John Fenn

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 bi…