Charles Tanford

Charles Tanford (December 29, 1921 to October 1, 2009) was an author and one of the preeminent protein chemists of his generation. He died in York, England on October 1, 2009.^[1]

Life

Charles was born in Halle, Germany in 1921 to Majer and Charlotte Tannenbaum. His parents, who were Jewish, fled to England in 1929 anticipating the coming rule of the Nazi party, and changed their name to Tanford. Many of his relatives stayed behind in Germany despite his attempts to persuade them to leave and perished in the holocaust. At the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, Charles was sent to New York to live with relatives. There he earned a B.A. from NYU in 1943, worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, and then earned a PhD in Chemistry from Princeton in 1947. He did post-graduate work in protein chemistry at Harvard in the lab of Edwin Cohn and John Edsall. He joined the faculty at the University of Iowa in 1950, and then moved to Duke University in 1960 where he taught for almost 30 years. He was named a James B. Duke distinguished professor in 1970.

While at Harvard, he married Lucia L. Brown. They had three children, Vicki, Alex and Sarah. Charles was divorced in 1968, and soon thereafter began a professional and personal relationship with Dr. Jacqueline A. Reynolds, a fellow biochemist, that would last until his death. Charles had a long and successful academic career. His scientific research focused on the physical chemistry of protein molecules and he is widely known for his two ground-breaking textbooks: The Physical Chemistry of Macromolecules (1961), which dealt with water-soluble macromolecules, and The Hydrophobic Effect (1973) which covered proteins in all their various guises including those within cell membranes. In recognition of his scientific contributions, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. During his career, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alexander von Humboldt award, the Merck Award for Molecular Biology, and the distinguished Eastman Professorship at Oxford.

He and Dr. Jacqueline Reynolds retired in 1988 and moved to Easingwold, England, a remote Georgian market town in North Yorkshire. Here he began a second career writing about the history of science primarily for lay readers. He published Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves: An Informal History of Pouring Oil on Water with Reflections on the Ups and Downs of Scientific Life in General. He and Dr. Reynolds published two books 'A Travel Guide to the Scientific Sites of the British Isles: A Guide to the People, Places and Landmarks' and 'The Scientific Traveler: a Guide to the People, Places and Institutions of Europe,' which was a natural product of their extensive travels; and 'Nature's Robots: A History of Proteins.' They were also frequent contributors to the British scientific magazine Nature.

Throughout his life, Charles loved conversation, walking, wine, good food, travel, cricket, hiking, Switzerland, France, classical music, murder mysteries and birds.^{[2] [3]}

Education and academic career

Charles Tanford attended university in the United States, graduating from New York University in chemistry in 1943. In 1947 he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University, with a thesis on how gases burn. He then spent two years at Harvard University Medical School in the laboratory of E.J. Cohn, where he changed his research focus to proteins. After that, he was hired as an assistant professor by the University of Iowa, where he was promoted to associate professor in 1954 and full professor in 1959. Duke University hired him as professor of physical biochemistry in 1960. In 1970 he was named James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry. He moved to the department of physiology in 1980 where his research efforts were concentrated on the movement of ions across cell membranes together with his collaborators Dr. E.A. Johnson and Dr. J.A. Reynolds..

Tanford retired in 1988, and was a James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Cell Biology at Duke University until his death in 2009.

Scientific Achievements

He is credited with the "Tanford-Pease theory of burning velocity". It has been said that he coined the term "hydrophobic effect" but in all his publications he acknowledged the original contributions of G.S. Hartley to this concept and the later efforts of Walter Kauzmann who popularized the idea among biological scientists. In a modesty typical of him Tanford gave great credit to the "giants upon whose shoulders he stood".

Honors

Charles Tanford was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1956.^[4] In 1972 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences (Biophysics and computational biology).^[5] In 1984 he received an Alexander von Humboldt award which he used during a sabbatical in Heidelberg, Germany.

Partial bibliography

• Tanford, Charles (1961). Physical Chemistry of Macromolecules. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. 

• Tanford, Charles (1973). The Hydrophobic Effect: Formation of Micelles and Biological Membranes. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons Inc.. ISBN 9780471844600. 

• Tanford, Charles (1989). Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves: An Informal History of Pouring Oil on Water with Reflections on the Ups and Downs of Scientific Life in General. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-0876-2. http://books.google.com/?id=ll9DkC4ZZBkC. 

• Tanford, Charles; Jacqueline Reynolds (1992). The Scientific Traveler: A Guide to the People, Places, and Institutions of Europe. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9780471555667. 

• Tanford, Charles; Jacqueline Reynolds (2003). Nature's robots: A History of Proteins. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-850466-7. 

• Tanford, Charles (2004). Ben Franklin stilled the waves: An informal history of pouring oil on water with reflections on the ups and downs of scientific life in general.. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-280494-4. 

Notes

1. ^ "James B. Duke Professor Charles Tanford Dies". Duke Today (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University). http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2009/10/tanford.html. Retrieved 2009-10-25. 
2. ^ Kresge, Nicole; Nicole Kresge, Robert D. Simoni, and Robert L. Hill (January 25, 2008). "Amino Acid Solubility and Hydrophobic Interactions in Proteins: the Work of Charles Tanford". J. Biol. Chem. 283 (4): e3–e4. http://www.jbc.org/cgi/content/full/283/4/e3. Retrieved 2008-02-19. 
3. ^ Tanford, Charles (2003). G Semenza, R Jaenicke, E C Slater, A J Turner. ed. COMPREHENSIVE BIOCHEMISTRY. VOLUME 42. A HISTORY OF BIOCHEMISTRY. Selected Topics in the History of Biochemistry. Personal Recollections. VII. Amsterdam: Elsevier. pp. 1–52. ISBN 0444509240. http://books.google.com/?id=QDjy6Ij3FJcC&printsec=frontcover. Chapter 1: "Fifty Years In the World of Proteins"
4. ^ "Fellows whose last names begin with T". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Archived from the original on 2008-03-14. http://web.archive.org/web/20080314122449/http://www.gf.org/tfellow.html. Retrieved 2008-03-31. 
5. ^ "National Academy of Sciences:". http://www.nasonline.org/site/Dir?sid=1011&view=basic&pg=srch. Retrieved 2008-04-02.  Directory search

Persondata
Name	Tanford, Charles
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Date of birth	1921
Place of birth
Date of death	2009
Place of death