Pehr Edman Swedish biochemist Date of Birth: 14.04.1916 Country: Sweden

1. Biography of Pehr Edman
2. Early Life and Education
3. Contributions to Biochemistry
4. Later Career and Legacy

Biography of Pehr Edman

Pehr Viktor Edman, a Swedish biochemist, is renowned for developing the Edman degradation method, which determines the primary sequence of peptides. The Edman method gained widespread use in the second half of the 20th century.

Early Life and Education

Pehr Viktor Edman was born on April 14, 1916, in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1935, he began studying medicine at the Karolinska Institutet, one of the largest medical universities in Europe. It was there that he became interested in fundamental research and obtained a Bachelor's degree in medicine in 1938. His studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, during which Edman was called to serve in the Swedish army. He later returned to the Karolinska Institutet, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1946 under the supervision of Professor Erik Jorpes.

Contributions to Biochemistry

Edman started working with a globulin-class protein called angiotensin and discovered that proteins are distinct entities with specific molecular weight, electric charge, and structure. This inspired him to develop a method that could be used to determine the sequence of amino acids in a protein. In 1947, he received a scholarship and went to the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research at Princeton University. Upon returning to Sweden in 1950, Edman became an assistant professor at the University of Lund. In the same year, he published his first paper on peptide sequencing, which later became known as the Edman method. Until his death, Edman continued to refine his method to be able to determine longer segments with smaller sample sizes.

Later Career and Legacy

In 1957, Edman relocated to Australia, where he became the director of the St. Vincent's School of Medical Research. In 1967, he successfully developed an automated protein sequencer, known as the Edman sequenator, together with his assistant Geoffrey Begg. In 1972, Edman moved to the Max-Planck-Institut of Biochemistry in Martinsried, near Munich, Germany. He worked here alongside his second wife, Agnes Henschen, and applied the Edman method to analyze the sequence of fibrinogen. Pehr Viktor Edman passed away on March 19, 1977, due to a brain tumor, following a brief period in a coma.