Born inHartford, Connecticut,[2] Rich was the founder ofAlkermes and was a director beginning in 1987. Rich was co-chairman of the board of directors ofRepligen, a biopharmaceutical company. He also served on the editorial board ofGenomics and theJournal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics.
Rich spent his early life in Springfield, Massachusetts.[3] He grew up in a working-class family and worked in the U.S. Armory while he was in high school. From 1943 to 1946, Rich was in theU.S. Navy.[4]
He obtained a bachelor's in biochemical sciences from Harvard University in 1947 and a medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1949.[4] Rich died on 27 April 2015, aged 90.[5]
At Harvard, Rich studied withJohn Edsall, who inspired him to pursue an academic career.[3] In 1949, he moved to theCalifornia Institute of Technology to perform postdoctoral research withLinus Pauling.[4] He metJames Watson during his time in Pauling's lab.[6][importance?] He stayed in Pauling's group until 1954. Rich worked as a section chief in physical chemistry at theNational Institutes of Health from 1954 to 1958.[3][4] He spent a sabbatical at theCavendish Laboratory in Cambridge (1955–1956), where he worked withFrancis Crick and solved the structure ofcollagen.[7] He became a professor atMIT in 1958. He worked diligently at MIT until his death in 2015.[4] He still went into lab until two months before his death.[4]
His work played a pivotal role in the discovery of nucleic acid hybridization.[3][8]
In 1955, Rich and Crick solved the structure of collagen.[7]
In 1963, Rich discoveredpolysomes: clusters ofribosomes which read one strand ofmRNA simultaneously.[9]
From 1969 to 1980, he was a biology investigator looking for life on mars with NASA's Viking Mission to Mars.[10]
In 1973, Rich's lab determined the structure of tRNA.[11]
In 1979, Rich and co-workers at MIT grew acrystal ofZ-DNA.[12] After 26 years of attempts, Richet al. finally crystallised the junction box of B- and Z-DNA. Their results were published in an October 2005Nature journal.[13] Whenever Z-DNA forms, there must be two junction boxes that allow the flip back to the canonicalB-form of DNA.
2008 Welch Award in Chemistry: "For outstanding contributions to the understanding of the chemical and biochemical mechanisms in maintaining a living cell".[14]
^Wang AH, Quigley GJ, Kolpak FJ, Crawford JL, van Boom JH, Van der Marel G, Rich A (1979). "Molecular structure of a left-handed double helical DNA fragment at atomic resolution".Nature.282 (5740):680–686.Bibcode:1979Natur.282..680W.doi:10.1038/282680a0.PMID514347.S2CID4337955.
Schwartz T, Rould MA, Lowenhaupt K, Herbert A, Rich A (1999). "Crystal structure of the Za domain of the human editing enzyme ADAR1 bound to left-handed Z-DNA".Science.284 (5421):1841–1845.doi:10.1126/science.284.5421.1841.PMID10364558.
