Walker, John

John Walker, in full Sir John Ernest Walker, (born January 7, 1941, Halifax, Yorkshire, England), British chemist who was corecipient, with Paul D. Boyer, of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1997 for their explanation of the enzymatic process that creates adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Walker and Boyer’s findings offer insight into the way life-forms produce energy. (Danish chemist Jens C. Skou also shared the award for separate research on the molecule.)

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, in 1964, Walker studied in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford and received a doctorate in 1969. From 1969 to 1971 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin in the United States, and from 1971 to 1974 he was a fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. His award-winning work was conducted at the University of Cambridge in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which he joined in 1974 at the urging of biochemist Frederick Sanger.

Walker began his work at Cambridge by studying the proteins encoded by DNA that are found in certain bacteriophages and in mitochondria, the energy-producing organelles of animal cells. In the late 1970s he began studying ATP synthase, an enzyme found on the inner membrane of the mitochondrion that aids in the synthesis of ATP, the carrier of chemical energy. Focusing on the chemical and structural composition of the enzyme, he determined the sequence of amino acids that make up the synthase’s protein units. By 1994, working with X-ray crystallographers, Walker clarified the three-dimensional structure of the enzyme, which consists of one protein group (the F₀ portion) embedded in the inner membrane and connected by a sort of protein stalk or shaft to another protein group (the F₁ portion) located in the matrix of the organelle. The passage of hydrogen ions through the membrane causes the F₀ portion and the stalk to rotate, and this rotation changes the configuration of the proteins in the F₁ portion. Walker’s results supported Boyer’s “binding change mechanism,” which proposed that the enzyme functions by changing the position of its protein groups in such a way as to change their chemical affinity for ATP and its precursor molecules.

In 1998 Walker became director of the MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit, also at Cambridge. Largely on the strength of his own work, this unit in 2009 became the Mitochondrial Biology Unit, focusing on the mechanisms of energy conversion in the mitochondrion and on the role of that organelle in human health and disease. Walker directed one group that studied ATP synthase and another that studied the composition and function of all the proteins found in the mitochondrion. In 2013 he stepped down as director of the Mitochondrial Biology Unit.

Walker received many honours in addition to the Nobel for his work. In 1999 he was knighted. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1995 and was awarded the Society’s highest honour, the Copley Medal, in 2012.