Eighty-year-old Bessie bursts into the recreation room of the retirement home.
She holds her clenched fist in the air and announces, “Anyone who can guess what’s in my hand, can take me out to dinner tonight!”
A witty, elderly gentleman in the rear shouts out, “An elephant?”
Bessie thinks a minute and replies, “Close enough!”
Hartmut MichelBorn 18 Jul 1948.German biochemist who, along with Johann Deisenhofer and Robert Huber, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1988 for their determination of the three-dimensional structure of certain proteins that are essential for photosynthesis. They are the first to succeed in unravelling the full details of how a membrane-bound protein is built up, revealing the structure of the molecule atom by atom. The protein is taken from a bacterium which, like green plants and algae, uses light energy from the sun to build organic substances. All our nourishment has its origin in this process, which is called photosynthesis and which is a condition for all life on earth. |
