R Bruce Merrifield, one of the PCC alumni
honored during the college's 75th anniversary year, is apparently the first and only
community college graduate to have won a Nobel
Prize. Merrifield, who attended Pasadena Junior College
from 1939 to 1941, won the award for chemistry in
1984, based on his revolutionary work in peptide synthesis. Now, adding to his already impressive collection
of awards and honorary degrees, he will be presented
in April with the 2001 Outstanding Alumni Award by
the American Association of Community Colleges.
Merrifield came to PJC from Montebello High School.
While there were four or five junior colleges in the
area at the time, Merrifield said that he and his friends
chose Pasadena because of its good reputation and
the easy commute. Merrifield describes attending junior college near his home as "standard practice"
among those uin the lower middle class town without
a lot of money" Plus, he said, "the undergraduate
teaching was better than at the big universities."
He went on to UCLA, to earn his bachelor's degree
in chemistry in 1943. He worked for a year at the
Phillip R. Park Research Foundation, taking care of
an animal colony and assisting with growth experiments on synthetic amino acid diets. Returning to
UCLA in 1948-1949, Merrifield did research at the
UCLA Medical School and in 1949 earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry. He was
appointed an assistant biochemist at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical
Research (now The Rockefeller University) in New York City, where he has
remained and is now Professor Emeritus.
In 1959, Merrifield began working in peptide chemistry with his mentor,
Dr. D.W. Woolley; the pair did research on a dinucleotide growth factor that
Merrifield had discovered in graduate school and on peptide growth factors
that Woolley had discovered earlier. The need arose for a way to synthesize peptides in the laboratory—a simple and efficient method that would
be suited to mechanization and automation. Eventually, a middle-of-the-
night brainstorm led to Merrifield's idea for solid-phase peptide synthesis.
Peptides are the basic building blocks of proteins, such as many enzymes,
hormones, and numerous antibiotics. Merrifield's method of synthesizing
American Association of Community Colleges 2001 Outstanding Alumni Dr. R. Bruce
Merrifield in his laboratory in 1984. -photo: Ingbert Gruttner, courtesy The Rockefeller University
peptides has had many practical applications and has, for example, become
the basis for the commercial manufacture of hormones such as insulin. It has
facilitated studies on growth factors, antibiotics, antigens, etc. Although he
did not make money out of his own invention, the method has also formed
the foundation for hundreds of successful businesses which now manufacture a dizzying array of automated peptide synthesizers.
Merrifield married Elizabeth Furlong in 1949. She is also a PCC alumnus,
although the two didn't meet until they were both at UCLA. Mrs. Merrifield,
educated as a biologist, stayed home to raise their six children, but when
their youngest was in high school she joined her husband at the university. The couple now have fourteen grandchildren. Currently, Merrifield is
working on glucagon—a peptide hormone that increases blood sugar—
which he hopes will eventually help in the treatment of diabetes.
