Gregorio Weber was an Argentinian scientist who made significant contributions to the fields of fluorescence spectroscopy and protein chemistry.
17 Facts About Gregorio Weber
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Gregorio Weber was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1916.
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Gregorio Weber attended the University of Buenos Aires where he received his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1942.
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Gregorio Weber worked as a medical student from 1939 to 1943 in the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry as a teaching assistant for Bernardo Alberto Houssay.
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Gregorio Weber continued his studies at the University of Cambridge under the guidance of Malcolm Dixon, well-known enzymologist, and, in 1947, earned a Ph.
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Gregorio Weber's thesis, titled "Fluorescence of Riboflavin, Diaphorase and Related Substances", marked the beginning of the application of fluorescence spectroscopy to biomolecules.
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Gregorio Weber's thesis was devoted especially to measurements of the quenching of fluorescence of riboflavin, and on development of a general theory of quenching by complex formation.
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From 1948 to 1952 Gregorio Weber carried out independent investigations at the Sir William Dunn Institute of Biochemistry at Cambridge, supported by a British Beit Memorial Fellowship.
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Gregorio Weber began to delve more deeply into the theory of fluorescence polarization and began to develop methods which would allow study of proteins that did not contain an intrinsic fluorophore such as FAD or NADH.
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Specifically, Gregorio Weber showed that Perrin's complex equations, which required a knowledge of the orientation of the fluorophore's absorption and emission oscillators with respect to the axis of rotation of the ellipsoid, could be considerably simplified if the fluorophores carrying the oscillators were assumed to be randomly oriented on the macromolecule.
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Gregorio Weber stayed at Cambridge as an independent researcher until 1953 when Hans Krebs recruited him for the new Biochemistry Department at Sheffield University.
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Gunsalus related the story that while he was convincing his colleagues that Gregorio Weber was an exceptional scientist, someone commented that Weber didn't have as many publications as one might expect from a senior professor.
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Gregorio Weber joined the University of Illinois in 1962 and built a research program that continued actively until his death from leukaemia on July 17,1997.
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Gregorio Weber was responsible for many of the more important theoretical and experimental developments in modern fluorescence spectroscopy.
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Gregorio Weber rejected the view, common at that time after the appearance of the first x-ray structures, that proteins had a unique and rigid conformation.
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Drickamer, Gregorio Weber combined fluorescence and hydrostatic pressure methods to the study of molecular complexes and proteins.
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Gregorio Weber's observations confirmed the applicability of fluorescence and high-pressure techniques to problems of structure, and particularly dynamics, at the molecular level.