Walker, Sir John Ernest, 1941–, English biochemist, Ph.D. Oxford, 1969. He has been a researcher at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge since 1974. In 1997 Walker was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Paul Boyer and Jens Skou. Boyer and Walker did pioneering work on the enzyme that participates in the formation of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a molecule that transports energy in cells. Walker determined the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein units of ATP and clarified the enzyme's three-dimensional structure. He was knighted in 1999.
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