Wendell Meredith Stanley Biography

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World of Scientific Discovery on Wendell Meredith Stanley

Wendell Meredith Stanley, a native of Ridgeville, Indiana, grew up in the news business, helping his parents publish a small-town newspaper. After graduating from college, he dreamed of becoming a football coach. Before he could realize this ambition, however, he met professor Roger Adams who touted the chemistry program at the University of Illinois. Instead of winning in the Rose Bowl, Stanley went on to win the 1946 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Stanley earned his B.S. in 1926 from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, his M.S. (1927) and Ph.D. in chemistry (1929) from the University of Illinois. At Illinois he worked under Professor Adams, majoring in organic chemistry with a minor in physical chemistry and bacteriology. After completing post-doctoral work as an International Research Council fellow at the University of Munich in Germany, he went to the Rockefeller Institute in New York City in 1931.

At this time viruses remained a mystery to researchers. The techniques needed to study their structure and composition had not been refined. Stanley was destined to make a substantial contribution to scientific knowledge by defining the nature and structure of viruses. The early 1930s saw John Northrop extend the work of James B. Sumner by crystallizing enzymes to prove that they were nothing more than protein molecules. Northrop's work erased the mystery behind the enzyme. Using similar techniques, Stanley, who shared the 1946 Nobel Prize with Northrop, was able to determine the nature of viruses, solving a riddle that had lingered since these agents were discovered by Martinus Willem Beijerinck, a Dutch botanist, in 1898.

Stanley chose to work with the tobacco mosaic virus because it is stable, large amounts of highly infectious starting material are easily obtainable, and the virus can be titrated in a solution with great accuracy. Step-by-step, through a variety of chemical studies leading to crystallization, Stanley showed that the virus is a protein. In 1936, shortly after crystallizing tobacco mosaic virus, he isolated nucleic acid and proved that withdrawing this material left the crystals without any virus activity. Therefore, he concluded that the virus is a nucleoprotein. Stanley's conclusion that viruses are not living organisms was not accepted by the entire scientific community, particularly since viruses seemed to teeter between life and nonlife. To defend his conclusions, Stanley took up the lecture circuit in the United States and England, and then published his paper: Chemical Studies on the Virus of Tobacco Mosaic.

During World War II, Stanley directed his research efforts toward developing a centrifuge-purified influenza vaccine that was 10 times more effective than other vaccines on the market. It was his contribution to the war effort, but even more, it supported other researchers who believed that isolating viruses would lead to the development of vaccines to eradicate deadly human diseases. Following the war, Stanley continued his work with the tobacco mosaic virus, and directed Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat to separate the protein from the nucleic acid to illustrate that the nucleic acid was truly the infectious portion. By the 1950s, Stanley, an advisor to the National Institutes of Health, was concentrating on tumor-causing viruses and searching, in particular, for viruses that cause cancer. Despite challenges from his colleagues, he eventually persuaded Congress to support a large-scale study of cancer-causing viruses.

Stanley retired in 1969 as head of the virus laboratory he established at the University of California. He was the reciepient of numerous awards and honors including the American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize in 1937, the Gold Medal of the American Institute of New York in 1941, the Franklin Medal and Presidential Certificate of Merit in 1948, the Modern Medicine Award in 1958, and the American Cancer Society's Medal for Distinguished Service in Cancer Control in 1963. He also served as an advisor to the World Health Organization, was a Director-at-large of the American Cancer Society and a member of the Board of Scientific Counsellors of the National Cancer Institute. He died of a heart attack in 1971 while attending a medical convention in Salamanca, Spain.