Theodor Svedberg
Swedish chemist (1884-1971) · Sweden · Scientists · Died at 86
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Something wrong?He spun matter faster than it had ever been spun before, and in doing so made the invisible weights of proteins visible - work that earned a Swedish chemist the 1926 Nobel Prize and changed how science measures the molecular world.
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Theodor Svedberg arrived at Uppsala University in the mid-1900s as a docent, studying colloids and proteins with a machine of his own crucial development: the ultracentrifuge. By 1912 he'd become the university's head of physical chemistry, a position he held through the late 1940s while his centrifuge work redrew the boundaries of what could be measured at molecular scale. The Nobel came in 1926; external recognition followed with election to the Royal Society in 1944 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1945. He left Uppsala in 1949 to direct the Gustaf Werner Institute, remaining there until 1967 - nearly two decades past the prize, still working.
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