The son of a small-town Indiana newspaper
publisher, Wendell Stanley was born in Ridgeville, Indiana on
August 16, 1904. He went to Earlham College in Richmond,
Indiana, where he was a good student but a better football
player (one season, he made the All-Indians college team along
with Notre Dame's fabled Four Horsemen). He even toyed with the
idea of becoming a football coach. Instead, a friendship with a
University of Illinois chemistry professor resulted in his
enrolling there in graduate school. His time at Illinois
included both a term on probation for low grades and a Ph.D.
with the best scholastic record any graduate student in
chemistry had ever complied there.
After a
post-doctoral fellowship in Europe, Stanley returned to the
United States and settled in at Rockefeller Institute, first in
New York City and then in Princeton, to build a research career.
His research
problem was the virus, the existence of which had been
determined in 1892. Stanley's great achievement came in 1935,
after he had ground up nearly a ton of infected tobacco plants
and laboriously purified the extracted juices. What he obtained
was about a tablespoon of white powdery substance --- a sample
of crystallized tobacco mosaic virus, marking the first time
that a virus had been isolated and crystallized. This discovery
helped pave the way for a deeper look into the nature of life
and of man, was instrumental in the conquest of such diseases as
polio, and helpful to unravel the chemical mystery of heredity.
During World War
II, Stanley and his colleagues took time out to develop the
influenza virus vaccine, used with great success by the Army and
later produced commercially for the general public.
In 1946, Stanley
received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with John Howard
Northrop and J. B. Summer. Stanley came to the Berkeley campus
in 1947 to head the Department of Biochemistry and to establish
a new Virus Laboratory. He said, upon his arrival at the
University, that he wanted to "build an institution comparable
in its field to that of Professor Ernest O. Lawrence in the
Radiation Laboratory." Stanley built his lab and went on to
gather an outstanding team of scientists, to launch a series of
basic research achievements, and to oversee the training of many
of the world's most promising scientists.
An International
leader and spokesman for science, Stanley was at ease with
people from all walks of life. Always willing to explain and
interpret, he was the first member of the University's virology
faculty to appear on a public television series on the virus, in
1961.
In 1970, he was
named president of the Tenth International Cancer Congress, the
first time a non-medical doctor had held that important post. He
died in Spain, in June 1971, after he had attended another major
meeting on viruses and cancer. A colleague said of Wendell M.
Stanley, shortly before his death: "Young and old alike have
found it difficult to resist his confident assurance that the
puzzles of nature can be solved to the benefit of mankind by
imaginative and diligent effort."
__________
Schoch,
Russell. "Wendell M. Stanley: Chemistry, 1946." The Nobel
Tradition in Berkeley:
University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley
Development Office: UC Press,
1984, p. 8.
