Wendell Meredith Stanley American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, 1946, (together with D. Sumner and D. Northrop) “for the preparation of pure enzymes and viral proteins.” Date of Birth: 16.08.1904 Country: USA

1. Biography of Wendell Meredith Stanley
2. The Crystalization of Tobacco Mosaic Virus
3. Contributions during World War II and Nobel Prize
4. Later Career and Contributions

Biography of Wendell Meredith Stanley

Wendell Meredith Stanley was an American chemist and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. He was born into a family of newspaper publishers, James J. Stanley and Claire Plesinger. As a schoolboy, he helped his parents by selling newspapers and working in the editorial office. After graduating from high school in Ridgville, he enrolled at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where he studied chemistry and mathematics. Stanley was the captain of the football team and had plans to become a football coach. However, shortly before graduating from Earlham College, he visited the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. This visit sparked his interest in scientific research and led him to pursue a graduate degree at the university. In 1927, he obtained his master's degree, and in 1929, he defended his dissertation on compounds for the treatment of leprosy. A year later, he was awarded a fellowship from the National Research Council to work with Heinrich Wieland, the 1927 Nobel Laureate, at the University of Munich. Upon his return to the United States the following year, Stanley became an assistant at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) in New York City. However, in 1932, he moved to the animal and plant pathology laboratory at Princeton University in New Jersey. Here, he began studying viruses that cause diseases in plants. Viruses had been discovered in 1892 by Russian scientist Dmitry Ivanovsky (1864–1920). Seven years later, Dutch botanist and microbiologist Martin Willem Beijerinck (1851–1931) reported that tobacco mosaic disease, a plant disease, was caused by a carrier of infection much smaller than the smallest bacterium, so tiny that it could not be seen under a microscope. It became known that viruses were capable of reproduction and, essentially, represented living organisms.

The Crystalization of Tobacco Mosaic Virus

Stanley was the first to obtain crystals of the tobacco mosaic virus. By subjecting the virus to the action of trypsin and pepsin enzymes, as well as over a hundred chemical reagents, he concluded in 1934 that the tobacco mosaic virus consists mainly of protein and, therefore, can be crystallized. He succeeded in doing so. From a ton of virus-infected tobacco leaves, he isolated a few grams of small needle-shaped crystals. Furthermore, it was discovered that the virus crystals could be dissolved, filtered, purified, and recrystallized without destroying their ability to reproduce in plants and infect them. The following year, he isolated the nucleic acid from the crystalline tobacco mosaic virus, and in 1937, he established that the tobacco mosaic virus was a nucleoprotein (a compound of nucleic acids and proteins).

Contributions during World War II and Nobel Prize

During World War II, Stanley worked in the Committee on Medical Research of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. He and his colleagues obtained several strains of the influenza virus and developed the first anti-influenza vaccine, for which Stanley received the Honorary Presidential Certificate (1948). In 1946, Stanley and D. Norhop were awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the preparation in pure form of enzymes and virus proteins". The other half of the prize was awarded to D. Samner. In his Nobel Lecture, Stanley noted that since the discovery of the tobacco mosaic virus, more than 300 different viruses had been identified, including those that cause smallpox, yellow fever, tropical fever, poliomyelitis, measles, mumps, pneumonia, and the common cold. "Some fundamental... problems concerning the reproduction and mutation of the virus have already taken a definite form. Their solution could provide extremely valuable information for biology, chemistry, genetics, and medicine."

Later Career and Contributions

In 1948, Stanley became the head of the virus research laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until the end of his scientific career. He led research aimed at further elucidating the nature of viruses, decoded the entire sequence of 158 amino acids in the tobacco mosaic virus, and isolated and studied the poliomyelitis virus (1955). He was rightly regarded as the father of modern virology. Stanley believed that viruses were the cause of many types of human cancer and speculated that viruses were the first form of life on Earth. He laid out these views in his books "Viruses" (1959) and "Viruses and the Nature of Life" (1961).

In addition to his research and administrative work, Stanley had a significant teaching load and served on numerous commissions and committees. From 1945 until his death, he served as an advisor to the National Institutes of Health, a member of the Expert Committee on Virus Diseases of the World Health Organization (1951–1966), the National Cancer Council of the US Public Health Service (1952–1956), the National Scientific Committee for Medical Research (1955), the Scientific Advisory Group of the National Cancer Institute (1957–1958), and the Advisory Committee to the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1967–1968).

Wendell Meredith Stanley passed away on April 15, 1971, in Salamanca, Spain, following a heart attack.