Bury, Charles

Until recently, the catalytic role of Asp ° in trypsin and the other serine proteases had been surmised on the basis of its proximity to His in structures obtained from X-ray diffraction studies, but it had never been demonstrated with certainty in physical or chemical studies. As can be seen in Figure 16.17, Asp ° is buried at the active site and is normally inaccessible to chemical modifying reagents. In 1987, however, Charles Craik, William Rutter, and their colleagues used site-directed mutagenesis (see Chapter 13) to prepare a mutant trypsin with an asparagine in place of Asp °. This mutant trypsin possessed a hydrolytic activity with ester substrates only 1/10,000 that of native trypsin, demonstrating that Asp ° is indeed essential for catalysis and that its ability to immobilize and orient His is crucial to the function of the catalytic triad. 

According to J. J. Thomson, Lord Rutherford s death on October 19, 1937, just on the eve of his having in the High-Tension Laboratory means of research far more powerful than those with which he had already obtained results of profound importance, is, I think, one of the greatest tragedies in the history of Science (101, 102). Lord Rutherford was the first scientist born in the overseas dominions to be buried in Westminster Abbey, beside the graves of Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Kelvin, Charles Darwin, and Sir John Herschel. 

Journal of Physical Chemistry,83 as well as of Charles Bury s (1890-1968) contributions to physical chemistry.84 85... 

M. Davies, Charles Rugeley Bury and his contributions to physical chemistry , Arch. Hist. Exact ScL, 1986, 36, 75-90. 

Woehler died in his eighty-third year, following an illness of only three days. After a simple funeral he was buried in Gottingen, the city of his life work. In accordance with his wish only a modest legend was carved on his tombstone—Friedrich Woehler Born July 31, 1800 Died Sept. 23, 1882. At Downs, five months before, there passed away another pioneer of science, Charles Darwin, the man who recreated life out of the rocks and fossils of the earth even as Woehler created a new world of compounds out of the same inanimate stones, and with them showed the way to the modern Elixirs of Life. 

C. Vance Haynes, Jr. of the University of Arizona at Tucson. The whale bone was obtained from Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado. The modern bones belong to an elephant that died in 1964 and was buried for six years prior to re-excavation. The elephant bones were obtained from Charles McNulty of the University of Texas at Arlington. 

Figure 8.15. Stiuctoie of cndo 111, lowing the estposed residue tip. 132 and the buried residue trp-l78 near the ina-sulfur cluster. Courtesy of Dr. Charles R Scholes.

Following this work, Bohr abandoned the question of periodicity for about a decade, and it was left to various chemists to try to improve upon the electronic version of the periodic table.As discussed in chapter 8, there are some grounds for thinking that Bohr s later tables were directly influenced by the more detailed electronic configurations given by the chemist Charles Bury and that insufficient credit has been given to this pioneer of electronic configurations. 

Mansel Davies, Charles Rugeley Bury and his Contributions to Physical Chemistry,... 

Bohr also attempted to write electronic structures (in terms of orbits) for elements up to chromium. However, the theoretical treatment of multi-electron systems proved to be very complex, and Bohr assigned electronic structures for elements principally on the basis of chemical properties. Thus lithium was assigned a structure of (2,1) but nitrogen was presumed to be (4,3) because of its trivalency. Over the next few years, Bohr, along with Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951), William Wilson and Charles Bury, refined electronic structures on the basis of both spectral and chemical behaviour. 

M. Mansel Davies, Charles Rugeley Bury and his Contributions to Physical Chemistry , Archive for History of the Exact Sciences, 36(1986), 75-90 M. Mansel Davies, C. R. Bury, L. Vegardand the Electronic Interpretation of the Periodic Table, A note, Archive for History of the Exact Sciences, 41 (1990). 185-7. 

---