Nobel Laureate Scientist. He was an American scientist who received professional recognition as one of the three scientists receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1997. Besides him, this coveted award was given to Danish scientist Jens Skou and British scientist John E. Walker, with him and Walker each receiving a fourth of the Nobel monetary prize and Skou receiving the majority of half. According to the Nobel Prize committee, he and Walker received the award "for their elucidation of the enzymatic mechanism underlying the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)." He has the honor of being the first Utah-born Nobel Prize recipient. After graduating from high school as valedictorian and receiving a B.S. degree from Brigham Young University in 1938, he received his doctorate degree on a scholarship in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1943. Although he lived in a Mormon community and attended Brigham Young University, he was not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. During World War II, he was a war-related project researcher at Stanford University in California. In 1955 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for research with Nobel Prize in Medicine Hugo Theorell in Sweden. This followed in 1956, with him accepting a Hill Foundation Professorship and relocating to the medical campus of the University of Minnesota. Following these positions, he joined the University of California - Los Angeles in 1963. He served as a professor from 1963 to 1989 and director of the Molecular Biology Institute from 1965 to 1983 at UCLA before being named professor emeritus in 1990. In the early 1950s, he began his research on how cells form ATP, a process that occurs in animal cells in a structure called a mitochondrion. He continued his research on what is involved in ATP synthesis throughout his career. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Walker and Skou, who also did research on the formation of ATP. During his career, he wrote a number of scientific publications with his wife, who was a professional editor for UCLA. Besides the Nobel Prize, he also received many other honors and awards for his work. In 1938 he married Lyda Whicker and the couple had three children. Upon his death, he and his wife had been married for almost 80 years, making them the longest-married Nobel Prize couple.