Reinhold and Ruth Benesch
Encyclopedia
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
whose forty year scientific collaboration primarily investigated hemoglobin
Hemoglobin
Hemoglobin is the iron-containing oxygen-transport metalloprotein in the red blood cells of all vertebrates, with the exception of the fish family Channichthyidae, as well as the tissues of some invertebrates...
. Their most important discovery was the function of 2,3-bisphosphoglyceric acid.
Reinhold Benesch was born in Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
but immigrated to England. He graduated from Leeds University in 1941. Ruth Benesch was born in Paris, France to German parents who returned to Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
six days later. She and her sister were evacuated to England via Kindertransport
Kindertransport
Kindertransport is the name given to the rescue mission that took place nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig...
in 1939, where she graduated from Stroud High School
Stroud High School
Stroud High School is a state funded grammar school for girls aged 11 to 18 located in Stroud, Gloucestershire, England.-History:Stroud High School was founded in 1904 as the Girls' Endowed School by a group of local citizens led by solicitor Mr. A. J...
and received a B.Sc. from Birkbeck College in 1946. To support herself in college she worked at a rubber
Rubber
Natural rubber, also called India rubber or caoutchouc, is an elastomer that was originally derived from latex, a milky colloid produced by some plants. The plants would be ‘tapped’, that is, an incision made into the bark of the tree and the sticky, milk colored latex sap collected and refined...
factory where she met Reinhold, who was working there as a consultant. They married in 1946.
Both Benesches earned their doctorates in biochemistry from Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....
, he in 1950, she in 1952. They began working at Columbia in 1960.
Their early work concerned sulfur
Sulfur
Sulfur or sulphur is the chemical element with atomic number 16. In the periodic table it is represented by the symbol S. It is an abundant, multivalent non-metal. Under normal conditions, sulfur atoms form cyclic octatomic molecules with chemical formula S8. Elemental sulfur is a bright yellow...
in protein
Protein
Proteins are biochemical compounds consisting of one or more polypeptides typically folded into a globular or fibrous form, facilitating a biological function. A polypeptide is a single linear polymer chain of amino acids bonded together by peptide bonds between the carboxyl and amino groups of...
s and thiol
Thiol
In organic chemistry, a thiol is an organosulfur compound that contains a carbon-bonded sulfhydryl group...
groups. However, the bulk of their collaboration centered on hemoglobin. Of 125 scientific papers they published together, only 13 do not concern hemoglobin.
Their key discovery, in 1967, was that 2,3-bisphosphoglyceric acid was necessary for hemoglobin to transport oxygen throughout the human body through its role in loosing the bonds between hemoglobin and oxygen. This transformed how scientists viewed the oxygen transport system. Nobel
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
laureate Max Perutz
Max Perutz
Max Ferdinand Perutz, OM, CH, CBE, FRS was an Austrian-born British molecular biologist, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with John Kendrew, for their studies of the structures of hemoglobin and globular proteins...
notes "that discovery opened a new era in the physiology of the respiratory carriage".
The Benesches also demonstrated that two types of protein chains, hetero-oligomer and homo-oligomer, were essential to the proper functioning of hemoglobin. Their paper in Science
Science (journal)
Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....
summarizing their discoveries was humorously titled "Homos and Heteros Among the Hemos" and signed "R2B2" to signify their "heterodimer". They also discovered mutant
Mutant
In biology and especially genetics, a mutant is an individual, organism, or new genetic character, arising or resulting from an instance of mutation, which is a base-pair sequence change within the DNA of a gene or chromosome of an organism resulting in the creation of a new character or trait not...
hemoglobin which only produced one type of chain, which were important in their later studies of sickle-cell anemia, caused by misshapen red blood cells.