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Obituary: Robert Bruce Merrifield dies at 84
In October 1984, Robert Bruce Merrifield was
interviewed by the Star-Ledger of New Jersey after he won the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry. “Successful research scientists are born, not
fashioned,” Dr. Merrifield said. “There must be
something special inside the individual in the first place, or it
will never come together.” Dr. Merrifield, whose retirement
in 1992 never fully took him away from his work at Rockefeller,
died after a long illness on May 14, at the age of 84.
Dr. Merrifield’s careful, methodical and
optimistic approach to research was well known to everyone around
him, and when his groundbreaking discovery of the technique known
as solid phase peptide synthesis resulted in the Nobel Prize, the
only person surprised by the news was the man himself. “[His]
was a revolution in peptide chemistry,” said Günter
Blobel, head of Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Cell Biology,
describing to The New York Times Dr. Merrifield’s method of attaching the
first amino acid in a peptide chain to an insoluble plastic bead,
thereby pinning it down and allowing for the addition of further
amino acids. The method increased the chemical reaction efficiency of the process to 99.5 percent,
accomplishing what previously took years to complete in a matter of
days.
Born in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas, Bruce
Merrifield spent most of his young life in southern California. He
received both bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in chemistry
from the University of California, Los Angeles, and immediately
thereafter accepted a job as assistant professor at what was then
the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. “He graduated
from UCLA on Sunday, we got married on Monday and we left for New
York on Tuesday,” said his wife, Elizabeth, several years
ago. Elizabeth, herself a committed researcher, raised six children
and worked in her husband’s Laboratory of Biochemistry for 23
years. Dr. Merrifield became full professor at Rockefeller in 1966
and was named John D. Rockefeller Jr. Professor in 1983. His
scientific autobiography, titled Life
during a Golden Age of Peptide Chemistry, was published in 1993.
Dr. Merrifield is survived by his wife
Elizabeth, one son, five daughters, and 16 grandchildren.
June 09, 2006
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