John Fenn, Koichi Tanaka, and Kurt Wüthrich will receive the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for helping to develop tools for the study of large biological molecules. Fenn, a professor of chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and professor emeritus of Yale University, and Tanaka, an R&D engineer with Shimadzu Corp in Kyoto, Japan, will share half of the prize for “their development of soft desorption ionization methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules.” Wüthrich, a professor of molecular biophysics at ETH Zürich, will receive the other half for “his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution.”

Mass spectrometry (MS) determines the mass of an ionized molecule from the mass-to-charge ratio, thus providing an important and sometimes sufficient clue to its identity. 1 Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) helps decipher the three-dimensional structure of a molecule by observing its nuclear...

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