Paul Boyer
Biochemist who won a Nobel Prize for working out how the body’s cells store and use energy
PAUL BOYER, who has died aged 99, was an American biochemist who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Walker and Jens Skou for discovering aspects of how the body’s cells store and use energy – a process which affects everything from the building of bones to muscle contractions and the transmission of nerve impulses.
Boyer, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, became interested in the tiny molecule Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) when he was a graduate student in the 1940s. ATP, which was discovered in 1929, is the universal carrier of chemical energy in all living organisms. It captures the energy released from food and transfers it to functions that require energy. Boyer wanted to understand how the enzyme that converts the energy from food into ATP inside cells did its job – a process known as oxidative phosphorylation.
The enzyme (known as ATP synthase) did not behave in a similar way to other enzymes, so Boyer developed a model of how the various subunits of ATP synthase might work like a molecular wheel, powered by a system of gears, levers and ratchets, to generate ATP as it turned.
Most other scientists were sceptical (as Boyer recalled, “they thought I was off on the deep end”), but his insight was vindicated in 1994 by the British scientist John Walker who, working at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, determined the threedimensional structure of Boyer’s enzyme, showing that it could indeed work in the way Boyer had proposed.
The third winner of the Nobel Prize, the Danish scientist Jens Skou, coincidentally died five days before Boyer, also aged 99. He was awarded a share of the prize for explaining how a different enzyme used the ATP Boyer’s enzyme produced.
Paul Delos Boyer was born on July 31 1918 at Provo, Utah, into a nonpractising Mormon family. After taking a degree in Chemistry from Brigham Young University, he went on to take a master’s degree and a PHD in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-madison. From 1943 to 1946 he was involved at Stanford University on a military research project aimed at stabilising serum albumin for transfusions.
He then moved to the University of Minnesota where he developed new methods for investigating enzyme mechanisms including those of the alcohol dehydrogenases – enzymes which occur in many organisms and, among other things, serve to break down alcohols that would otherwise be toxic.
In 1963 he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, as a professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry. He was founding director of the university’s Molecular Biology Institute.
Boyer rejected the doctrinal claims of the Mormon church and, after a flirtation with Unitarianism, became an atheist. In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel laureates who signed the “Humanist Manifesto”.
In 1939 Boyer married Lyda Whicker. She survives him with their two daughters; a son predeceased him.
Before Boyer’s death he was the oldest living Nobel Prize winner. He donated a major share of his award to fund chemistry postdoctoral fellows at UCLA and other institutions.
Paul Boyer, born July 31 1918, died June 2 2018