Anfinsen, Christian Boehmer (1916–1995)

US biochemist who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1972 with Stanford Moore and William Stein for his work on the shape and primary structure of ribonuclease (the enzyme that hydrolyses RNA). Specifically, he determined how ribonuclease kept its configuration after it had completed its enzymatic function.

Ribonuclease is made up of a single peptide (a molecule consisting of two or more amino acid molecules joined by a peptide bond) chain folded into a sphere bound together by four disulphide bonds. These bonds can be broken down so that the enzyme becomes denatured (collapses), losing all of its enzyme properties. Anfinsen found that its shape and consequently its enzymatic power could be restored, and concluded that ribonuclease must retain all of the information about its configuration within its amino acids. He went on to study the secondary and tertiary structures of ribonuclease.

Anfinsen was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania, and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and then Harvard, where he obtained his doctorate in 1943. From 1943 to 1950, he taught at Harvard Medical School and also collaborated with Axel Theorell at the Medical Nobel Institute. He then moved to the National Heart Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was responsible for the laboratory of cellular physiology until he was appointed professor of biology at Johns Hopkins University in 1982.