Wendell Meredith Stanley

He shared the 1946 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for successfully crystallizing the tobacco mosaic virus. His groundbreaking work proved that viruses, previously thought to be strictly liquid, could exist in a crystalline form.

Much of his influential research on the tobacco mosaic virus was conducted at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. He later became a professor and chairman of the biochemistry department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Wendell Meredith Stanley was born in 1904 and died in 1971. He lived during a pivotal era of mid-20th-century biochemistry that saw major advancements in the understanding of molecular biology and virology.

He successfully crystallized the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), a pathogen that infects a wide variety of plants. This achievement in 1935 fundamentally changed the scientific understanding of what viruses are made of by showing them as particulate matter.