 | John B. Fenn at his Yale laboratory in 1987. |
Retired Yale professor and Yale alumnus John B. Fenn ,was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in chemistry for research he conducted during his 20-year tenure at Yale.
Fenn, a former professor of chemical engineering at Yale, shared the prize in chemistry with Koichi Tanaka of Japan and Kurt Wuethrich of Switzerland. The three won the prize for advances in the analytical chemistry of proteins and other large biological molecules.
In its citation, the Swedish Academy of Science notes: "The possibility of analyzing proteins in detail has led to increased understanding of the processes of life. ... The methods have 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."
Working independently, Fenn and Tanaka devised different ways to apply mass spectrometry, which is a technique used to identify chemicals by weighing individual atoms and molecules. Fenn's method is called electrospray ionization (ESI), and produces charged droplets of protein solutions. Tanaka's method uses a laser pulse to desorb proteins from solution.
"This is truly an honor for Yale Engineering and the Chemistry department," says Dean of Engineering Paul Fleury. "Fenn did his pioneering research on electrospray onization while at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Yale. It may be the first time that work done in an engineering department has been recognized with a Nobel Prize."
Gary L. Haller, the Becton Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, who joined the Yale faculty at the same time as Fenn, collaborated with Fenn on some research projects and co-authored papers on the exchange of energy when molecules collide with each other or when they collide with surfaces.
"He is a person with a keen sense of how things happen on a molecular level and he's able to design experiments to demonstrate molecular interactions during collisions," says Haller. "He has physical insight into how molecular systems behave, has great enthusiasm about science and is full of ideas."
Haller says Fenn's Nobel Prize-winning work on "making elephants fly" was to show how to get a heavy organic molecule into the gas phase in order to use mass spectrometry to calculate its relative mass or molecular weight. "His work has the kind of societal impact that is worthy of a Nobel Prize," says Haller.
Bengt Norden, chair of the Nobel committee for chemistry, said of this year's Nobel Prize-winners in the sciences: "Their work has paved the way for the future finding of a cure for cancer." The techniques developed by the Nobel laureates assist with diagnosing cancer, analyzing environmental pollution, and have many other applications.
Fenn received a B.A. in chemistry in 1937 from Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, and earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale in 1940. He then spent 12 years working in industry at companies such as Monsanto, Sharples and Experiment, Inc. Fenn then spent another 10 years at Princeton administering a research project for the U.S. Navy called Project SQUIDD. He then became a professor of aerospace sciences at Princeton. Fenn came back to Yale in 1967 to teach and conduct research until 1987. He stayed at Yale as emeritus professor until 1994, when he became a research professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Fenn has written a book titled "Engines and Entropy -- A Thermodynamics Primer" and has published over 100 papers in scientific journals. He has received 19 patents, some with co-inventors. He has taught at the University of Trento in Italy, at the University of Tokyo, at a research institute in Bangalore, and at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Among his many awards, Fenn received the 1999 Yale Science and Engineering Association Award for distinguished contributions to basic and applied science.
"During the Sesquicentennial Year of Yale Engineering, we have had the unique good fortune to have our faculty honored with two elected to the National Academy of Sciences, another receiving the National Medal of Technology from President Bush and now a fourth receiving the Nobel Prize," said Fleury. "No other program in the country has been so fortunate."
Other Yale Nobels
In addition to John Fenn, who shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry this year, Yale graduate Raymond Davis received the 2002 Nobel Prize in physics.
Davis, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1942, shared the prize for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos.
Davis and Fenn bring the number of Nobel laureates with ties to the University to 23. Of the 23, 10 serve or served on the faculty. Sidney Altman, currently Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989 for the discovery of the catalytic properties of ribonucleic acid (RNA).
Yale faculty and graduates have won nine Nobel Prizes in medicine, five each in economics and physics, three in chemistry and one in literature.
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