Wendell Stanley

Wendell Stanley was an American biochemist who in 1935, working at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, purified tobacco mosaic virus into a crystalline form, one of the most surprising results in biology of the twentieth century because it showed a virus behaving as a definable chemical substance rather than a vague infectious fluid. His later work established that the crystals were made of protein and ribonucleic acid, revealing that a virus has properties of both living and nonliving matter. The discovery shared the 1946 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Howard Northrop and James B. Sumner and helped found the molecular study of viruses. Born in Ridgeville, Indiana, in 1904, Stanley worked at Rockefeller from 1931 to 1948 before becoming professor of biochemistry and director of the Virus Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. He died in 1971.