October 4, 1938 - Birth of Kurt Wüthrich, Nobel Prize for developing nuclear magnetic resonance methods

He studied chemistry, physics, and mathematics at the University of Bern. During his postgraduate studies, he started working with electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy. His doctoral thesis, supervised by Silvio Fallab at the University of Basel, was entitled "The catalytic activity of copper compounds in autooxidation reactions".

In 1965, after completing his graduate studies, Wüthrich moved to the United States to join Professor Robert E. Coonick at the University of California (Berkeley) for postdoctoral training. During this period, he devoted himself to intensive work on nuclear spin relaxation theory, group theory, and quantum mechanics. He began his career with the newly developed and related nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy technique to study the hydration of metal complexes.

In 1967, he joined Dr. Robert G. Shulman's Biophysics Department at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. There he was assigned responsibility for maintaining what was one of the first high-resolution superconducting NMR spectrometers, operating at a proton resonance frequency of 220 MHz. Because of his experience, his interest focused on metal centers rather than polypeptide chains, and all of his initial high-resolution NMR projects involved hemoproteins.

In 1969 he returned to Switzerland to join the Polytechnic Institute of Zurich (ETH) where he remained for 32 years in various positions and had a prolific research career. He collaborated, among others, with Nobel laureate Richard R. Ernst in developing the first two-dimensional NMR experiments, and established the nuclear Overhauser effect as a convenient way to measure distances within proteins. This research later led to the complete assignment of resonances for bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitors and glucagon, among others.

In 2002 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his "development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to determine the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution". These new techniques not only find excellent application in scientific research, but their use has spread to laboratories all over the world and represents a major step towards the design of new drugs that will revolutionize medicine.

Since then, Wüthrich has been active as a lecturer and scientific advisor to political bodies, companies, foundations, universities, and research institutes.

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