Volume 1, Issue 2
Berkeley's Scientific Legacy
1948: Wendell Meredith Stanley and the birth of biochemistry at UC Berkeley
Wendell M. Stanley (courtesy Bancroft Library)
Wendell Meredith Stanley (1904-1971) was the father of Berkeley biochemistry. Away from campus though, he's perhaps better known for sharing a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946 for his research on the tobacco mosaic virus. In 1935, Stanley, then at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and his colleagues crystallized the tobacco mosaic virus, transforming the study of viruses as large molecules. During World War II, Stanley 's insight into viruses as the cause of infectious disease informed the development of an influenza vaccine.
Shortly after the war, Stanley's drive to understand the secrets of viral structures led him to UC Berkeley where he founded the Virus Laboratory. Upon arrival, he spearheaded the construction of the Biochemistry and Virology Laboratory Building that would eventually be renamed in honor of Stanley himself. An innovative administrator, Stanley purposely combined the two units to encourage the sharing of ideas, a precursor to the cross-disciplinary research essential to today's bioscience and bioengineering efforts.
A diseased leaf from Stanley's research archives (courtesy Bancroft Library)
In 1954, Stanley and his collaborators made another biochemical breakthrough that helped save millions of lives. For the first time, an animal virus--specifically, polio--was crystallized for study. Understanding the structure of the virus for polio helped enable researchers to develop a vaccine against it. The following decade, Stanley's research group coalesced into what would ultimately become the current Department of Molecular and Cell Biology.
Last year, the original Stanley Hall was demolished to make room for the 185,000 square foot, state-of-the-art Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility. Scheduled for completion in 2006, the new building will house the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3), a cooperative effort between UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and UC Santa Cruz. As a hub of Berkeley's Health Science Initiative, the new facility will bring together biologists, computer scientists, chemists, physicists, and engineers to foster novel research and education while promoting the development of new technologies to improve human health.
Indeed, the objective of the Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility is not so different than the goal first set when Wendell Meredith Stanley joined the Berkeley faculty more than fifty years ago: "Every effort will be made to develop this (department) into the foremost center for biochemical research in the world."
Stanley with other 1946 chemistry Nobelists, John N. Northrup and James B. Sumner. (courtesy Bancroft Library)