Wüthrich, Kurt, 1938–, Swiss chemist, Ph.D. Univ. of Basel, 1964. Wüthrich has been on the faculty at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology since 1969 and at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, Calif., since 2001. In 2002 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Fenn and Koichi Tanaka; he was awarded the prize for his use of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to determine the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution. NMR spectroscopy enables proteins to be studied in solution, an environment that closely mimics the conditions found in living cells.
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