Daniel Edward Koshland, Junior. was an American biochemist.
Background
Koshland is one of three children born to a Jewish family, the son of Daniel E. Koshland, Senior and Eleanor Haas, daughter of the Haas family patriarch Abraham Haas. His father served as Chief Executive Officer of Levi Strauss & Company from 1955 to 1958 and is widely credited with saving the company during the Great Depression.
Education
However, he chose not to tap in to the fortune and instead went to school to learn a different trade.
Career
He reorganized the study of biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and was the editor of the leading United States science journal, Science, from 1985 to 1995. He has two siblings: Frances "Sissy" Koshland Geballe and Phyllis Koshland Friedman. Koshland"s private fortune, derived from Levi Strauss, put him on lists of America"s wealthiest mentor
Attending Philips Exeter Academy for high school Koshland then became the third generation of his family to matriculate to the University of California at Berkeley (University of California, Berkeley) where he majored in chemistry.
The next five years, 1941-1946, were spent working with Glenn Seaborg at the University of Chicago on the top-secret Manhattan project, where his team purified the plutonium that was used to make the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. In 1949, he received his Doctor of Philosophy in organic chemistry from the University of Chicago.
His early work was in enzyme kinetics at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, and Rockefeller University, New New York This led him to propose the induced fit model for enzyme catalysis.
After this advance, he turned to studying how bacteria control their movements in chemotaxis.
Doctor Koshland"s laboratory made three major discoveries concerning protein phosphorylation in bacteria. (1) The first phosphorylated bacterial protein, isocitrate dehydrogenase, was identified. (2) lieutenant was demonstrated that substituting an aspartate residue for the serine residue that was phosphorylated causes the protein to behave as if it were phosphorylated.
(3) The response regulators in the two-component regulatory systems were shown to be phosphorylated on an aspartate residue and to be protein phosphatases with a covalent intermediate.
He spearheaded the reorganization of the biological sciences at Berkeley, merging 11 departments into three. Koshland Hall is named for Dan East. Koshland Junior.
The building is located next to (and on some floors connected to) Barker Hall. Koshland Hall houses a number of laboratories in both Molecular and Cell Biology as well as Plant and Microbial Biology.
The basement has a storeroom that serves all of campus.
Koshland wrote in an autobiographical article that he decided to become a scientist in the eighth grade after reading two popular books about science, Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif and Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. In 2008, the award was renamed the Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science in honor of Koshland.
Membership
National Academy of Sciences]
He was a Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.