The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2002
Awarded on: 2002-10-09
"for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules"
Affiliations:
- Virginia Commonwealth University – Richmond, VA, USA
John B. Fenn
Born: 1917-06-15 in New York, NY, USA
Gender: male
Field: American chemistry professor
Biography
John Bennett Fenn was an American professor of analytical chemistry who was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002. He shared half of the award with Koichi Tanaka for their work in mass spectrometry. The other half went to Kurt Wüthrich. Fenn's contributions specifically related to the development of electrospray ionization, now a commonly used technique for large molecules and routine liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Early in his career, he studied the field of jet propulsion at Project SQUID and focused on molecular beams. He finished his career with more than 100 publications, including one book.