Fenn, John Bennett (1917-2010), an American chemist, won a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a way to identify proteins and other large molecules that are parts of living things. The prize was also awarded to the Japanese engineer Koichi Tanaka and the Swiss chemist Kurt Wuthrich.
Fenn’s technique can identify proteins by their mass (amount of matter). First, the proteins are dissolved in water. Next, the water is sprayed into a vacuum chamber in the presence of an electric field, an influence that an electric charge creates in the region around it (see Electric field ). The resulting droplets therefore have an electric charge. The droplets then evaporate, shrinking as they do so. Eventually, only electrically charged proteins remain hovering in a vacuum. Finally, another electric field sets the proteins in motion, and their time of flight over a known distance is measured.
The mass of a given protein and the strength of its charge determine its time of flight. For example, the fastest proteins are those that are the lightest and have the highest charge. Fenn’s method is complicated by the fact that a protein with a given mass can have any of several amounts of charge. But even so, scientists can analyze time measurements to determine protein masses.
John Bennett Fenn was born in New York City on June 15, 1917. He received a Ph.D. degree in chemistry from Yale University in 1940. He worked for various private firms until 1959, when he became the director of a United States Navy research program on jet propulsion. At the same time, he became a professor of aerospace and mechanical sciences at Princeton University, which administered the Navy program. Fenn joined the Yale faculty in 1967 as a professor of applied science and chemistry. In 1980, he became a professor of chemical engineering at Yale.
Fenn formally retired in 1987 and remained at Yale as a research scientist. In 1994, he moved to Virginia Commonwealth University as a professor of analytical chemistry. He taught there until shortly before his death on Dec. 10, 2010.
See also Tanaka, Koichi ; Wuthrich, Kurt .
