Robert Baldwin
Wisconsin & Trinity 1950 (30 September 1927 - 6 March 2021)
Robert “Buzz” Baldwin, PhD, professor emeritus of biochemistry at the Stanford University School of Medicine, died March 6 in Portola Valley, California at the age of 93.
On obtaining a bachelor’s of arts degree in chemistry in 1950 at the University of Wisconsin, Baldwin studied biochemistry at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, receiving his D.Phil. degree (the British equivalent of a PhD) in 1954.
Baldwin devoted his career to studying how proteins, which begin life as linear chains of chemical building blocks, quickly assume their characteristic highly complex, functional structures. His research sped a shift in many biologists’ attention from organismic biology, the study of creatures great and small, to molecular biology, which focuses on the individual biochemical reactions that underpin all living processes and on the molecules — usually proteins — responsible for catalyzing those reactions.
You can see a full obituary for Buzz here.