Torbjörn Caspersson

Torbjörn Oskar Caspersson (15 October 1910 – 7 December 1997) was a

• In the 1934 he and
  nucleotides
  long.
• He provided William Astbury with well prepared samples of DNA for Astbury's pioneering structural measurements.
• In 1936, in his doctoral thesis in chemistry, presented at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, he first studied genetic material inside a
  Feulgen reaction
  to stain the DNA.
• He worked with Jack Schultz in Stockholm from 1937 to 1939 on protein synthesis in cells and published the work in 1939, where he independent of Jean Brachet, working out the same problem using a different technique, found that cells making proteins are rich in ribonucleic acids RNA, implying that RNA is required to make proteins. This was summarised in his book 'Cell Growth and Cell Function' (1950).
• He received a personal professorship from the Swedish state in 1944.
• He became head of the newly created department for cell research and genetics at the Medical Nobel Institute, at the Karolinska, in 1945.
• He was the first to study the giant chromosomes found in insect larvae.
• He studied the role of the nucleolus in protein synthesis.
• He examined the relationship between the quantity of heterochromatin (chromosomes with few genes) and the rate of growth of cancer cells.
• In 1969 when working at the
  Down's syndrome (see also cytogenetics
  ).

In 1979 Caspersson was awarded the Balzan Prize for Biology "For his fundamental studies on protein metabolism and nucleic acids, culminating in a method for identifying specific bands on individual chromosomes by ultraviolet microscopy, thereby creating a new tool for the study of evolution" (motivation of the Balzan General Prize Committee). He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.^[1][2]

References