His parents, who were Jewish, fled to England in 1929 anticipating the coming rule of the Nazi Party, and changed their name to Tanford.
[1] After graduating from Princeton, Tanford spent two years at Harvard University in the laboratory of E. J. Cohn and John Edsall, where he changed his research focus to protein biochemistry.
He moved to the Department of Physiology in 1980, where his research efforts were concentrated on the movement of ions across cell membranes together with his collaborators Dr. E. A. Johnson and Dr. Jacqueline Reynolds.
[1] In 1994 Tanford recalled, "I had been stimulated by Walter Kauzmann to move into protein chemistry and that made it logical that 'large molecules' should be my domain.
There were 2 reviewers and their criticism was scathing; I had got it all wrong, they said, and the book was declared effectively unpublishable...John Wiley & Sons reluctantly agreed to publish...the book was in fact a success..."[5] In 1973 Tanford published The Hydrophobic Effect, which covered proteins in all their various guises including those within cell membranes.
Tanford retired in 1988 but remained James B. Duke Professor Emeritus in the Department of Cell Biology until his death in 2009.
[1] On August 28, 2017, the Charles-Tanford-Proteinzentrum[17] was opened in Halle (Saale), city of his birth, by Prof. Dr. Johanna Wanka, Federal Minister of Science and Education.
[1] Throughout his life, Tanford was known for conversation, walking, wine, good food, travel, cricket, hiking, Switzerland, France, classical music, murder mysteries and birds.