Don Craig Wiley

Don Craig Wiley ( born October 21, 1944 in Akron, Ohio; † November 2001 in Memphis, Tennessee) was an American biophysicist, a molecular biologist and microbiologist. He pioneered the transition from protein crystallography to modern structural molecular biology, in particular for some for cell -cell recognition important classes of molecules on cell surface ( MHC complex, viral glycoproteins such as hemagglutinin ).

Wiley grew up in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He graduated from Tufts University Physics (Bachelor 1966) and in 1971 received his doctorate at Harvard University in Biophysics at William Lipscomb. At that time, the X-ray structure analysis of a to the hitherto largest molecules, aspartate carbamoyltransferase he succeeded ( ACTase ). In 1971 he became assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Harvard University, 1975 Associate Professor and Professor in 1979. Since 1987, his laboratory with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute was connected. He was an internationally recognized expert on infectious diseases such as AIDS and Ebola.

The mid-1970s, another breakthrough came with the determination of the structure of the hemagglutinin of influenza virus (where he worked with John Skehel and Ian Wilson). The structure was published in 1981 in Nature and in consequence he also examined the change in shape of hemagglutinin and its role in the entry of the virus into the host cell. From the late 1970s he was also involved in the MHC complex in immunology and his group at Harvard was instrumental in the structural elucidation.

On November 15, 2001, he was last seen alive. One found his rental car without the driver on a bridge over the Mississippi River in Memphis and his body was found a month later downstream in the Mississippi at Natchez.

Wiley has received many awards scientifically. He was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize - (1990 ), the Emil von Behring Prize (1992 ), the William B. Coley Award ( 1993), the Passano Award (1993 ), a Gairdner Foundation International Award (1994 ), the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (1995 ) and Jack L. Strominger the Japan Prize (1999).

He was married to the Icelander Katrin Valgeirsdottir and learned then even the Icelandic language.