Paul D. Boyer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1997 for his research on the binding change mechanism and rotational catalysis of the ATP synthase complex, which he performed at UCLA in the 1960-70s. This collection contains his professional papers, documenting his career as an academic at the University of Minnesota (1946-1963) and UCLA (1963-present [Emeritus]), where he was Director of the Molecular Biology Institute (MBI). Of particular note is Boyer's correspondence with other major bioenergeticists of the twentieth century including Efraim Racker and Nobelist Peter Mitchell, and regarding UCLA specifically, the naming of UCLA's Boyer Hall on campus.

Paul D. Boyer (1918–present) was born on July 31st, 1918 in Provo, Utah. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a B.S. in chemistry in 1939, was awarded a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Scholarship, and began his doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin in 1939 in the lab of Paul H. Philips. Five days before leaving Provo, Boyer married fellow BYU student Lyda Whicker. He received his PhD in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1943, and moved to Stanford to work in the lab of J. Murray Luck on a war-related research project on the stabilization of serum albumin for transfusions. In 1945 Boyer was drafted into the U.S. Navy (second class seaman) and sent to the Navy Medical Research Institute. In 1946 he became an Assistant Professor at University of Minnesota. In 1955 Boyer received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work with Nobelist Hugo Theorell on alcohol dehydrogenase in Sweden, and also won the Award in Enzyme Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (ACS) that year. In 1956 Boyer accepted the Hill Foundation Professorship at the University of Minnesota and moved to the medical campus. He served as Chairman of the Biochemistry Section of the American Chemical Society from 1959-60.

19.4 Linear Feet (47 boxes and 3 half boxes)

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