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George Barany | |
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| Born | February 19, 1955 Budapest, Hungary |
| Education | Rockefeller University (Ph.D., 1977; Postdoctoral Fellow) |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Chemistry |
| Workplaces | University of Minnesota |
| Robert Bruce Merrifield | |
George Barany (born February 19, 1955) is an American chemist whose research has focused on peptide chemistry and the chemistry of organosulfur compounds. As of 2026, he is Distinguished McKnight University Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota.
Barany was born in Hungary in 1955 and moved to the United States in 1960. Barany completed his doctorate in 1977 at Rockefeller University working with R. Bruce Merrifield and stayed there as a postdoctoral researcher until 1980. He joined the University of Minnesota as an Assistant Professor in 1981. He was named a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in 1997 and became Distinguished McKnight University Professor Emeritus in 2024.
Barany shared an office in Merrifield's laboratory with Svetlana Mojsov for nearly ten years and has been her friend and colleague for more than fifty years. Barany championed Mojsov's role in the discovery of GLP-1, helping to correct the record of her GLP-1 research through a peer-reviewed account and participation in a podcast highlighting her struggles for proper recognition.
The now widely used term "orthogonal" was first introduced into the chemical vocabulary in 1977 by George Barany and R. Bruce Merrifield in a paper describing a new amino protecting group (Dts), with "orthogonal" being defined as “a set of completely independent classes of protecting groups… [where]… each class of groups can be removed in any order and in the presence of all other classes”. In 2003 Carolyn R. Bertozzi coined the termed bioorthogonal to refer to chemical reactions that can occur within living systems without interfering with native biochemical processes.
Barany's research focuses on peptide synthesis using solid-phase synthesis methods, protecting groups for organic functional groups, the chemistry of thiols, disulfides, and polysulfides, as well as the biochemistry of garlic. Barany and his team developed a series of reagents and methods that have been used in combinatorial chemistry and peptide synthesis, e.g., PAL, XAL, BAL Linkers, PEG-PS, and CLEAR supports.