William Stein

Origins and early life

William Howard Stein was born in New York City on 25 June 1911 into a Jewish family, the son of Fred Stein, a businessman who retired early to work for the city's health charities, and Beatrice Borg Stein, who campaigned for children and built after-school programmes. He went to the progressive Lincoln School run by Columbia's Teachers College, where science was taught by field trips and projects, and at sixteen to Phillips Exeter.

He read chemistry at Harvard, moved to Columbia in 1934 and took a doctorate there in 1937 on the amino acid composition of elastin, then joined the Rockefeller Institute, where he worked with Stanford Moore for the rest of his career.

Work and career

Their problem was arithmetic. To know what a protein is, one must know which amino acids it contains and in what order, and counting them by hand took months for a single sample. Stein and Moore turned the counting into a machine: a column of resin that separates the amino acids as they wash through, with a detector and a recorder at the bottom, which did in a day what had taken a laboratory a season. With it they read out the complete sequence of ribonuclease, one hundred and twenty-four amino acids, the first enzyme whose whole chain was known, and then identified the handful of residues that do the actual chemistry. They shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Christian Anfinsen. Stein died in New York on 2 February 1980.