Professor Quentin Gibson | |
---|---|
Born | Quentin Howieson Gibson 9 December 1918 Aberdeen, Scotland |
Died | 6 March 2011 | (aged 92)
Citizenship | British, American |
Education | Queen's University Belfast |
Spouse | Audrey Jane Pinsent |
Children | 4 |
Awards | Fellow of the Royal Society (1969)[1] |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Biochemistry of heme proteins |
Institutions | University of Sheffield Cornell University University of Pennsylvania |
Notable students | Keith Moffat[2] |
Quentin Howieson Gibson FRS[1] (9 December 1918 – 16 March 2011) was a Scottish American physiologist, and professor at the University of Sheffield,[3] and Cornell University.[4]
Gibson earned a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1944 and a Ph.D. in 1946, from Queen's University Belfast.[citation needed]
Gibson taught at the University of Sheffield from 1947. Whilst at the University of Sheffield Gibson met Audrey Jane Pinsent in 1951. They married, started a family, and eventually had four children. Jane Gibson continued working part-time whilst raising her family. In 1963 they emigrated to the United States, where she took up positions, first at the University of Pennsylvania.[5] He succeeded (Sir) Hans Krebs as the Head of the Department of Biochemistry in 1955. In 1963 he left Sheffield to become a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the Greater Philadelphia Professor at Cornell University, from 1965 to 1996. In 1982, he became a U.S. citizen.[6]
Gibson started his career with studies of hemoglobin,[7] [8] and continued with much other work on heme proteins.
In keeping with his medical qualifications, much of Gibson's early work[9] [10] had medical or physiological relevance.[11]
During the period when protein and enzyme cooperativity was at the center of biochemical interest Gibson studied it in the context of abnormal hemoglobins.[12] [13]
Gibson made major contributions to the development of methods for studying rapid reactions,[14] and their application to hemoglobin.[15]
Other work concerned enzymes such as "diaphorase",[16][17] glucose oxidase,[18] cytochrome oxidase[19][20] and peroxidase.[21]
Much of Gibson's work concerned questions of thermodynamics and equilibria, and in that context he participated in discussions about how to present thermodynamic data.[22]
Gibson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969.[1] He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and an associate editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry from 1975 to 1994.[23]