Charles Tanford, a James B. Duke Professor Emeritus who was one of the pre-eminent protein chemists of his generation, died in York, England, on October 1, 2009, at the age of 87.
He was born in Halle, Germany, in 1921 to Maximilian and Charlotte Tannenbaum. His parents, who were Jewish, fled to England in 1929 as the Nazis were rising to power and changed their name to Tanford. Many of his relatives stayed behind in Germany and perished in the Holocaust.
At the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, Charles was sent to New York to live with relatives. There he earned a B.A. from NYU in 1943, worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, and then earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton in 1947.
He did post-graduate work in protein chemistry at Harvard in the lab of Edwin Cohn and John Edsall. He joined the faculty at the University of Iowa in 1950, and then moved to Duke University in 1960 where he taught for almost 30 years. He was named a James B. Duke distinguished professor in 1970.
While at Harvard, he married Lucia L. Brown. They had three children, Vicki, Alex and Sarah. They divorced in 1968, and soon thereafter Charles began a professional and personal relationship with Jacqueline A. Reynolds, a fellow biochemist, that would last until his death.
Tanford's scientific research focused on the physical chemistry of protein molecules and he is widely known for his two ground-breaking textbooks: The Physical Chemistry of Macromolecules (1961) which dealt with water-soluble proteins, and The Hydrophobic Effect (1973) which covered proteins in cell membranes.
In recognition of his scientific contributions, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. During his career, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Alexander von Humboldt Prize, the Merck Award for Molecular Biology, and the distinguished Eastman Professorship at Oxford. He retired in 1988 and moved with Jacqueline Reynolds to Easingwold, a remote Georgian market town in North Yorkshire.
Here he began a second career writing about the history of science primarily for lay readers. He published Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves: An Informal History of Pouring Oil on Water with Reflections on the Ups and Downs of Scientific Life in General. He and Dr. Reynolds published The Scientific Traveler: A Guide to the People, Places and Institutions of Europe, and its companion volume A Travel Guide to Scientific Sites of the British Isles. They were also frequent contributors to the British scientific magazine Nature.
Throughout his life, Tanford loved conversation, wine, good food, travel, hiking, Switzerland, classical music, murder mysteries and birds. He is survived by his partner of 40 years, Dr. Jacqueline A. Reynolds; three children , Vicki Desy of Tucson, Ariz., Sarah Tanford of Las Vegas, Nev., and Alex Tanford of Bloomington, Ind.; three "adopted" children, Ben Reynolds of Baltimore, Md., Deborah Jackson of Chapel Hill, and Rebecca Newton of Durham; two grandchildren, Philippa and James Tanford; and his sister Gabrielle Tanford of Oaxaca, Mexico. He will be interred with his father at Golders Green in London.