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European Latsis Prize winner announced

The European Science Foundation (ESF) has awarded this year's European Latsis Prize to Professor Kenneth Charles Holmes for his contributions to structural biology. The European Latsis Prize consists of 100,000 Swiss Francs (65,000 euro), and is financed by the Latsis Founda...

The European Science Foundation (ESF) has awarded this year's European Latsis Prize to Professor Kenneth Charles Holmes for his contributions to structural biology. The European Latsis Prize consists of 100,000 Swiss Francs (65,000 euro), and is financed by the Latsis Foundation. It is awarded by the ESF to an individual or group who, in the opinion of their peers, has made the greatest contribution to a particular field of European research. The chosen field of the 2000 prize was 'molecular structure'. Professor Holmes' work has been essential for revealing the atomic structures of the proteins actin and myosin in muscle, and he is widely acknowledged as a leading authority on the mechanism by which the contractile protein components of muscle turn the chemical energy of ATP into work. He has been director of the Max Planck Institute for medizinische Forschung in Heidelberg since 1968. Throughout his career, he has been an important figure in structural biology. He was a pioneer in the development of both theoretical and experimental X-ray diffraction methods for elucidating the structures of biological macromolecules.

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