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William Howard Stein
American biochemist (1911-1980) · United States · On the map · Scientists · Died at 68
He cracked the code of how enzymes work at the molecular level - mapping ribonuclease atom by atom and proving that a protein's shape dictates its chemical power.
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William Howard Stein was born June 25, 1911, and spent his career unraveling the mechanics inside living cells. Working with collaborators, he determined the complete sequence of ribonuclease, an enzyme that breaks down RNA, then traced how its three-dimensional structure enables its catalytic function. That work earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972. Along the way, Stein helped invent the automatic amino acid analyzer, a machine that automated the tedious process of identifying amino acids in proteins and effectively birthed modern chromatography techniques - liquid, gas, the whole lineage. He died February 2, 1980, having shown that you could read a protein like a sentence and understand why it does what it does.
