George Feher
Wolf Prize Laureate in Chemistry 2006/7
George Feher
Affiliation at the time of the award:
University of California, San Diego, USA
Award citation:
“for ingenious structural discoveries of the ribosomal machinery of peptide-bond formation and the light-driven primary processes in photosynthesis”.
Prize share:
George Feher
Ada Yonath
The work of both scientists has led to a unified picture of basic biological machinery. Ada Yonath was the first to determine against all odds the structure of the ribosome, which is the large protein-synthesis machinery of living cells. George Feher pioneered the structure/function relations of the simplest reaction centre in photosynthesis, revealing the basic principles of light energy conversion in biology.
Professor George Feher ingenious contributions to science are centered on two recurrent themes, which address the development of novel and revolutionary spectroscopic tools, on the one hand, and their applications, in particular, to problems in biochemistry and biophysics, on the other.
George Feher´s invention of electron-nuclear double resonance ENDOR, as an example of only one of the novel methods, opened a field of applications, the enormous breadth of which only became apparent in the course of time. This method allows one to obtain detailed information on structure both for polycrystalline and for amorphous materials. Due to these features ENDOR has become a great asset in the study of biological systems with paramagnetic centers.
Although the existence of a “reaction center” in photosynthesis was postulated as early as 1952, its true nature became apparent only through the work of a later generation of scientists from all over the world. Feher was the first to identify the amino acid sequence of a membrane protein, and built the essential steps of developments that led to the present detailed understanding of the reaction center, including its structure. Feher’s impressive work in research on photosynthesis rests on his extraordinarily vivid imagination and on the sustained discipline with which he forced himself to master the underlying biochemistry in a brilliant and systematic manner. These qualities allowed him to view the complex problems related to the primary steps of photosynthetic energy conversion in their entirety, while many specialists tended to concentrate only on individual pieces of the puzzle.
Since insight into the structure and the charge separation mechanism of the reaction center has provided the principles of optimized light energy conversion in biology, Feher’s work is seminal for the construction of synthetic and semi-synthetic molecular energy converters, which may have profound implications in an energy-demanding world.