Christian Boehmer Anfinsen (1916-1995), US biochemist. Anfinsen received his PhD from Harvard Medical School in 1943, and worked there for the next 7 years. He then spent most of the rest of his career at the US National Institutes of Health. His work involved the study of proteins and their synthesis from amino acids. His major contribution, for which he received a share of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was to realise that the structure of a protein depends on the sequence by which its amino acids are joined. Much of his studies involved ribonuclease, the enzyme that acts on the genetic molecule RNA. Photographed in the 1950s.