Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1953 and to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1962. Buchanan became the first John and Dorothy Wilson Professor in 1966 and retained the title till he retired in 1988. In 2006, MIT endowed an annual lectureship in his name. Research Buchanan's graduate research formed one of the earliest uses of radiolabeling for studying metabolism. He is best known for his research on the biosynthesis of purines. Often working in parallel with G. Robert Greenberg, Buchanan's research group made so much progress on this topic that they laid out their findings in a series of over 20 papers published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Buchanan and Greenberg's work together provided an understanding of the pathway through which purine bases could be converted to nucleotides. Personal life Buchanan met his wife Elsa during a visit to Stockholm to work with Hugo Theorell. The two were married for 57 years and had four children. Buchanan died in 2007 at age 89. References External links National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir 1917 births 2007 deaths People from Pulaski County, Indiana DePauw University alumni University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts alumni Harvard Medical School alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences American biochemists