Johann deisenhofer autobiography of benjamin

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75 (2): 164. Almost immediately after my arrival I fell in love with Kirsten Fischer Lindahl, Professor of Microbiology and Biochemistry and Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; we got married in 1989.

For the determination of the three-dimensional structure of the reaction center Hartmut Michel and I received the 1986 Biological Physics Prize of the American Physical Society, and the 1988 Otto Bayer Prize.

degree, Robert Huber offered me a postdoctoral position for two years which I accepted. Photosynthesis, according to the official Nobel review of the 1988 chemistry award, is “the most important chemical reaction on earth”.

Exhibition "Sketches of Science" by Volker Steger - Locations & Dates

By Volker Steger

When I see Deisenhofer I imagine him looking through a stack of plexi-glass sheets with very fine x-ray-diffraction patterns on it.

Hans Deisenhofer, Hartmut Michel and Robert Huber shared that Nobel Prize, having worked together on the experiments, and have all contributed to Volker’s project. In 1949, I entered elementary school at Zusamaltheim, and continued to attend until 1956. Nevertheless, the experimental work I did under the supervision of Karl-Friedrich Renk in Dransfeld's lab was very successful, and led to a publication in Physical Review Letters in 1971; this was my first scientific publication.

Together with a couple of colleagues I started my Diplomarbeit in this field in the laboratory of Klaus Dransfeld. "Johann Deisenhofer--Nobel Laureate in chemistry". It was a special privilege to belong to the very small group of people who saw the structural model of this molecule grow on the screen of a computer workstation, and it is hard to describe the excitement I felt during this period of the work.

During all my time in Martinsried I enjoyed working with computers, and developing and maintaining crystallographic software.

In 1982, Hartmut Michel, who had come to Martinsried together with Dieter Oesterhelt, reported in one of Huber's group seminars about his spectacular success with the crystallization of the photosynthetic reaction center from Rhodopseudomonas viridis.

However, to their great dissapointment, my parents early noticed my lack of interest in farming, and made the diffcult decision to send me away to school. The wide recognition of our work also opened the possibility for me to move to a new place, and to build a research group of my own. It still took almost two years until we had worked out the complete structure, and two more years to refine the model at 2.3Å resolution.

The work on the photosynthetic reaction center changed my life in many ways.

PMID 10683655.
2. This membrane protein complex, called a photosynthetic reaction center, was known to play a crucial role in initiating a simple type of photosynthesis.

As it turned out, Klaus Dransfeld was a person almost as shy as myself, so that we could not establish a good personal contact at the time. Proc.