Bert L. Vallee

Bert Vallee Lester ( born June 1, 1919 in Hemer, Germany; † 7 May 2010) was an American doctor and biochemist. He was a professor at Harvard Medical School.

Vallee studied at the University of Bern ( completion 1938) and was the U.S. in 1938 with a grant from the International League of Nations. He studied medicine at New York University with a MD degree in 1943. He inquired after the Second World War at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a joint working group in physical chemistry from Harvard Medical School ( HMS) under the direction of John Edsall and Edwin Cohn. In 1955 he was Assistant Professor and then Professor at HMS. He was founding director of the 1954 Biophysics Research Laboratory at Harvard, who later became the Center for Biochemical & Biophysical Sciences & Medicine ( CBBSM ). 1964 to 1989 he was Paul C. Cabot Professor of Biochemistry and had Edgar M. Bronfman in 1980, the Distinguished Senior Professorship.

He has been a visiting professor at the ETH Zurich and at the Weizmann Institute. He had an honorary professor at Tsinghua University and the Institute of Biochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai and the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.

Vallee was a pioneer in the study of metal - enyzmes from the 1950s, especially zinc enzymes, where he applied spectroscopic methods (especially atomic emission spectroscopy, which he further developed to also ). One of these enzymes, alcohol dehydrogenase, led to his employment with alcohol addiction. He also dealt with various issues of physical chemistry and absorption spectroscopy. He has published over 600 works.

He was a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and an honorary doctorate from the Karolinska Institute, the Ludwig- Maximilians- University of Munich and the University of Naples. In 1981 he received the Willard Gibbs Medal, 1980, the Linder -Lang Medal and 1982 William C. Rose Award in Biochemistry. In 1988 he held the Messenger Lecture at Cornell University and in 1992 he received the Order of Andres Bello first class of Venezuela.

He was a U.S. citizen.