NIH Eminent Scientist Profiles

Christian B. Anfinsen, M.D., was a biochemist who spent most of his career at the NIH, arriving at the National Heart Institute (now called the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute) in 1950 and subsequently appointed, in 1962, as chief of the Laboratory of Chemical Biology at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases (now the National Institute of Arthritis, Diabetes, and Digestive and Kidney Diseases), where he remained until 1981. Elected to the National Academy of Science in 1963, Dr. Anfinsen would go on to share one half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972 "for his work on ribonuclease, especially concerning the connection between the amino acid sequence and the biologically active conformation."

Christian Boehmer Anfinsen U.S. National Library of Medicine