Dr. Richard Henderson


1945 -

Biophysicist. Born in Edinburgh, Henderson was educated in Newcastleton, at Hawick High School, Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh. He undertook his doctorate at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he returned to spend his career after a few years of post-doctoral research at Yale in the USA. He is noted for his contributions to protein crystallography, his work led first to the foundation of Heptares, a company developing novel drug therapies, secondly winning Royal Society's Copley Medal, the world's oldest scientific prize, then to the award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017, jointly with Swiss-born Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank from the USA. The prize was awarded for "developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution". In 2015, Heptares was bought by the Japanese pharmaceutical group Sosei for $400 million.


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