Curriculum Vitae

Educational background

• Honorary Doctor ( dr.med. h.c. ), University of Copenhagen, 1985
• DrMedSc ( dr.med. ), Aarhus University, 1954
• MD ( cand.med. ), University of Copenhagen, 1944
• Student, Haslev, 1937

Career

• Professor Emeritus (retired), 1988
• Professor, Department of Biophysics, Aarhus University, 1978–88
• Professor, Department of Physiology, Aarhus University, 1963–78
• Associate Professor, Department of Physiology, Aarhus University, 1954–63
• Doctor, Orthopaedic Hospital, Aarhus, 1954
• Assistant Professor, Department of Physiology, Aarhus University, 1947–54
• Clinical education and training, Hjørring Hospital and Orthopaedic Hospital, Aarhus, 1944–47

Awards

• The Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1997
• Eric K.Fernström Foundation’s Nordic Prize, 1985
• The Leo Award, 1954
• The Novo Award, 1965
• Consul Carlsen’s Award, 1973
• The Anders Retzius Medal, 1977

Memberships

• The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters
• The German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
• The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)
• The National Academy of Sciences, USA
• Honorary Member, the Japanese Biochemical Society
• Honorary Member, the American Physiological Society
• Academia Europaea

From North Jutland to Nobel

Studies and wartime

Jens Christian Skou was born in 1918 in Lemvig, a small coastal town in West Jutland, the eldest son of Magnus Martinus Skou, a timber and coal merchant, and his wife, Ane-Margrethe Skou.At that time, there was no upper secondary school in Lemvig and at fifteen, Skou therefore left for Haslev, on the island of Zealand, to take his leaving examination at a boarding school.He passed this examination in 1937, but returned home to Lemvig without deciding what he would use his certificate for. However, a tennis partner who was studying medicine convinced Skou that medical studies were a good choice – and he began two days later at the University of Copenhagen.

His time spent at university was influenced by both the German occupation and the Danish resistance.Skou’s experiences included the seizure of his birthplace, the execution of a fellow student, and a number of his lecturers going underground. Fearing the occupying power, Skou and the other medical students took the Hippocratic oath one by one at a secret location remote from the university in 1944.

His subsequent internship at a hospital in the North Jutland town of Hjørring was also affected by the war.The young Skou therefore quickly learned to perform minor operations so that the senior surgeon could leave the hospital and take part in gathering up weapons that had been dropped for the resistance movement.

From surgery to research

During the time spent in Hjørring, Skou met a student nurse called Ellen Margrethe Nielsen. They were married in 1948 and have two daughters.It was also in Hjørring that Skou became seriously interested in surgery, but progress to a senior position in this field required a doctorate. In 1947, Skou therefore took a job at the Orthopaedic Hospital in Aarhus, where he planned to write his doctoral dissertation on the mechanism behind the effect of local anaesthetics.However, he soon moved on when he was given a position at the Department of Physiology at Aarhus University, where he continued his studies.This job was not very well paid, so in addition to teaching and research work, Skou took night shifts for general practitioners in Aarhus.

At this time, with a history of only 19 years, Aarhus University was a very young institution and the research environment was correspondingly limited.Apart from Professor Søren L.Ørskov and Skou himself, the department consisted of two other young doctors.These four researchers jointly lectured the approximately140 medical students who were enrolled each year.Skou’s research therefore advanced slowly, but he nevertheless became caught up in his scientific work and summer 1953 was a turning point, when he had the opportunity to visit Professor Nachmansohn from Columbia University.Nachmansohn spent the whole summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole.This was a hub for neurophysiology because of the easy access to squid and thereby experiments with enormous nerves that could not be comparably studied in other animals.Skou’s period at Woods Hole was a significant experience for him. He suddenly found himself in an international research environment occupied by personalities whose names he otherwise only knew from textbooks and journals.

Numerous crabs

Jens Christian Skou completed his medical doctorate in 1954, and his dissertation was published in Danish under the title Lokalanæstetika (Local anaesthetics). At home in Aarhus, however, the newly graduated doctor did not have access to nerves from squid, and he therefore decided to use nerves from crabs instead.Crab nerves have the same properties as squid nerves because they also contain a protein substance with a high level of enzymatic activity. Unfortunately, however, they do not have the same size – so a considerable number of crabs had to be used.Skou made an agreement with a fisherman from Norsminde and, in the following years, a distinct odour permeated the Department of Physiology in Aarhus, where approximately20–25,000 crabs had to be boiled so the fresh, threadlike nerve fibres could be studied. These were the studies that led to Skou’s description of the sodium-potassium pump:an ion-transporting enzyme (Na,K-ATPase) that maintains the balance between sodium ions (Na ⁺ ) and potassium ions (K ⁺ ) in the cells.Skou did not initially use the term “pump” about the enzyme, but in 1957, he published his research in the Biochimica et Biophysica Acta journal under the heading: The influence of some cations on an adenosine triphosphatase from peripheral nerves (PDF).This was the article that 40 years later earned him the Nobel Prize.

A remarkable discovery

In 1963, Jens Christian Skou was appointed professor at the Department of Physiology.His identification of the sodium-potassium pump attracted attention to the department, and on an international scale, Aarhus University became one of the centres of expertise in transport across the cell membrane during the 1960s – a position the university still holds today. During Skou’s period as professor, the department underwent sweeping development, and in the course of a few years, the number of staff members increased from four to approximately 25. Skou himself continued to carry our research into the structure and function of the active transport system in the cells and established numerous international connections.

Skou retired in 1988, but when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1997, he still spent his days at his office at the university and still spent a lot of time researching.

More information

Read more details of Jens Christian Skou’s career here:

• Jens Christian Skou’s personal biography, which he wrote in connection with receiving the Nobel Prize.