John E. Walker

John Walker was born in the North of England, in Yorkshire. His grandfather was a local politician who had a stone quarry. They were quite well off. 

Walker went to Oxford and was in St. Catherine s College, which was in a state of transition in 1960. It had a dynamic head, a historian, Alan Bullock, who wrote famous books. He raised money to convert the St. Catherine s Society into a college. Bullock had been in a grammar school in Northern England and he knew that there were northern grammar school boys who were an untapped resource. 

Abraham guided him in reading appropriate books and appropriate papers, he told him that he had to study a paper by Jacob and Monod and others. Thus Walker began to learn about biology. The four years Walker spent there was an important foundation for his future, which was laid down without any formal education, simply by opportunity. The only course he attended was one on protein structures by the newly appointed Professor of Molecular Biophysics, David Phillips. 

He spent two years in Madison, one year in Gif-sur-Yvette, and there he met a Czech scientist Keil who told him that they were starting a protein chemistry unit in the Pasteur Institute in Paris with himself as head. Walker went there and helped him start the unit and was responsible for sequencing proteins. That was another two years, 1972-1974. Monod was still director, but he was also very ill by then and he was hardly visible. 

In 1974, Walker was on an EMBO fellowship and went to an EMBO Workshop in Cambridge on sequencing proteins. At dinner he met Frederick 

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Paul D. Boyer and John E. Walker Chemistry Mechanism of ATP synthesis... 

Paul D. Boyer, John E. Walker Enzymatic mechanism underlying the synthesis of ATP. 

The authors are grateful to Dr. Michael G. Simic, Dr. James J. Shieh, Mr. John E. Walker, and Mr. James B. D Arcy for helpful discussions of this subject and for making available data in advance of publication. 

In 1978, John E. Walker (1941- ) at Cambridge commenced his structural studies of ATP synthase combining determination of the... 

In 1997, Paul D. Boyer, John E. Walker, and Jens C. Skou (1918- ) shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Skou, at Aarhus University in Denmark, discovered during the 1950s and 60s the mechanism whereby energy derived from ATP is used to pump Na and K ions across cell membranes. Inside cells there is high K concentration and low Na concentration while the reverse is true in extracellular fluids. Energy is required to keep each of these intra- and extracellular gradients from disappearing. The key enzyme involved in this process, Na /K -ATPase was finally isolated in chemically stable form from cell membranes in 1980. 

Paul D. Boyer (1918- ), United States, and John E. Walker (1941- ), United Kingdom. For their elucidation of the enzymatic mechanism underlying the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Jens C. Skou (1918), Denmark. For the first discovery of an ion-transporting enzyme, Na", K"-ATPase. ... 

Discovery and characterization of the actual molecular pump that establishes the sodium and potassium concentration gradient (Na > -ATPase) earned Jens Skou (Aarhus University, Denmark) half of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The other half went to Paul D. Boyer (UCLA) and John E. Walker (Cambridge) for elucidating the enzymatic mechanism of ATP synthesis. 

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