Gopinath Kartha

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Gopinath Kartha (1927-1984) was a prominent crystallographer of Indian origin. He is notably known for the determination of the molecular structure of the enzyme ribonuclease in 1967. This was the first protein structure elucidated and published in the United States.

Gopinath Kartha obtained his Ph.D. in Physics in 1953 from University of Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. As a graduate student, he worked on the triple-helix structure of the collagen molecule together with G.N. Ramachandran. He continued the post-doctoral work ostdoctoral positions there, at the Cavendish Laboratory and at the National Research Council of Canada. In 1959, he moved to the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York where he stayed till the end of his life, raising four sons.

The collagen structure proposed by Ramachandran and Kartha was disputed by Francis Crick initially and in fact, their paper to the London-based Nature magazine was not published for five months while Crick's proposal for the collagen structure was published within a month of submission. However, their proposed structure was accepted subsequently.