Sir John CornforthBorn 7 Sep 1917.John Warcup Cornforth is an Australian-British chemist who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (with Vladimir Prelog) for “his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reactions.” He investigated the mechanism of important reactions in biological systems, to see which specific hydrogen atom among two or three equivalent ones at a given site in an organic molecule will be replaced in a reaction by a larger group of atoms. The problem involves identifying the three-dimensional arrangement of the nearby and resulting groups of atoms. He used hydrogen's three isotopes (hydrogen, deuterium and tritium) as markers, which have different reaction speeds resulting from the different masses of the different isotope atoms. Comforth became totally deaf at age 16.« |
