Bruno H. Zimm

Bruno Hasbrouck Zimm (October 31, 1920 – November 26, 2005) was an American chemist. He was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry from University of California, San Diego, and a leading polymer chemist and DNA researcher.

Early life Zimm was born an only child in 1920 in Woodstock, New York. His father was the sculptor Bruno Louis Zimm, and his mother a writer. Zimm graduated from Kent School in Kent, Connecticut in 1938. After obtaining his Ph.D. in physical chemistry under the tutelage of Joe Mayer at Columbia University in 1944, he moved across town for postdoctoral work with Herman Mark at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he began his research on light scattering. Whilst the original Rouse model overestimates the decrease of the diffusion coefficient D with the number of polymer beads N as 1/N, the Zimm model predicts D~1/Nν which is consistent with the experimental data for dilute polymer solutions, and where ν is the Flory exponent, a measure of the polymer solubility.

In 1959, together with J.K. Bragg, Zimm wrote a classic paper on the helix-coil transition for polypeptides; a year later he published a second paper on the “melting” of the helical forms of DNA.