He’s still German. But the newly minted Nobel laureate in chemistry, Joachim Frank, spent most of his scientific career in the USA. Since 1997 he has also had their nationality. Frank belongs to the growing number of top researchers who did not leave Germany for political reasons for America as they did during the Nazi era. But simply because the USA offers better conditions. Other examples are the Physics Nobel Prize winners Wolfgang Ketterle (2001), Herbert Kroemer (2000) and Horst Störmer (1998) and the Medicine Prize winners Thomas Südhof (2013) and Günter Blobel (1999).
Frank was born in Siegen in 1940. At an early age he did chemical experiments under the veranda of his parents’ house, later he became an electronics hobbyist. “When I was twelve or 13 I bought parts to build a radio,” he recalled in an interview. “Later I took apart old radios and put them back together.”
Frank studied physics in Freiburg and Munich, where he also received his doctorate. Electron microscopy soon cast a spell over him. He was fascinated by the idea of “photographing” molecules with the help of electrons. She never let go of his whole research life.
A study as a door opener to the USA
After completing his doctorate, a scholarship enabled the young scientist to spend his first time in the USA at several top institutions such as Berkeley University and Cornell University. At Berkeley, Frank wrote a widely acclaimed study of modern methods of electron microscopy. It ultimately became his “ticket” to the USA.
When he returned to Germany, he initially found no return to work and went to the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where Francis Crick and James Watson “cracked” the structure of the DNA double helix in 1953. Here he got a job offer from the Wadsworth Center, a large government research laboratory in Albany, New York.
Frank moved to the Wadsworth Center in 1975, where he refined his method of discovering the spatial shape of molecules with the help of many individual electron microscope images. In 1986 he accepted a professorship at the University of Albany, and guest stays took him to the Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge (1987) and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg (2004).
In 2008 Frank moved to the New Yorker Columbia Universitywhere he is Professor of Biochemistry, Molecular Biophysics and Biological Sciences. In 2006 he was appointed a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Frank is married and has two children.
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