Chemistry Labs

Photo credit: File:John B Fenn01.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain

John B. Fenn

1917–2010 · United States · 20th century

Nobel Chemistry 2002

American chemist who turned mass spectrometry into a tool for proteins and macromolecules through electrospray ionisation.

Nobel Prize work

Fenn perfected electrospray ionisation (ESI), coaxing proteins and other biological macromolecules into the gas phase as intact ions without breaking them apart. Paired with mass spectrometry, ESI let chemists weigh molecules of tens of thousands of daltons and opened the era of mass spectrometry in biology and proteomics.

Fields

Analytical chemistry

Related topics

Ionization techniques (ESI, MALDI, EI)

An ion source converts neutral analyte molecules into gas-phase ions while retaining enough structure for measurement.

High-resolution mass spectrometry

Accurate mass and resolving power distinguish ions that share the same nominal mass.

Chemists in the same field

Herbert A. Hauptman (1917)Richard L. M. Synge (1914)Stanford Moore (1913)William H. Stein (1911)Archer J. P. Martin (1910)Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910)