Abstract
HALF of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for 1946 has been awarded to Dr. W. M. Stanley and Dr. J. H. Northrop of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research Princeton, New Jersey, and it is appropriate enough that these two workers should be honoured together since an important part of Stanleys work was carried out by means of Northrop's technique. It was in 1935 that Stanley announced (Science, 81, 644) the isolation of the virus of tobacco mosaic in crystalline form, and thereby opened the way to the intensive studies of plant viruses which in the last decade have revolutionized the whole subject. Although Stanley was not the first to conceive of a virus as a chemical substance rather than an organism -Vinson and Petre may be mentioned as pioneers in this direction-he was the first to isolate a crystalline or paracrystalline virus protein, and thus enabled workers to visualize a virus as a tangible entity rather than a mysterious agent the existence of which could only be deduced from its effects on its host. This discovery was soon confirmed by workers in Britain and elsewhere. There was at first a good deal of scepticism as to whether the protein really was the virus itself. The biologist was loth to ex change his conception of a very small organism for that of a crystalline protein with the power to multi ply, and the chemist was equally unwilling to con template the possibility of a mutating molecule. Stanley, however, showed that the virus protein could be obtained from plants botanically unrelated such as the tobacco and the phlox, but only if these plants were infected with tobacco mosaic virus. He also showed that a closely related strain of the tobacco mosaic virus could be isolated, and that it was similar to the first but yet possessed properties which were distinctive and characteristic. Nowadays, no plant virus worker doubts that the virus and crystalline protein are one and the same; several more viruses have been isolated in crystalline form, four of them as three-dimensional crystals, and all have bpen shown to be nueleoproteins.
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Nobel Prize for Chemistry: Dr. W. M. Stanley. Nature 158, 826 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158826b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158826b0