Deisenhofer, Hans

The photosynthetic reaction center was certainly the most important protein structure, which Hans Deisenhofer, my former doctoral student, and I and... 

The recognition of this homology was initially pointed out by Achim Trebst on the basis of amino-acid sequence and greatly facilitated by the determination of the three-dimensional structure of a purple bacterium by X-ray diffraction by Deisenhofer, Epp, Miki, Huber and Michel in 1985, and noted particularly by Hartmut Michel and Hans Deisenhofer. Many of these features will be discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters. On the other hand, distinctions do exist between the purple bacterial and PS-II reaction centers. PS II contains Cyt b559, but no comparable carrier is present in purple bacteria. The most outstanding distinction, however, is the unique ability of PS II to oxidize water. Although one may consider the purple bacteria to have a comparable ability to oxidize H2S, the mechanisms ofthe two processes are entirely different. Nevertheless, many of the structural similarities do suggest that the purple bacterial and PS-II reaction centers are evolutionarily related. 

We would like to thank Hans Deisenhofer for pre-publication access to the x-ray coordinates of the Rp. viridis reaction center protein, Guillermo Alegria for helpful discussion and Anthony Nicholls for timely modifications of DelPhi. This work was supported by N.S.F. DMB88-03489. M.R.G. is supported by NIGMS Research Fellowship GM12897-02. 

Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber, Hartmut Michel 1930 Hans Fischer... 

But whether Moses could get tenure in a modern-day department is another question. Why, I believe not even God would make tenure. Can t you see the committee arguing that i) He didn t publish in a refereed journal, ii nobody was able to repeat His experiments, and iii) what has He done recently The last item is not only the nightmare of candidates for tenure but also of aging scientists. I suggest that we call it the Prometheus syndrome". So Prometheus discovered fire but what has he done since Hans (Deisenhofer) earlier this week showed a slide illustrating this point. 

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