Carl-Ivar Brändén (1934–2004)

Abstract

Science lost a valued citizen on 28 April 2004 when Carl-Ivar BraÈndeÂn succumbed to lung cancer following an 18-month battle. BraÈndeÂn was a prominent member of the structural biology community. Carl grew up in Lapland in northern Sweden, where his father was the teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. His active and free childhood instilled a life-long love of exploration and nature. At the same time he developed a strong desire to expand his horizons beyond the frozen north, and decided that a good education was his ticket to rest of the world. This led him, from age 13 onward, to schooling away from his family and eventually to Uppsala University. Carl's higher education in science was characterized by an ability to take opportunities where and when he found them and by an intellect that was restless unless challenged with an important problem. He began studying mathematics and physics at Uppsala University, but, bored by the undergraduate physics curriculum and inspired by Linus Pauling's texts, he switched to chemistry. An early and important mentor was Professor Ingvar Lindqvist, who invited Carl into his laboratory for PhD studies in chemical crystallography. During his studies with Lindqvist, Carl co-authored a least-squares re®nement program for the ®rst Swedish electronic computer and used it to re®ne the structures of several metal coordination complexes he had solved. Again bored and on the verge of leaving both crystallography and chemistry, Carl was enticed to the new ®eld of protein crystallography by a lecture course in biochemistry. Thus, he leapt at a postdoctoral opportunity to develop re®nement methods for myoglobin with John Kendrew at the MRC laboratory in Cambridge, UK, where in 1962 joined the ®rst generation of protein crystallographers. In the company of Max Perutz, John Kendrew, Francis Crick, Fred Sanger, Michael Rossmann, David Blow, Sydney Brenner, Aaron Klug, Lubert Stryer, Richard Henderson and many others, Carl experienced the heady early days of molecular and structural biology and celebrated the Nobel prizes to Crick, Watson and Wilkins, and to Perutz and Kendrew.