The Nobel Tradition at Berkeley
Wendell M. Stanley
Chemistry, 1946
By Russell Schoch
1984
The son of a small-town Indiana newspaper publisher, Wendell
Stanley was born in Ridgeville, Indiana on August 16, 1904. He went to Earlham
College in Richmond, Indiana, where he was a good student but a better football
player (one season, he made the All-Indiana college team along with Notre Dame's
fabled Four Horsemen). He even toyed with the idea of becoming a football coach.
Instead, a friendship with a University of Illinois chemistry professor resulted
in his enrolling there in graduate school. His time at Illinois included both a
term on probation for low grades and a Ph.D. with the best scholastic record any
graduate student in chemistry had ever complied there.
After a post-doctoral fellowship in Europe, Stanley returned to
the United States and settled in at the Rockefeller Institute, first in New York
City and then in Princeton, to build a research career.
His research problem was the virus, the existence of which had
been determined in 1892. Stanley's great achievement came in 1935, after he had
ground up nearly a ton of infected tobacco plants and laboriously purified the
extracted juices. What he obtained was about a tablespoon of white powdery
substance --- a sample of crystallized tobacco mosaic virus, marking the first
time that a virus had been isolated and crystallized. This discovery helped pave
the way for a deeper look into the nature of life and of man, was instrumental
in the conquest of such diseases as polio, and helpful to unravel the chemical
mysteries of heredity.
During World War II, Stanley and his colleagues took time out to
develop the influenza virus vaccine, used with great success by the Army and
later produced commercially for the general public.
In 1946, Stanley received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along
with John Howard Northrop and J. B. Summer. Stanley came to the Berkeley campus
in 1947 to head the Department of Biochemistry and to establish a new Virus
Laboratory. He said, upon his arrival at the University, that he wanted to
"build an institution comparable in its field to that of Professor Ernest
O. Lawrence in the Radiation Laboratory." Stanley built his lab and went on
to gather an outstanding team of scientists, to launch a series of basic
research achievements, and to oversee the training of many of the world's most
promising scientists.
An international leader and spokesman for science, Stanley was
at ease with people from all walks of life. Always willing to explain and
interpret, he was the first member of the University's virology faculty to
appear on a public television series on the virus, in 1961.
In 1970, he was named president of the Tenth International
Cancer Congress, the first time a non-medical doctor had held that important
post. He died in Spain, in June 1971, after he had attended another major
meeting on viruses and cancer. A colleague said of Wendell M. Stanley, shortly
before his death: "Young and old alike have found it difficult to resist
his confident assurance that the puzzles of nature can be solved to the benefit
of mankind by imaginative and diligent effort."
----------
Schoch, Russell. "Wendell M. Stanley:
Chemistry, 1946." The Nobel Tradition in Berkeley:
University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley
Development Office: UC Press,
1984, p. 8.
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