John Howard Northrop
American biochemist (1891-1987) · United States · On the map · Scientists · Died at 95
He crystallized enzymes - turned invisible biochemical machinery into something you could hold in your hand and see under a microscope - and shared a Nobel for proving that proteins could be both pure substance and living catalyst.
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About this person
John Howard Northrop was born July 5, 1891, into a century that didn't yet know what enzymes were made of. Working as a biochemist, he developed methods to isolate and crystallize enzymes, dragging them out of solution and into the realm of measurable, reproducible chemistry. That work, alongside James Batcheller Sumner and Wendell Meredith Stanley's parallel efforts with proteins and viruses, earned him the 1946 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He spent his career at University of California, Berkeley, rising to Professor of Bacteriology and Medical Physics, Emeritus. He died May 27, 1987, nearly a century after the questions he answered were first posed.
