William Howard Stein

Born June 25, 1911, in New York. American biochemist. Member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Stein graduated from Harvard University in 1933 and received a Ph.D. from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in 1938. In that year he began working at Rockefeller Univerity in New York, where he became a professor of biochemistry in 1955. Stein’s research has dealt mainly with the analytical chemistry of proteins and enzymes. He developed a quantitative method of determining amino acids based on ion- exchange chromatography. He was the first to establish (jointly with others) the primary structure of the enzyme ribonuclease, and he also investigated the structure of the active sites of enzymes. Stein received¹ a Nobel Prize in 1972 jointly with S. Moore and C. Anfinsen.