Michel, Hartmut

Hartmut Michel, (born July 18, 1948, Ludwigsburg, Germany), German biochemist who, along with Johann Deisenhofer and Robert Huber, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1988 for their determination of the structure of certain proteins that are essential for photosynthesis.

Michel earned his doctorate from the University of Würzburg in 1977. In 1979 he joined the staff of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, West Germany, where he conducted his award-winning research. In 1987 he became head of the Department of Molecular Membrane Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt am Main.

It was Michel’s preliminary work, done in the period from 1978 to 1982, that cleared the way for the three scientists’ joint research. They wanted to determine the three-dimensional structure of a four-protein complex (called a photosynthetic reaction centre) that is crucial to the process of photosynthesis in certain bacteria. Michel performed the hitherto impossible feat of crystallizing the membrane-bound protein complex to a pure crystalline form, thus making it possible to determine the protein’s structure atom-by-atom by means of X-ray diffraction techniques.