Boyer was born in
Provo, Utah, and grew up in a nonpracticing Mormon family of Dutch, German, French, and English descent. He attended
Provo High School, where he was active in
student government and the debating team.[2] He was also his high schools valedictorian and played intramural basketball in high school and college. He received a
B.S. in
chemistry from
Brigham Young University in 1939 and obtained a Wisconsin Alumni Research
FoundationScholarship for graduate studies. Five days before leaving for
Wisconsin, Paul married Lyda Whicker in 1939, and they remained married for nearly eighty years until his death in 2018, making him the longest-married Nobel laureate.[3] The Boyers had three children.
Since 1963, he had been a professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at
University of California, Los Angeles. In 1965, he became the founding director of the
Molecular Biology Institute and spearheaded the construction of the building and the organization of an interdepartmental Ph.D. program. This institutional service did not diminish the creativity and originality of his research program, which led to three postulates for the binding mechanism for
ATP synthesis—that energy input was not used primarily to form ATP but to promote the binding of
phosphate and mostly the release of tightly bound ATP; that three identical catalytic sites went through compulsory, sequential binding changes; and that the binding changes of the catalytic subunits, circularly arranged on the periphery of the enzyme, were driven by the rotation of a smaller internal
subunit.
Paul Boyer was
editor or associate editor of the Annual Review of Biochemistry from 1963 to 1989. He was editor of the classic series, "The Enzymes".[2] When he worked on the series "The Enzymes", he was helped by his wife Lyda as she was a professional editor at UCLA. In 1981, he was faculty research lecturer at UCLA. In that same year, he was awarded the prestigious
Tolman Medal by the Southern California Section of the
American Chemical Society.
Boyer, Paul D (October 18, 2002), "A research journey with ATP synthase", Journal of Biological Chemistry, 277 (42): 39045–61,
doi:10.1074/jbc.X200001200,
PMID12181328
Allchin, Douglas (2002), "To err and win a nobel prize: Paul Boyer, ATP synthase and the emergence of bioenergetics", Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 149–72,
doi:
10.1023/A:1014583721788,
PMID12068893,
S2CID18445197
Lores Arnaiz, G R (1998), "[Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1997: Jean Skou, Paul Boyer and John Walker: the motor of life]", Medicina (B Aires), vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 107–9,
PMID9674216
^"1981 Paul D. Boyer, UCLA". Southern California Section of the American Chemical Society. Archived from
the original on April 4, 2016. Retrieved March 23, 2017.