Paul D. Boyer

Paul Delos Boyer (July 31, 1918 – June 2, 2018) was an American biochemist, analytical chemist, and a professor of chemistry at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research on the "enzymatic mechanism underlying the biosynthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)" (ATP synthase) with John E. Walker, making Boyer the first Utah-born Nobel laureate; the remainder of the Prize in that year was awarded to Danish chemist Jens Christian Skou for his discovery of the Na+/K+-ATPase.

[1] Boyer was born in Provo, Utah, and grew up in a nonpracticing Mormon family of Dutch, German, French, and English descent.

He began his independent research career at the University of Minnesota and introduced kinetic, isotopic, and chemical methods for investigating enzyme mechanisms.

Boyer died of respiratory failure on June 2, 2018, at the age of 99, less than two months shy of his 100th birthday at his Los Angeles home.