The Chemistry of Life: Nucleic Acids and Proteins at Rockefeller University

Chemistry at Rockefeller

Much of the work by chemists at Rockefeller was, and continues to be, conducted in Flexner Hall. The building is named for Simon Flexner, Rockefeller's first director. Flexner recruited Phoebus A. Levene, a Russian who had studied with the great German chemist, Emil Fischer, to establish a chemical laboratory in 1905.

Levene's research during his 45-year career at Rockefeller centered on isolating and identifying organic compounds, including carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids, from living systems. He and his team studied RNA and DNA, and identified ribose and deoxyribose as their key building blocks. They also isolated and named adenosine, one of the basic units of DNA and RNA. This work provided a firm foundation for much of what was to follow.

Physical chemistry arrived at Rockefeller in 1926 with Duncan MacInnes. Previously affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was interested in the properties of ions in solution. For this work, MacInnes, a superb instrumentalist, developed a vastly improved version of the glass electrode. Leonor Michaelis, who was already well known for his work in enzyme kinetics, started a second physical chemistry laboratory at Rockefeller in 1929. At Rockefeller, Michaelis' studies were centered on biological oxidation-reduction reactions.

next | back