CHEMISTRY: MODEL T

By Natalie Angier

In the elevator of Flexner Hall at Rockefeller University in New York City, a hand-lettered sign proudly proclaims:

SOLID-PHASE PEPTIDE SYNTHESIS WAS BORN HERE. Twenty-five years ago, Biochemist R. Bruce Merrifield was riding up to the fourth floor with a colleague when he proposed a new method for creating proteins, the essential components of life. Last week Merrifield, 63, stepped off the same elevator and into the embrace of a laboratory worker who told him that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for that idea. Merrifield thus became the only American in 1984 to win a Nobel.

Like Henry Ford, Merrifield gained fame by automating a complex process. Proteins, produced inside living cells, are made of long chains of chemically linked amino acids, which group into units known as peptides. To understand a wide variety of biological processes, scientists must be able to trace the sequence of amino acids in a protein. They must know how to duplicate that sequence to manipulate its components for research. Before Merrifield developed his technique, biologists labored through dozens of painstaking purification procedures, taking months or even years to synthesize a peptide chain.

Merrifield confined his simple process to a single laboratory container. Placing a microscopic polystyrene bead inside the receptacle to act as a solid, inert foundation, he began adding drops of amino acid units, which linked together in the proper order. He washed the growing chain in a purifying solution after adding each chemical, thus avoiding the possible need to remove any part for additional purification, as in past methods. When the protein was complete, acid was used to cleave it from the bead. Though Merrifield's first device, regulated by a metal cylinder studded with pegs, had a touch of Rube Goldberg, it worked like a Model T.

Merrifield's primitive prototype has since been upgraded to computer-controlled models. The technique now synthesizes such complex peptides as ribonuclease, an enzyme needed by cells to decipher the genetic information in DNA. Pharmaceutical companies may soon exploit it to create new drugs, including vaccines and diabetic and heart medications.

A soft-spoken Texan, Merrifield is a graduate of UCLA and the 19th Nobelist to be associated with Rockefeller. He is the father of six children and for a while was the leader of a Boy Scout troop. When not at the lab, he spends his time happily tinkering around his house in Cresskill, NJ.

Says he: "I could spend the rest of my life raking leaves." --By Natalie Angler.

Reported by Kenneth W. Banta/New York

With reporting by Kenneth W. Banta