It was announced, on 15 October 1997, that Dr John Walker of the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and a user of the Protein Crystallography facility at Daresbury, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his studies of energy generation in cells.

He shared the prize with two others: Dr Paul Boyer of the University of California at Los Angeles, and Dr Jens Skou of Aarhus University, Denmark, both of whom have worked on the same problem. Dr Skou wins half the $1 million (£600,000) prize, and Drs Walker and Boyer a quarter each.

Dr Walker won his share of the prize for studies of the enzyme F1 ATP Synthase, or F1 Atpase, which produces adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP is the form in which energy is stored in special cell compartments called mitochondria. The energy is generated by pumping protons across the membrane around any mitochondrion. Dr Walker has spent 15 years studying this "transmembrane pump" using X-ray crystallography.

F1 Atpase was extracted from the muscle of beef heart, obtained from a Northampton slaughterhouse and homogenised at his Cambridge Laboratory. The constituent proteins were then separated out, and the Atpase enzyme was purified. It was crystallised and studied using the X-ray diffraction system on Station 9.6 of the SRS, as described in the SRS Annual Report 1994-95. The report may be accessed on the internet, via URL: http://sasws1.dl.ac.uk/pr/AN_REPORT/REP94_95/Ch2/Microbiology.html