Melvin Calvin

Melvin Ellis Calvin (April 8, 1911 to January 8, 1997) was an American biochemist born in St. Paul, Minnesota, who died in Berkeley, California. Working at the University of California, Berkeley with collaborators including Andrew Benson and James Bassham, he traced the biochemical pathway by which plants convert carbon dioxide and light energy into sugars during photosynthesis, a cycle of reactions now named the Calvin cycle in his honor. He won the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this research on carbon dioxide assimilation in plants, work that used radioactive carbon-14 tracing to map a process previously understood only in broad outline.