Stanford Moore

Stanford Moore graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt in 1935 and earned his doctorate in organic chemistry from Wisconsin three years later. He joined Rockefeller Institute immediately after and stayed for his entire career, aside from a stretch of government work during the war. In 1952 he became professor of biochemistry. With William H. Stein, he built the first automated amino acid analyzer in 1958, a tool that let researchers finally determine protein sequences at scale. A year later the two announced they had mapped the complete amino acid sequence of ribonuclease - the first enzyme ever fully sequenced. That work, and their insights into how chemical structure drives catalytic activity, earned Moore a share of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.