Hans Lineweaver
Hans Lineweaver (December 25, 1907 – June 10, 2009) was an American physical chemist, who reinvented the Lineweaver–Burk plot. The paper containing the equation, also known as the Double Reciprocal Plot, was co-authored by Dr. Dean Burk, and was entitled "The Determination of Enzyme Dissociation Constants (1934)". It remains the most frequently cited paper to appear in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Linearizations of the Henry-Michaelis-Menten law of enzyme kinetics were important in the era before general availability of computers to determine the parameters Vmax and Km from experimental data, even though there are significant statistical problems involved in this procedure. These are still used for data presentation. All three possible methods of linearization (now called Lineweaver-Burk, Eadie-Hofstee and Hanes plots, respectively) were originally proposed by Woolf, who was unable to formally publish them due to injuries received in a car accident. However, he had discussed them with his close friend and fellow member of the British Communist Party, J. B. S. Haldane, who referred to them in his seminal book on enzyme kinetics. However, the linearizations were largely ignored until they were re-invented by the authors whose name they now bear.
Lineweaver developed the Lineweaver–Burk equation in 1934 while still a graduate student, working as a laboratory assistant under Burk at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. He is an internationally recognized authority on food technology as it is applied to the processing, preservation and safety of poultry and eggs.
Lineweaver received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Chemistry from George Washington University in 1930, and continued on to receive his Masters of Arts degree there in 1933. He obtained his PhD in Physical Chemistry from Johns Hopkins University in 1936. In 1929, a year before graduating, he was appointed a Junior Scientific Aid to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and worked as a chemist in the fertilizer section of the Bureau of Chemistry and Soils. In 1930, Lineweaver was transferred to the Food Research Division of the USDA as an Associate Chemist pursuing enzyme research. In 1939, he was transferred to the newly built Western Regional Research Laboratory of the USDA in Albany, California as Senior Biochemist and head of the enzyme section in the biochemical division. During and after World War II, Dr. Lineweaver collaborated with the Quartermasters Corps of the Armed Services in enzyme work related to poultry and powdered egg flavor and processing. In 1948, he was appointed Chief of the WRRL Poultry Laboratory in 1949, a position he held until his retirement in 1973, after 44 years of continuous service for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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