The Nobel Tradition at
Berkeley
John H.
Northrop
Chemistry, 1964
By Russell Schoch
1984
John Howard
Northrop was born in Yonkers, New York, on July 5, 1881. His
work on the nature of enzymes, of fundamental importance in
understanding the working of the body in health and disease, was
completed before his long career brought him to Berkeley.
Northrop is a
descendent of eight generations of New England settlers (dating
from 1630) and counts among his ancestors the Reverend Jonathan
Edwards and Frederick C. Havemeyer, whose family provided
Columbia University with Havemeyer Hall, a chemistry laboratory.
John Northrop
attended Columbia College, the undergraduate men's school at
Columbia University, the same school his father and grandfather
attended. (Only a few weeks before John Howard's birth, his
father lost his life in a tragic laboratory fire at Columbia.)
Young Northrop earned his B.S. degree in 1912 and his Ph.D. in
1915. While an undergraduate, he was a member of championship
fencing, rifle, and revolver teams; he remained an expert hunter
and skilled marksman throughout his active life.
In 1915, Northrop
began his career at the Rockefeller Institute in New York under
the famed biologist Jacques Loeb, who found in Northrop a
responsive student, thoroughly grounded in physical principles
and unprejudiced about biological processes. A strong and
mutually high regard soon developed between the two men. After
Loeb's death, in 1924, Northrop succeeded Loeb as editor of the
Journal of General Physiology, which Loeb had founded.
In the late 1920s
and through the 1930s, Northrop concentrated his studies on a
wide range of complex biochemical problems related to the nature
and properties of enzymes ("a prize problem," he once called
it). The result of his work with pepsin, a digestive chemical,
was the first accurate purification and crystallization of an
enzyme. "I knew I was tackling an awful hard job," Northrop
later recalled. "Many had tried to isolate enzymes in pure form
for hundreds of years. When my research was completed, I knew
I'd done something important." He had successfully isolated the
organic compounds that catalyze such chemical reactions in the
body as digestion.
His work was of
far-reaching and fundamental importance in understanding the
workings of the body and in such areas as the development of new
drugs. For this work, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in
1946 with Wendell Stanley and J. B. Sumner.
Even before Pearl
Harbor, Northrop was asked to undertake studies of interest to
the armed forces. He promptly stopped his own work and devoted
his efforts to the national effort throughout the duration
of the war.
At the conclusion
of the war, and with the recognition brought on by the Nobel
Prize in 1946, Northrop returned to the Rockefeller Institute
Laboratories in Princeton. But, shortly after, that lab was
closed and moved to New York City, where Northrop did not want
to live. Instead, in 1947, he accepted an offer to become
professor of bacteriology and medical physics at the Berkeley
campus, where he had visited and received an honorary degree in
1939. He continued to pursue his research until retirement in
1959. "You've got to do what you want to do," he said in a rare
interview in the 1960s. "It's all in the chase."
__________
Schoch,
Russell. "John H. Northrop: Chemistry, 1946. "The Nobel
Tradition in Berkeley:
University of California,
Berkeley. UC Berkeley Development Office: UC Press,
1984, p. 6.
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