Christian B. Anfinsen; Nobel Prize Winner for Chemistry

Christian Boehmer Anfinsen, winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize in chemistry, has died of a heart attack at age 79.

Anfinsen, who died at his home Sunday, won the Nobel while laboratory chief of the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, where he worked from 1963 to 1981. He shared the prize with Rockefeller University scientists Stanford Moore and William H. Stein.

Anfinsen received the award for developing the concept that the amino acid sequence of a protein determines the three-dimensional structure for that protein.

The Nobel committee described the work as having made “fundamental contributions to enzyme chemistry.”

Anfinsen joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1982. He recently was involved with the study of bacteria found in vents along the edges of the tectonic plates on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

The bacteria, with their ability to live at very high temperatures, might be useful in disposing of toxic materials such as chemical weapons.

Anfinsen was an instructor and assistant professor of biological chemistry from 1943 to 1950 at Harvard Medical School.

As a member of the National Academy of Sciences Human Rights Committee, he visited many countries in support of human rights. In 1984, he was among 55 Western scientists, including six Nobel Prize winners, who volunteered to trade places with Elena G. Bonner so that she could come to the West for medical treatment. The next year, she was allowed to visit Italy and the United States by the Soviet government that had sentenced her and her husband, Andrei D. Sakharov, to exile in Gorky.