Molecular Biology of Assemblies and Machines (PDF)

Wolfgang Baumeister is Director and Head of the Department of Structural Biology at the Max Planck-Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. Baumeister studied biology, chemistry and physics at the Universities of M nster and Bonn and obtained his PhD from the University of D'sseldorf. In 1973, he began his career as Research Associate in the Department of Biophysics at the University of D'sseldorf and held a Heisenberg Fellowship spending time at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England. In 1982 he became a Group Leader at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany and then appointed Director and Head of the Department of Structural Biology. Baumeister pioneered the development of cryo-electron tomography and his work has shaped the understanding of the structure and function of the cellular machinery of protein degradation. His awards include the Otto Warburg Medal, the Schleiden Medal, the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the Stein and Moore Award, the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology and the Ernst Schering Prize. He is a member of several academies including the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Louise N. Johnson was an Emeritus Fellow of the Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford in Cambridge, UK. Johnson was educated at University College, London, and began her postgraduate career at the Royal Institution working with Lawrence Bragg and David Phillips. There she co-discovered the structure of lysozyme in 1965, then the second protein and first enzyme ever solved by X-ray crystallography. As the David Phillips Professor of Molecular Biophysics at Oxford from 1990 to 2007, Johnson led structural studies of regulatory proteins of the cell cycle, protein kinases, and glycogen metabolism, crucial to understanding the origin of disease and new drug design. In 1976, together with Tom Blundell, she coauthored the widely infl