Wendell Meredith Stanley, Nobel Prize Winner
Wendell Meredith Stanley was born in Ridgeville, Randolph County, Indiana, on August 16th, 1904, the son of a newspaper publisher. He attended Earlham College in Richmond where he was a good student but a better football player: one year he made the All-Indiana College team along with the Four Horsemen from Notre Dame. After graduating in 1926, Stanley thought about coaching football, but decided to study chemistry at the University of Illinois instead. Despite being on academic probation for a while for low grades, he still managed to earn a Master of Science degree in 1927 and a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1929.
In 1930 Stanley won a scholarship to do research at Munich, Germany under Heinrich Wieland, who was a Nobel Prize winner. In 1931, he returned to the United States to take up a post as an Assistant at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City. His project was working with a virus that was attacking tobacco plants. In 1935, he became the first person ever to isolate a virus. For this work, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946.
During World War II, Stanley helped develop vaccines against the influenza virus for the United States Army to protect soldiers. Later, the vaccine was marketed to the general public.
In 1948, Stanley was appointed Professor of Biochemistry at the University of California – Berkeley. There, he established the Virus Laboratory and directed the research that led to the identification of the polio virus in 1954. This allowed Jonas Salk to develop his famous polio vaccine.
Wendell Stanley died in 1971 in Spain while attending a world conference on viruses, and was buried in El Cerrito, California. He certainly is the only Nobel Prize winner who was born in Ridgeville, Indiana.
