William Jencks
| William Platt Jencks | |
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| Born |
August 15, 1927 Bar Harbor, Maine |
| Died | January 3, 2007 (aged 79) |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Biochemistry |
| Institutions |
National Academy of Sciences Brandeis University |
| Alma mater | Harvard College |
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William Platt Jencks (August 15, 1927 – January 3, 2007) was an American biochemist. He was noted particularly for his work on enzymes, using concepts drawn from organic chemistry to understand their mechanisms.
Jencks graduated from Harvard College in 1947 with a degree in English, and earned a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard University in 1951. He interned at the Peter Bent Brigham hospital. Jencks conducted his first postdoctoral research for two years with Fritz Lipmann at Harvard Medical School. Jencks was drafted into the Army Medical Corps and was assigned to the Army Medical Service Graduate School at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, DC. He worked with E. L. Durrum and served as the chair of the department of pharmacology. In 1956–1957, he did a second Public Health Service postdoc with R. B. Woodward of the Harvard University Department of Chemistry. In 1957, he moved to the new graduate program in biochemistry at Brandeis University. He became professor emeritus in 1996.
Much of his career focused on reaction mechanisms used by enzyme catalysts. He was particularly well known for studies of the reaction of nucleophiles with carbon. He proposed that enzymes use ground state destabilization, termed the Circe Effect, to increase the reactivity of their bound substrates. Many of these research interests were explored in his influential text Catalysis in Chemistry and Enzymology. Jencks published close to 400 scientific papers during his career.
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