Chemistry: This Day in Science History - August 3 - Koichi Tanaka

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This Day in Science History - August 3 - Koichi Tanaka Aug 2nd 2011, 22:36 August 3rd is Koichi Tanaka's birthday. Tanaka is a Japanese engineer who was awarded part of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of soft laser desorption (SLD) mass spectroscopy. SLD uses lasers to ionize biological macromolecules such as proteins so they can be sorted by the spectrometer. When you blast proteins with lasers, the bonds are broken by the incident energy and the proteins are no longer useful. Tanaka discovered a method of suspending the proteins in a mixture of glycerol and superfine metal powder where the proteins would ionize without breaking any bonds. Find out what else occurred on this day in science history. Follow Chemistry on Facebook or Twitter.

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