October 4, 1938, Aarberg (Switzerland) - Present day
Most of his childhood was spent in the small village of Lyss in Berner Seeland, a rural environment that sparked Wüthrich's interest in the natural sciences from an early age. His career goal was to become a forestry engineer. However, he changed his mind and 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’.
1965 after completing his postgraduate studies, Wüthrich moved to the United States where he joined 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 started working with the recently 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 was in metal centres rather than polypeptide chains, and all 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 2001 he returned to California as a visiting professor in Structural Biology at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in La Jolla, although he continued to work simultaneously for ETH Zürich.
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 great application in scientific research, but their use has spread to laboratories all over the world and represent a major step towards the design of new drugs that will revolutionise medicine.
Since then, Wüthrich has been active as a lecturer and scientific advisor to political bodies, companies, foundations, universities, and research institutes.
His bibliography includes more than 600 articles and reviews, as well as the monographs: NMR in Biological Research: Peptides and Proteins, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1976; NMR of Proteins and Nucleic Acids, Wiley, New York, 1986; and NMR in Structural Biology, World Scientific, Singapore, 1995.
