Christian Boehmer Anfinsen, Biochemist, American, 1916-1995....Christian Anfinsen shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Stanford Moore and William H. Stein for their work linking the structure of proteins to their biological functioning.

Anfinsen focused his research on the protein enzyme ribonuclease, discovering how it folds into a three-dimensional structure that determines its function.


Svante August Arrhenius, Physical Chemist, Swedish, 1859-1927....Svante Arrhenius almost failed his 1884 doctoral examination on chemical dissociation in solution, the very same topic that earned him the Nobel Prize two decades later in 1903.

As a founding member of the Ionists, proponents of the idea that water suspends negatively and positively charged ions in a chemical solution, Arrhenius walked the line between physics and chemistry and thereby helped establish the field of physical chemistry.


Francis William Aston, Chemist, Physicist, English, 1877-1945....Francis Aston was an exacting experimentalist who designed and built his own mass spectrometers to identify the precise masses of chemical elements. In the process he confirmed the existence of isotopes in stable elements; it was previously believed that only radioactive elements had isotopes, or atoms of the same elements with a different number of neutrons in the nucleus.

Aston received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1922 in recognition of t he significance of this discovery.