Oleg Ptitsyn was born in Leningrad in 1929, and attended the university there as a student of physics. He had a doctorate by the age of 25, and he became a prominent figure in the field of polymer theory through his work at the Institute of High Molecular Weight Compounds of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Leningrad. But by the 1960s he had become fascinated by the ubiquitous polymers of the natural world, the proteins. As he later stated, “If a physicist wants to be useful in molecular biology he basically has the choice between establishing the structure of a biological macromolecule or trying to understand the physical basis of a biological process” (Trends Biochem. Sci. 20, 376-379; 1995). He had chosen the second way, adding “the main difficulty is finding a process that, while being biologically important, does not involve biochemical reactions, but rather is based purely on physical laws”. He concluded that protein folding was the problem waiting to be solved. Nearly 40 years ago this was radical stuff indeed.
To begin research in this new area, Ptitsyn and others founded the Institute of Protein Research in the small scientific settlement of Pushchino, some 70 miles from Moscow. This institute became a world-famous centre for interdisciplinary research. And as a result of the general dispersal of Russian scientists over the past few years, its members have had an especially wide influence.
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