I'm sure many of you know that Bruce Merrifield passed away a few weeks ago. In today's issue of Nature, Stephen Kent wrote an obituary describing Merrifield and his accomplishments.

If your institution subscribes to the ACS archives, you can download "Solid Phase Peptide Synthesis. I. The Synthesis of a Tetrapeptide" (you should be able to download the first page for free). According to C&EN, this was the "fifth most cited paper in the journal’s 125-year history."

You may also want to take a look at Gutte's & Merrifield's classic 1971 JACS paper, in which they reported the synthesis of ribonuclease A (124 amino acids long: this "required 369 chemical reactions and 11,931 steps of the automated peptide synthesis machine without any intermediate isolation steps.")

Merrifield also wrote two reviews in Science (in 1965 and 1986) - they're both pretty interesting reviews (and it's amazing to see how much changed in those 21 years...)

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)