Roderick MacKinnon
Roderick MacKinnon ( born February 19, 1956 in Burlington, Massachusetts) is an American biochemist and physician and professor of Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics at Rockefeller University. Together with Peter Agre, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his elucidation of the permeation mechanism in potassium channels in 2003.
Life
Roderick MacKinnon grew up in Burlington and he enrolled first at the University of Massachusetts in Boston one. However, he changed after only one year at the more prestigious Brandeis University to further his studies. He received a bachelor's degree in biochemistry in 1978, while he examined the transport of calcium across the cell membrane for his thesis under Christopher Miller. At Brandeis University, where he also met his future wife and colleague Alice Lee.
After graduating from Brandeis, he entered the medical program at Tufts University. In 1982, he completed his training as a doctor and worked afterwards as an internist at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. However, this work did not allow him to pursue his desire career and he returned in 1986 to Christopher Miller by Brandeis as a post- graduate student back. He became an assistant professor at Harvard University, where he studied the interaction of the potassium channel with a specific toxin from scorpion venom and himself taught the methods of crystal structure analysis 1989.
He was appointed to the Rockefeller University as a professor and director of the Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics 1996. There he began with the structure elucidation of the potassium channels, which are particularly important for the nervous system and allow potassium ions to pass through the cell membrane. Ion channels are important among others for the function of the nervous system and the muscles. The action potential in nerve cells is produced when an ion channel on the surface of a nerve cell is opened by a chemical signal, which is transmitted from a nearby nerve cell, whereupon an electric voltage pulse along the nerve cell surface by propagating that in the course of a few milliseconds whole number of ion channels can be opened and closed.
Before MacKinnon the exact structure of the channels and their functioning unknown and speculation was left. But after only two years at the Rockefeller University in 1998, he succeeded in spite of all obstacles, which made the structure determination of integral membrane proteins almost impossible up to this point, an exact three-dimensional structure of a potassium channel from bacteria to publish. This was also the high selectivity of these channels are declared potassium ions - the smaller sodium ions can not pass through. The scientific journal Science described this performance as one of the greatest scientific success stories of 1998.
His thesis was carried out mainly at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source ( CHESS ), Cornell University and at the National Synchrotron Light Source ( NSLS ) of the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
In 1999, Albert Lasker Award for MacKinnon the Basic Medical Research told Clay Armstrong and Bertil Hille - one of the greatest honors for a scientist in the field of medicine. In 2000 he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and has since received numerous other awards, so the 2000 Rosenstiel Award, 2001, both the Perl -UNC Neuroscience Prize and the Gairdner Foundation International Award and the 2003 Louisa Gross Horwitz prize. In 2003, MacKinnon was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.