Wendell Meredith Stanley
American biochemist and virologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1946) · United States · Scientists · Lived 1904 to 1971 · aged 66
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Something wrong?He crystallized a virus. In 1935, when life's boundary seemed firmly drawn, Stanley pulled tobacco mosaic virus out of infected plant juice as needle-shaped crystals - something you could see, weigh, bottle. The line between living and not-living blurred in his hands.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
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Awards
About this person
Wendell Meredith Stanley was born August 16, 1904, an American who would stake his career on a disease in tobacco plants. His early work ranged across lepracidal compounds and sterol chemistry, but the mosaic virus became his obsession. He isolated a nucleoprotein from infected tobacco that retained the virus's activity - proof that something so small and strange could be handled like any other molecule. The crystallization earned him the Nobel Prize and reframed virology as chemistry. He died June 15, 1971, having turned the invisible into something you could hold in a test tube.
Scientists from the United States 6
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