Photo credit: Vogler — File:Michel, Hartmut (1948).jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 3.0
Hartmut Michel
born 1948 · Germany · Contemporary
Nobel Chemistry 1988
German biochemist who achieved the first crystallization of a membrane protein and solved the structure of the photosynthetic reaction centre.
Nobel Prize work
With Johann Deisenhofer and Robert Huber, Michel crystallized the photosynthetic reaction centre of the purple bacterium Rhodopseudomonas viridis — the first membrane protein complex ever crystallized — and determined its three-dimensional structure by X-ray crystallography. The structure revealed how light energy is captured and converted into a charge separation.