| 1 | Name: | Dr. Eugene Patrick Kennedy | |
| Institution: | Harvard University | ||
| Year Elected: | 1993 | ||
| Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1919 | ||
| Death Date: | September 22, 2011 | ||
Eugene Patrick Kennedy was born in Chicago in 1919. He enrolled at De Paul University in 1937 as a chemistry major and then went to the University of Chicago in 1941 for graduate training in organic chemistry. To pay his tuition, Dr. Kennedy also got a job in the chemical research department of Armour and Company, one of the large meat packers in Chicago. As part of the war effort, his job at Armour was to assist in the large scale fractionation of bovine blood to obtain pure bovine serum albumin. It was believed that the bovine serum albumin might be useful for treating shock in soldiers on the battlefield. However, by the end of 1942, hope had faded that bovine serum albumin would be an effective treatment, and the Red Cross started to collect blood from volunteers instead. Armour opened a new facility in Fort Worth, Texas for the fractionation of human blood from donors, and Kennedy was sent to Fort Worth to assist in this effort. He remained in Texas until 1945, when the war was nearing its end and large amounts of human plasma proteins had been stockpiled. Returning to the University of Chicago, Dr. Kennedy immediately transferred from the Department of Chemistry to the Department of Biochemistry. His experience on the plasma project had led to a new appreciation of biochemistry. After finishing graduate school, Dr. Kennedy went to the University of California, Berkeley, to work with Horace A. Barker, who had just discovered that soluble extracts of Clostridium kluyveri cells could produce short-chain fatty acids from ethyl alcohol. Although the initial discovery had already been made, there was much to be learned about these extracts, and Dr. Kennedy aided in this effort. In 1950, he joined Fritz Lipmann at Harvard Medical School. He then returned to the University of Chicago in 1951, after being given a joint appointment in the Department of Biochemistry and the newly organized Ben May Laboratory for Cancer Research. In 1959, he was invited to become a Hamilton Kuhn Professor and head of the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Harvard Medical School. Over the course of his career, Dr. Kennedy made major contributions to the biosynthesis of phospholipids, the basic component of all membranes, and to our understanding of membrane function. He discovered the first step of phospholipid synthesis, the reaction of cytidine triphosphate and phosphorylcholine to form cytidine diphosphocholine, as well as the enzyme which catalyzes the reaction. It was Dr. Kennedy who found that a protein, permease, was responsible for the transport of sugars through the bacterial membrane. His research consistently elucidated the structure, localization and biosynthesis of oligosaccharides derived from membranes. Dr. Kennedy's interests also led him to investigate membrane biogenesis and function in bacteria, the translocation of membrane phospholipids, and periplasmic glucans and cell signaling in bacteria. He was the recipient of many honors including the Gairdner Foundation Award and the American Chemical Society's Paul Lewis Award. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Eugene Patrick Kennedy died on September 22, 2011, at the age of 92 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Kennedy was at Harvard as the Hamilton Kuhn Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Emeritus. | |||