Previous winners include Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, Jonas Salk, and Nobelists Marie Curie, John Bardeen, Baruch Blumberg and Kary Mullis. The award, which is given by the board of directors of City Trusts in Philadelphia, recognizes Bax's contributions to structural biology. Whereas MRI obtains its image contrast primarily from water hydrogens and the changes in the amount of water at various positions in the human body, NMR derives its molecular image differently. NMR investigators dissolve their sample in a liquid, usually water, and then put this into a super-strong magnetic field. The samples are showered with radio waves that are absorbed and emitted in patterns.
Typical proteins emit thousands of signals, one for every hydrogen atom in the molecule.
The intensity and interrelationships of the signals contain information about the distances among the various hydrogens in the molecule, provided they are close. From that information scientists reconstruct the protein's shape. The idea is straightforward, but, in practice, identification of the individual signals is so complex that only the smallest proteins can be studied this way. Remarkably, Bax showed that these additional signals allow for new experiments that make the analysis of all the signals much simpler. The improvement can be compared to the difference between putting together a jigsaw puzzle relying just on the shape of the pieces and putting it together using the pieces' shapes and colors.