Arne Tiselius: The Chemist Who Sorted Proteins
Blood serum arrives at a laboratory bench as a single amber fluid, and for most of the history of chemistry it behaved like one — a substance stubbornly resistant to being taken apart. In 1937, at Uppsala University, Arne Tiselius finished rebuilding an apparatus that drove an electric current through exactly such a solution and let its proteins migrate apart at different rates. What had looked like one thing resolved into several. Eleven years later the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, sitting in his own country, gave him the prize for it.
A Boy from Gothenburg
Tiselius was born in Stockholm on 10 August 1902, but his upbringing belonged to Sweden's west coast. After his father's death the family relocated to Gothenburg, and it was there that he passed through the local Realgymnasium, graduating in 1921. He then went to Uppsala University to read chemistry — and in practice never left. Uppsala supplied his training, his laboratory, his career and, half a century later, the place where he died.
In Svedberg's Laboratory
In 1925 Tiselius became a research assistant in the laboratory of Theodor Svedberg, one of the addresses in European physical chemistry where the machinery of measurement counted for as much as theory. It was the right environment for a young man whose instincts ran toward instruments rather than grand hypotheses.
In 1930 he took his doctoral degree with a thesis titled "The Moving Boundary Method of Studying the Electrophoresis of Proteins." The title contains his entire career in miniature. Electrophoresis — the migration of electrically charged molecules through a solution under an applied field — offered, in principle, a way to distinguish proteins that were far too similar chemically to be separated by ordinary means. Different proteins carry different charges; under a current they should travel at different speeds and pull apart into distinguishable zones. In principle. In practice the technique was crude, and the boundaries it produced were blurry enough to be argued over. The thesis was competent work that led, for the moment, nowhere in particular.
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Between 1930 and 1935 Tiselius set proteins aside entirely and published instead on diffusion and adsorption in zeolites — the porous crystalline minerals that trap and release molecules according to size and affinity. It looked at the time like a change of subject. It was not. Adsorption analysis, the study of how substances cling selectively to surfaces, would eventually share his Nobel citation with electrophoresis. The detour taught him a second way of pulling mixtures apart.
Princeton, and a Second Start
After 1935, holding a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, Tiselius crossed the Atlantic to work in Hugh Stott Taylor's laboratory at Princeton University. When he returned to Uppsala he went back to the problem he had abandoned — the separation of proteins — and this time he attacked it as an engineering question rather than a chemical one.
The 1937 Apparatus
The result, in 1937, was a substantially improved apparatus for electrophoretic analysis. This was the breakthrough, and it is worth being precise about what kind of breakthrough it was: Tiselius did not discover a new law of nature. He built a machine that made an existing principle finally reliable. With it, serum could be shown to contain not one protein but a complex population of them, resolvable into distinct components. That result reorganized how biochemists thought about the blood, and the apparatus itself became a standard analytical tool — the ancestor of a family of separation techniques on which modern biochemistry, clinical diagnostics and molecular biology all depend.
The Prize
Sweden's Björkénska priset came in 1940. Then, in 1948, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded "for his research on electrophoresis and adsorption analysis." The wording repays attention: the committee named two methods rather than one discovery. Tiselius was honoured as a toolmaker, which is exactly what he was, and which is why his influence spread far beyond the questions he personally asked.
Statesman of Chemistry
The last two decades of his life were increasingly institutional. From 1951 to 1955 he served as president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the body that arbitrates the discipline's standards and nomenclature across national borders. From 1960 to 1964 he chaired the board of the Nobel Foundation itself — a laureate turned custodian of the machinery that had honoured him.
The honours accumulated accordingly. He was made a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1949, won the Centenary Prize in 1953 and was elected the same year to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Franklin Medal followed in 1955, foreign membership of the Royal Society in 1957, the Paul Karrer Gold Medal in 1961 and election to the American Philosophical Society in 1964.
Death
Tiselius died of a heart attack in Uppsala on 29 October 1971, aged sixty-nine, in the city where he had spent nearly the whole of his working life. He was married and left two children. A crater on the Moon carries his name — a durable memorial, though the more useful one sits in laboratories, where the descendants of his 1937 apparatus still separate what the eye cannot.
