[1] Fankuchen was born in Brooklyn in a family of modest means and went to Cooper Union where he received a BS in 1926.
He then went to Manchester University on a post-doctoral fellowship from the Schweinburg Foundation and worked with Sir Lawrence Bragg (1933–34) followed by two years at Birkbeck College with J.D.
[3] He then returned to the United States and worked on protein chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He then joined the Anderson Institute for Biological Research, Red Wing, Minnesota serving as an assistant director (1941–42).
His courses produced so-called "Fan's two-week wonders" who learned crystallography and knew what could be done with it.