Photo credit: Cabinet Public Relations Office, Government of Japan — Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0
Koichi Tanaka
born 1959 · Japan · Contemporary
Nobel Chemistry 2002
Japanese engineer-chemist at Shimadzu who made mass spectrometry usable for large, fragile biomolecules.
Nobel Prize work
He developed soft laser desorption ionisation, embedding biomolecules in a matrix so that intact proteins and other macromolecules can be transferred into the gas phase and measured by mass spectrometry without fragmentation.