science · 19 November 1887 · 137 years ago
birth
Born 19 Nov 1887; died 12 Aug 1955 at age 67.
James Batcheller Sumner was an American biochemist who shared (with John Howard Northrop and Wendell Meredith Stanley) the 1946 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Sumner was the first to crystallize an enzyme to show that enzymes were proteins. He learned to live one-handed from age 17, due to an accident. After earning his Ph.D. (1914), he joined the faculty of Cornell University Medical College. By 1917, he began investigating the protein nature of enzymes. It was technically difficult, taking nine years, before he produced a crystalline globulin with high urease activity in 1926. The significance of his work went unappreciated for a number of years, but by 1946, he was awarded a half-share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, “for his discovery that enzymes can be crystallized.” In 1947 he became director of a new laboratory for enzyme chemistry, at Cornell.
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