What are viruses and who is WM Stanley??
Answers
Stanley, Wendell
Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center
In 1935 Wendell Stanley (1904-1971), a young chemist working in the Rockefeller Institute's laboratories in Princeton, NJ, purified a virus in the form of needle-shaped crystals with the chemical properties of a protein. It was perhaps the most startling discovery to date in the Institute's history. How could a virus, with its ability to infect and multiply, also be an inanimate chemical—an inert molecule? Stanley's finding prompted discussion of the question, "what is life?" as well as much criticism. Further research elsewhere, confirmed in Stanley's laboratory, soon demonstrated that the infectious substance was in fact a combination of protein and the nucleic acid, RNA. The results called attention to the similar reproductive powers of viruses and genes (not yet known to be DNA), and helped lay the groundwork for modern molecular biology. For his achievements, Stanley shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946 with his Rockefeller colleague John H. Northrop (1891-1987) and James B. Sumner.
Stanley experimented with tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), which causes spots on the leaves of infected plants. By the time he began his studies in the early 1930s, TMV was well known to laboratory researchers. Others had shown that it could be manipulated chemically without losing its ability to infect. Stanley decided to apply to TMV methods for crystallizing proteins that had been developed by his Rockefeller colleagues John Northrop and Moses Kunitz. Although more than 300 human, animal, and plant viruses were known to science, when Stanley began his research it was not known whether viruses were, in his words, "inorganic, carbohydrate, hydrocarbon, lipid, protein, or organismal in nature."
In addition to opening questions about the basic nature of viruses that set the course for the field of virology, Stanley's own research had a more immediate impact on medicine. During World War II, he turned his attention to developing an inactivated vaccine for viral influenza. He used a Sharples centrifuge—a piece of equipment widely used in the dairy industry at the time—to obtain concentrated and purified quantities of the virus. The centrifuge's large capacity and efficiency made it possible to scale up production of the vaccine, and Stanley's method was used in the development of commercial vaccines. In the late 1950s and 1960s Stanley advocated for research on tumor viruses to aid in understanding human cancers, testifying before Congress to support the National Cancer Institute, and helping to support the passage of the National Cancer Act in 1971.