Jens Christian Skou
| Jens Christian Skou | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
October 8, 1918 Lemvig, Denmark |
| Nationality | Danish |
| Fields | Physiology, Biophysics, Biochemistry |
| Known for | Na+,K+-ATPase |
| Notable awards | 1997, Nobel Prize in Chemistry |
Jens Christian Skou (Danish pronunciation: [ˈjɛns kʁæsdjæn ˈsɡʌʊ̯ˀ]; born October 8, 1918) is a Danish medical doctor and Nobel laureate.
Skou was born in Lemvig, Denmark to a wealthy family. His father Magnus Martinus Skou was a timber and coal merchant. His mother Ane-Margrethe Skou took over the company after the death of his father. At the age of 15 Skou entered a boarding school in Haslev, Zealand. He graduated in medicine from the University of Copenhagen in 1944 and received his doctorate in 1954. He began working at the Aarhus University in 1947 and was appointed professor of biophysics in 1977. He retired from the Aarhus University in 1988, but he has kept his offices at the Department of Physiology (today part of Department of Biomedicine).
In 1997 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (together with Paul D. Boyer and John E. Walker) for his discovery of Na+,K+-ATPase [1].
Skou had taken a few years away from his clinical training in the early 1950s to study the action of local anaesthetics. He had discovered that a substance’s anaesthetic action was related to its ability to dissolve in a layer of the lipid part of the plasma membrane, the anaesthetic molecules affected the opening of sodium channels which he assumed to be protein. This, he argued, would affect the movement of sodium ions and make nerve cells inexcitable, thus causing anaesthesia.
Skou thought that other types of membrane protein might also be affected by local anaesthetics dissolving in the lipid part of the membrane. He therefore had the idea of looking at an enzyme which was embedded in the membrane and finding out if its properties were affected by local anaesthetics. He looked at ATPase in crab nerves.
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