John Fenn
American analytical chemist (1917-2010) · United States · On the map · Scientists · Died at 93
He won a Nobel Prize for inventing a way to weigh molecules that were previously too big to measure, then lost a lawsuit to his own university over whether he'd been honest about how useful it would be.
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A typical day, 30 days to 15 September 2026
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About this person
John Bennett Fenn was born in New York City in 1917 and moved to Kentucky during the Great Depression. After undergraduate work at Berea College and a PhD from Yale, he spent years in industry at Monsanto and private labs, then early academic work on jet propulsion and molecular beams. His late-career breakthrough was electrospray ionization - a technique that made mass spectrometry work for large molecules and became routine in labs worldwide. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Koichi Tanaka for that work, the other half going to Kurt Wüthrich. The recognition came with a bitter coda: Yale sued him for misleading the university about the technology's potential, and won $500,000 in legal fees and $545,000 in damages. The verdict satisfied the institution but left some affiliates uneasy about how a Nobel laureate with deep roots there had been treated. He published over 100 papers and a book before his death in 2010.
