August 16th
Born August 16, 1904; He died on June 15, 1971 at the age of 66
American biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946 for his work on the purification and crystallization of viruses, thereby demonstrating their molecular structure. In 1935, he had obtained thin rod-like crystals of the virus and showed that TMV still retained its infectivity after crystallization, the first such purification of a virus. At first, some scientists were skeptical – they thought that viruses resembling traditional living organisms could not exist in crystalline form. During the Second World War he worked to isolate the influenza virus and prepared a vaccine against it. In 1936, he isolated nucleic acids from the tobacco mosaic virus, which was later found to cause viral activity.
