but grew up in California where, through a series of moves from city to city, he attended nine grade schools and two high schools before graduating from Montebello High School near Los Angeles in 1939.

I. The Synthesis of a Tetrapeptide". Using this technique Merrifield synthesized the nonapeptide bradykinin in just 27 hours, and in 1969 he synthesized ribonuclease, the first enzyme to be prepared synthetically from its amino acid components (124 amino acid residues). After a year Merrifeld returned to UCLA for further training and received his PhD in 1949.

Merrifield was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1972 and received several awards including the Lasker Award (1969), the Gairdner Award (1970), and the Alan E Pierce Award of the American Peptide Symposium (1979).

There, he worked for DW Woolley on dinucleotide and peptide growth factors. His many honors besides the Nobel include the ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry (1972), the Royal Society of Chemistry Medal (1987), the ACS Hirschmann Award in Peptide Chemistry (1990) and the Glenn T.

Seaborg Medal, UCLA (1993).

Location in chemistry building: First Floor; West Wing South Wall; Sequence 6

Source: Professor Merrifield

Prof. He is survived by his wife, children and 16 grandchildren. After two years at Pasadena Junior College he transferred to the UCLA, gaining a BSc in chemistry, and going to work at the Philip R Park Research Foundation, working on amino acids and animal growth.

In 1993, he published his autobiography, "Life during a Golden Age of Peptide Chemistry." He received the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities Award for outstanding contributions to Biomolecular Technologies in 1998. Nobel Laureates photographed by Peter Badge" (WILEY-VCH, 2008).

In 1969, he and his colleague Bernd Gutte announced the first synthesis of the enzyme, ribonuclease A.

This work proved the chemical nature of enzymes.