Melvin Calvin · Science & Medicine
Photosynthesis
1911, Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States — 1997, Berkeley, California, United States
United States
Melvin Calvin is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Photosynthesis
Origins and early life
Melvin Calvin was born in St Paul, Minnesota, on 8 April 1911, the son of Elias Calvin and Rose Herwitz, Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire — from what are now Lithuania and Georgia. The family moved to Detroit, where his parents kept a grocery and where the boy spent his time reading the labels on every product on the shelves.
Work and career
Invited to Berkeley by Joel Hildebrand — the first person in twenty-five years the chemistry department hired who had not trained there — he was told that radioactive carbon was the thing to work on now. It was. With Andrew Benson and James Bassham he used carbon-14 to follow, step by step, what a plant does with carbon dioxide: they fed algae the labelled gas, killed the cells at intervals of seconds, and read off the order in which the carbon appeared in one compound after another.
What emerged is the cycle that carries his name, the chemistry by which sunlight is turned into sugar and, ultimately, into everything that eats. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1961 and spent five decades at Berkeley. He died on 8 January 1997.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Nobel Prize Chemistry 1961
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Photosynthesis
Source: Nobel Prize Chemistry 1961
