Kurt Wüthrich

Kurt Wüthrich has been Professor of Biophysics at ETH Zürich since 1980; since 2001 he has also been the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Professor of Structural Biology at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2002.

Kurt Wüthrich was born in Switzerland on October 4, 1938. He is married to Marianne Briner and has two children, Bernhard Andrew and Karin Lynn. He studied chemistry, physics and mathematics at the University of Bern from 1957 - 1962, and obtained the "Eidgenössisches Turn- und Sportlehrerdiplom" and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry with Prof. S. Fallab at the University of Basel in 1964. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Basel until 1965 (Prof. S. Fallab) and at the University of California Berkeley, CA, USA, until 1967 (Prof. R.E. Connick), and then a member of the Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ, USA (Dr. R.G. Shulman). In 1969 he joined the ETH Zürich ("Privatdozent" 1970, Assistant Professor 1972, Associate Professor 1976, Professor 1980, Chairman of the Department of Biology 1995 - 2000). Kurt Wüthrich's research interests are in molecular structural biology, protein science, and structural genomics. His speciality is high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy with biological macromolecules. Kurt Wüthrich's contributions to techniques development include the NMR method for three-dimensional structure determination of proteins and nucleic acids in solution, heteronuclear filter techniques for studies of intermolecular interactions in supramolecular structures, NMR experiments for studies of macromolecular hydration in solution, and the extension of solution NMR studies to very large molecular weights with the use of transverse relaxation-optimized spectroscopy (TROSY) and cross-correlated relaxation-enhanced polarization transfer (CRINEPT). The Wüthrich teams have solved a large array of NMR structures of proteins and nucleic acids, including the immunosuppression system cyclophilin A–cyclosporin A, the homeodomain–operator DNA transcriptional regulation system, and prion proteins from a wide selection of mammalian and non-mammalian species. Wüthrich's bibliography includes over 800 papers and reviews, and three monographs: NMR in Biological Research: Peptides and Proteins, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1976; NMR of Proteins and Nucleic Acids, Wiley, New York, 1986; NMR in Structural Biology, World Scientific, Singapore, 1995.