Melvin Calvin was
born in St. Paul, Minnesota on April 8, 1911. He received his
undergraduate degree from the Michigan College if Mining and
Technology, and his Ph.D. degree in chemistry from the
University of Minnesota in 1935. He spent two years as a
postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manchester, in England,
before joining the Department of Chemistry at Berkeley in 1937.
Calvin was thus
one of the early members of Berkeley's Rad Lab" group, where
ideas were generated from a mixture of sciences and where
discoveries came rapidly in the years before and after the war.
In 1945, Calvin was placed in charge of a new research group,
which featured a unique collaboration between chemists,
physicists, biologists, and others. "When they removed the
37-inch cyclotron from the old Radiation Laboratory," Calvin has
recalled, "it left a huge, empty room. Ernest Lawrence gave it
to us, and there we were: the laboratory without walls." Nowhere
has the famed interdisciplinary nature of the Lawrence Berkeley
Laboratory been more clearly exemplified than in Calvin's Labs.
In 1946,
sufficient quantities of radioactive carbon 14, discovered in
the Berkeley cyclotron in 1940, became available for research.
Among Calvin's discoveries is the use of carbon-14 isotope as a
"tracer" in biological studies. With the analytic tools he and
his group developed, Calvin traced the carbon cycle in
photosynthesis and thus revealed a key link in the process by
which plants use sunlight energy to convert atmospheric carbon
dioxide to carbohydrates. For this long and complex task, Calvin
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1961.
In the early
1960s, Calvin founded and assumed the directorship of the new
Laboratory of Chemistry Biodynamics on campus, a round,
three-story structure which in design allows the function Calvin
continued to favor: a laboratory without walls. Under Calvin's
leadership, hundreds of Ph.D.-level scientists from more than 20
countries have worked in the Laboratory in projects ranging from
solar energy and brain chemistry to cancer research and
inquiries into the origin of life.
More recently,
Calvin's own research has turned to the use of the principles of
photosynthesis as a renewable resource of energy. "If you know
how to make a chemical or electrical energy out of solar energy
the way plants do it --- without going through a heat engine ---
that is really quite a trick," he has said. "And I'm sure we can
do it, It's just a question of how long it will take to solve
the technical questions."
A consultant to
both industry and government, Calvin served on the President's
Science Advisory Committee under President Kennedy and Johnson
and also has served as chairman of the Committee on Science and
Public Policy of the National Academy of Sciences.
In 1980, a
singular honor was given the author of more than 500 scientific
papers and seven books when the Laboratory of Chemical
Biodynamics was renamed the Melvin Calvin Laboratory. Calvin has
retired as the lab's director but his research and consulting
schedules remain unchanged.
__________
Schoch,
Russell. "Melvin Calvin: Chemistry, 1961." The Nobel
Tradition in Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley
Development Office. UC Press.
1984, p. 22.