William Jencks

William Platt Jencks ( born August 15, 1927 in Bar Harbor, Maine; † 3 January 2007 ) was an American biochemist and Enzymologe.

Career and work

1951 Jencks received his Medical Doctor at Harvard Medical School. He assisted at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, first in Boston and then spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital. When Fritz Albert Lipmann, he deepened his knowledge in biochemistry and chemistry. During the Korean War Jencks served at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, as an employee of the Army Medical Service Graduate School Department of Pharmacology. After two years he returned to Lipmann, where he worked for a further year in the laboratory. After that he went - also as a postdoc - to Harvard University to Robert Woodward. In 1957 he moved to Brandeis University. First as Assistant Professor and then as Associate Professor and later as a full professor of biochemistry. In 1996 his retirement.

Jencks published nearly 350 scientific articles as an author or co-author, primarily in the field of enzymology.

Jencks was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Royal Society. He was awarded the James Flack Norris Award, the Repligen Award in Chemistry of Biological Processes and 1963 received the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry.

From Jencks, the concept of Circe effect, run accelerates the enzyme reactions as a result of electrostatic forces of attraction comes from.

With his wife, Miriam, he had two children together.

Publications (selection )

• WP Jencks: Catalysis in Chemistry and Enzymology. Courier Dover Publications, 1987, ISBN 0-486-65460-5 limited preview on Google Book Search
• RH Abeles, PA Frey, WP Jencks: Biochemistry. Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1992, ISBN 0-86720-212-2.
• WP Jencks: From chemistry to biochemistry to catalysis to movement. In: Annual review of biochemistry. Volume 66, 1997, ISSN 0066-4154, pp. 1-18. doi: 10.1146/annurev.biochem.66.1.1. PMID 9,242,900th
• WP Jencks: Reaction mechanisms, catalysis, and movement. In: Protein science Volume 3, Number 12, December 1994, ISSN 0961-8368, pp. 2459-2464. doi: 10.1002/pro.5560031232. PMID 7,757,002th
• WP Jencks: How does a calcium pump pump calcium? In: The Journal of biological chemistry. Volume 264, Number 32, November 1989, ISSN 0021-9258, pp. 18855-18858. PMID 2530226th (Review).