Up for auction a RARE! "The Circe Effect" William Jencks Hand Signed First Day C0ver Dated 1963. This auction includes a second signed transmittal letter.  

ES-6460E

William

Platt Jencks (August 15, 1927

– January 3, 2007) was an American biochemist. He was noted particularly for his work on enzymes,

using concepts drawn from organic chemistry to understand their mechanisms. Jencks

graduated from Harvard College in 1947 with a degree in English, and

earned a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard University in

1951. He interned at the Peter Bent Brigham hospital.

Jencks conducted his first postdoctoral research for

two years with Fritz Lipmann at Harvard Medical School. Jencks was drafted into the Army Medical Corps

and was assigned to the Army Medical Service Graduate School at Walter Reed

Medical Center in Washington, DC. He worked with E. L. Durrum and served as the

chair of the department of pharmacology. In 1956–1957, he did a second Public Health Service postdoc with R. B. Woodward of the Harvard University Department

of Chemistry. In 1957, he moved to the new graduate program in biochemistry

at Brandeis University. He

became professor emeritus in 1996. Much of his career focused on reaction

mechanisms used by enzyme catalysts. He was particularly well known for studies of the

reaction of nucleophiles with carbon.

He proposed that enzymes use ground state destabilization, termed the Circe Effect, to increase the reactivity of their bound

substrates. Many of these research interests were explored in his

influential text Catalysis in Chemistry and

Enzymology. Jencks published close to 400 scientific papers during his

career. Jencks was a co-founder of the biannual Winter Enzyme Mechanisms

Conference. He was memorialized at the 20th Enzyme Mechanisms Meeting in St. Pete Beach, Florida,

several days after his death.