Christian Anfinsen: Nobel Laureate from Monessen

Christian B. Anfinsen was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania, in nineteen sixteen, the son of Norwegian immigrants who had settled in the Monongahela River Valley. He would go on to become one of the most important biochemists of the twentieth century.

Anfinsen won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in nineteen seventy-two for his work on the enzyme ribonuclease, specifically for demonstrating that a protein's three-dimensional shape is determined entirely by its amino acid sequence. Before Anfinsen, the folding of proteins was poorly understood. His discovery became a cornerstone of modern molecular biology and laid conceptual groundwork for the field of protein engineering. He led a laboratory at the National Institutes of Health from nineteen fifty to nineteen eighty-one, then joined Johns Hopkins University. He died in nineteen ninety-five. Monessen gave the world a man who explained how life assembles itself.