Background
JENCKS, William was born on August 15, 1927 in Bar Harbor, Maine, United States. Son of Gardner Jencks and Elinor Melcher Cheetham.
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William Platt Platt Jencks
Edit Profilebiochemist university professor
Education
Jencks graduated from Harvard College in 1947 with a degree in English, and earned an Doctor of Medicine from Harvard University in 1951.
Career
He was noted particularly for his work on enzymes, using concepts drawn from organic chemistry to understand their mechanisms. 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, District of Columbia. He worked with East. 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.
He was memorialized at the 20th Enzyme Mechanisms Meeting in Saint Pete Beach, Florida, several days after his death.
Achievements
Membership
Served as 1st lieutenant, Medical Corps Army of the United States, 1953-1955. Fellow Royal Society. Member National Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Chemical Society (award in biological chemistry 1962, James Flack Norris award in physical-organic chemistry 1995, Repligen award 1996), American Philosophical Society, American Society Biological Chemists, American Academy Arts and Sciences, Alpha Omega Alpha.
Interests
Connections
Married Miriam Ehrlich, June 3, 1950. Children: Helen Esther, David Alan.
