Stanley, Wendell Meredith

Born Aug. 16, 1904, in Ridgeville, Ind. American virologist and biochemist. Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1941) and the New York Academy of Sciences (1963).

Stanley graduated from Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., in 1926. He began working at the University of Illinois in 1929 and at the University of Munich in 1930. In 1931 he returned to the United States and began working at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York; in 1932 he joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, N.J. In 1948 he became a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Stanley’s research has dealt mainly with the chemical composition, biochemistry, reproduction, and mutation of viruses. He has also conducted cancer research. In 1935, having discovered the method for obtaining and studying preparations of viruses in pure form, Stanley became the first to purify and isolate the tobacco mosaic virus in crystalline form. In 1955 he isolated the poliomyelitis virus.

Stanley received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1946 together with J. Sumner and J. Northrop.