The European Science Foundation has awarded this year's European Latsis Prize to Professor Kenneth Charles Holmes, Director of the Max Planck Institut f�r Medizinische Forschung, for his outstanding contributions to structural biology, studies of great scientific and social significance for European progress. The prize, worth 100,000 Swiss Francs, is awarded by the ESF to an individual or group who, in the opinion of their peers, has made the greatest contribution to a particular field of European research. The chosen field of the 2000 prize was 'molecular structure'.
Throughout his career, Professor Holmes has been a major figure in structural biology. He was a pioneer in the development of both theoretical and experimental X-ray diffraction methods for elucidating the structures of biological macromolecules. His work in the 1960's on the development of stronger X-ray sources paved the way for the novel use of synchrotron radiation as an X-ray source for the studies of the structure of matter, particularly for biological structures. His work has been essential for revealing the atomic structures of the proteins actin and myosin in muscle. He is acknowledged as a leading authority on the mechanism by which the contractile protein components of muscle turn the chemical energy of ATP into work.
In the early 1970's Kenneth Holmes and his student Gerd Rosenbaum were the first to build an optical bench for X-ray diffraction at a synchrotron. Their demonstration of X-ray diffraction from insect muscle using synchrotron radiation at DESY, in Hamburg, in 1971 was a major breakthrough. The results paved the way for the establishment of the EMBL outstation at DESY where Holmes served as acting head during its founding years.
Copied from the CLRC 'LabNews' for December 2000
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