Christian B. Anfinsen

Christian Boehmer Anfinsen Jr. (March 26, 1916 – May 14, 1995) was an American biochemist. He shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Stanford Moore and William Howard Stein for work on ribonuclease, especially concerning the connection between the amino acid sequence and the biologically active conformation (see Anfinsen's dogma).

Background Anfinsen was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania, into a family of Norwegian-American immigrants. His parents were Sophie (née Rasmussen) and Christian Boehmer Anfinsen Sr., a mechanical engineer. The family moved to Philadelphia in the 1920s. In 1933, he went to Swarthmore College where he played varsity football and earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1937.

Anfinsen had three children with his first wife, Florence Kenenger, to whom he was married from 1941 to 1978. In 1979, he married Libby Shulman Ely, with whom he had 4 stepchildren, and converted to Orthodox Judaism. However, Anfinsen wrote in 1987 that "my feelings about religion still very strongly reflect a fifty-year period of orthodox agnosticism."

His papers were donated to the National Library of Medicine by Libby Anfinsen between 1998 and 1999.

Career

In 1950, the National Heart Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, recruited Anfinsen as chief of its laboratory of cell physiology. In 1954, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship enabled Anfinsen to return to the Carlsberg Laboratory for a year and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship allowed him to study at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel from 1958 to 1959. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958. From 1982 until his death in 1995, Anfinsen was Professor of Biology and (Physical) Biochemistry at Johns Hopkins.

Past recipients of the Christian B. Anfinsen Award include:

Donald Hunt (1996) Wayne Hendrickson (1997) James A. Wells (1998) Alan Fersht (1999) Stephen Benkovic (2000) Martin Karplus (2001) Roger Tsien (2002) Ada Yonath (2003) Meir Wilchek (2004) Matthias Mann (2005) John R. Yates, III (2006) Carl Frieden (2007) Carol V. Robinson (2008) Wayne Hubbell (2009) Yoshinori Fujiyoshi (2010) D. Wayne Bolen (2011) Barry H. Honig (2012) Tom Alber (2013) Robert Tycko (2014) Sachdev Sidhu (2015) Andreas Plückthun (2016) Lewis E. Kay (2017) Yifan Cheng (2018) Anthony Kossiakoff (2019) Stephen Sligar (2020) Petra Fromme (2021) Jin Zhang (2022) Mei Hong (2023) Neil Kelleher (2024) Jan Steyaert (2025) Paula Booth (2026)

Selected works The Molecular Basis of Evolution (1959) Editor, Advances in Protein Chemistry