birth_place nationality field birth_date known_for prizes image article_title name
lemvig , denmark danish biochemistry 8 october 1918 na + , k + - atpase 1997 , nobel prize in chemistry skou2008.jpg jens christian skou
 jens christian skou
jens christian skou

jens christian skou -lrb- ; born october 8 , 1918 -rrb- is a danish chemist and nobel laureate .
skou was born in lemvig , denmark to a wealthy family .
his father magnus martinus skou was a timber and coal merchant .
his mother ane-margrethe skou took over the company after the death of his father .
at the age of 15 skou entered a boarding school in haslev , zealand .
he graduated in medicine from the university of copenhagen in 1944 and received his doctorate in 1954 .
he began working at the university of aarhus in 1947 and was appointed professor of biophysics in 1977 .
he retired from the university of aarhus in 1988 , but he has kept his offices at the institute .
in 1997 he received the nobel prize in chemistry -lrb- together with paul d. boyer and john e. walker -rrb- for his discovery of na + , k + - atpase -lsb- http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/1997/index.html] .
skou had taken a few years away from his clinical training in the early 1950s to study the action of local anaesthetics .
he had discovered that a substance 's anaesthetic action was related to its ability to dissolve in a layer of the lipid part of the plasma membrane , the anaesthetic molecules affected the opening of sodium channels which he assumed to be protein .
this , he argued , would affect the movement of sodium ions and make nerve cells inexcitable , thus causing anaesthesia .
skou thought that other types of membrane protein might also be affected by local anaesthetics dissolving in the lipid part of the membrane .
he therefore had the idea of looking at an enzyme which was embedded in the membrane and finding out if its properties were affected by local anaesthetics .
he looked at atpase in crab nerves .
the enzyme was there , but unfortunately its activity was very variable and he needed a highly active enzyme for his studies .
eventually he managed to discover that atpase was most active when exposed to the right combination of sodium , potassium and magnesium ions .
only then did he realise that this enzyme might have something to do with the active movement of sodium and potassium across the plasma membrane .
this idea had been postulated many years before , however , the mechanism was quite unknown .
skou published his findings .
however , in his paper he was wary of identifying the enzyme with the active ion movement , so he left out the term `` sodium-potassium pump '' from the title of his paper .
indeed , he seems only gradually to have realised the importance of his discovery , and he continued his studies on local anaesthetics .
in 1958 skou went to a conference in vienna to describe his work on cholinesterase .
there he met robert post -lrb- born 1920 -lsb- http://www.jbc.org/content/281/2/e2.full] -rrb- , who had been studying the pumping of sodium and potassium in red blood cells .
post had recently discovered that three sodium ions were pumped out of the cell for every two potassium ions pumped in , and in his research he had made use of a substance called ouabain which had recently been shown to inhibit the pump .
post had not read skou 's paper , but he was excited when skou told him about his work with atpase .
post asked whether the enzyme was inhibited by ouabain .
at this stage skou was unaware that ouabain inhibited the pump , but he immediately telephoned to his lab and arranged for the experiment to be done .
ouabain did indeed inhibit the enzyme , thus establishing a link between the enzyme and the sodium-potassium pump .
