Professor Jens Christian Skou was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1997 for his description of the sodium–potassium pump, which controls the entire musculoskeletal system in the human body.

There is a microscopic pump in every cell in the body. In spite of its inferior size, this pump is very important for human life because it acts as a generator that provides the cells with electricity and thereby regulates the entire musculoskeletal system and the nervous system. The vital pump operates by transporting ions – electrically charged atoms – across the cell membrane. When ions are transported in and out of the cell, a weak electrical potential is created, which makes it possible to form nerve impulses in human muscles and the central nervous system. But how does this ion transport take place? Professor Jens C. Skou described this in 1957 – and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1997 for his description.

Crabs and enzymes
As part of his experiment to find out how the ion pump worked, Professor Skou studied the particularly large nerve cells in the legs of crabs. Here he discovered an enzyme – sodium-potassium-ATPase – that acts as an ion pump. Where researchers had previously believed that enzymes only acted as catalysts for chemical processes, Professor Skou showed that the enzyme actively transported ions across the cell membrane and into the cell itself. The enzyme acted as a kind of pump – hence the subsequent name “the sodium–potassium pump”.

Leading research
Professor Skou got his ion pump research to flourish at Aarhus University, and the PUMPKIN basic research centre is currently one of the absolute leaders in this field of research. In 2007, Skou’s heirs managed to clear the front page and most of the contents of an edition of the journal Nature with their proof of what ion pumps look like and how they act.