Photo credit: Unknown author — File:The-svedberg-1.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain
Theodor Svedberg
1884–1971 · Sweden · Born in the 1800s
Nobel Chemistry 1926
Swedish physical chemist who built the ultracentrifuge and used it to prove that proteins are well-defined macromolecules.
Nobel Prize work
Svedberg invented the ultracentrifuge, which spins solutions at very high speed so that even macromolecules sediment. Using it, he measured the molecular masses of proteins and showed they are true molecules of defined size — work on disperse systems that transformed colloid and protein chemistry.
Fields
Related topics
Colloids, emulsions, surfactants
Matter dispersed at the nanometre scale: why colloids neither dissolve nor settle, how surfactants build micelles and stabilise emulsions, and the forces — electrostatic, van der Waals, steric — that decide whether dispersions survive.
Protein structure and function
A protein is a sequence that folds into a shape; its surface and flexibility help determine what it can bind or catalyse.