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Professor Kurt Wüthrich
Professor Kurt Wüthrich was born in Switzerland in 1938. He studied chemistry, physics and mathematics at the University of Bern from 1957 to 1962. He obtained a PhD degree in inorganic chemistry from the University of Basel in 1964, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Basel, the University of California in Berkeley, and Bell Telephone Laboratories. In 1969 Professor Wüthrich joined the ETH Zurich in Switzerland, where he is currently a Professor of Biophysics. Since 2001 he shares his time between ETH Zurich and The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, USA, where he is the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Professor of Structural Biology.
His research interests are in molecular structural biology, and in structural genomics. His specialty is nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy with biological macromolecules, where he developed the NMR method for three-dimensional structure determination of proteins and nucleic acids in solution (solution resembles the environment of body fluids in living organisms). The Wüthrich groups have solved more than seventy NMR structures of proteins and nucleic acids, including the immunosuppression system cyclophilin A?cyclosporin A, the homeodomain?operator DNA transcriptional regulatory system, and prion proteins from a variety of species.
For his work, Professor Kurt Wüthrich was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002. Excerpt from the Nobel press release: “The possibility of analyzing proteins in detail has led to increased understanding of the processes of life. Researchers can now rapidly and simply reveal what protein molecules look like in solution and can then understand their function in the cell. This method has revolutionized the development of new pharmaceuticals. Promising applications are also being reported in other areas, for example foodstuff control and early diagnosis of breast cancer and prostate cancer.”
