{"id":1966,"date":"2006-06-15T17:04:20","date_gmt":"2006-06-15T17:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/2006\/06\/bruce-merrifield.html"},"modified":"2006-06-15T17:04:20","modified_gmt":"2006-06-15T17:04:20","slug":"bruce_merrifield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/2006\/06\/bruce_merrifield.html","title":{"rendered":"Bruce Merrifield"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m sure many of you know that Bruce Merrifield<\/a> passed away a few weeks ago. In today’s issue of Nature<\/em><\/a>, Stephen Kent<\/a> wrote an obituary<\/a> describing Merrifield and his accomplishments.<\/p>\n

If your institution subscribes to the ACS<\/span> archives, you can download “”https:\/\/pubs.acs.org\/cgi-bin\/searchRedirect.cgi\/jacsat\/1963\/85\/i14\/pdf\/ja00897a025.pdf">Solid Phase Peptide Synthesis. I. The Synthesis of a Tetrapeptide<\/a>" (you should be able to download the first page<\/a> for free). According to C&EN<\/em><\/a>, this was the “fifth most cited paper in the journal\u2019s 125-year history.”<\/p>\n

You may also want to take a look at Gutte’s & Merrifield’s classic 1971 JACS<\/span><\/em> paper, in which they reported the synthesis of ribonuclease A<\/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.”)<\/p>\n

Merrifield also wrote two reviews in Science<\/em><\/a> (in 1965<\/a> and 1986<\/a>) – they’re both pretty interesting reviews (and it’s amazing to see how much changed in those 21 years…)<\/p>\n

Joshua<\/p>\n

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m sure many of you know that Bruce Merrifield passed away a few weeks ago. In today\u2019s issue of Nature, Stephen Kent wrote an obituary describing Merrifield and his accomplishments.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":149,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-authors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/149"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1966\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}