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In a career spent almost entirely at Stanford University School of Medicine, Robert “Buzz” Baldwin spearheaded work into the early life of proteins, helping to usher the biological community into the molecular era. The biochemist died last month (March 6) due to pulmonary failure at the age of 93.
“Buzz Baldwin was an outstanding scientist renowned for deep, penetrating thought,” Lloyd Minor, dean of Stanford Medicine, says in a university obituary. “His discoveries laid the groundwork for our understanding of how a newborn protein accurately folds up into its adult shape within milliseconds—an insight that’s informed molecular biology ever since.”
Baldwin earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in 1950 and his PhD in biochemistry at the University of Oxford four years later. After a brief stint at the University of Wisconsin first as a postdoc in physical chemistry and then ...
