Melvin Calvin Laboratory

Research Associate and Assistant Director, Bio-Organic Group, Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley. Research on the Path of Carbon in Photosynthesis with Melvin Calvin (Nobel Laureate, 1961). 

American biochemist Melvin Calvin (born 1911). In the 1950s, Calvin used radioactive isotopes to elucidate the chemical details of the process of photosynthesis. He won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1961. The photograph was taken at the University of California at Berkeley, where Calvin directed the chemical biodynamics laboratory in the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (later the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory). (Courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory/Science Photo Library)... 

The chemistry of petroleum will be described here by Melvin Calvin, Professor of Chemistry and member of the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California in Berkeley and one of the world s outstanding organic chemists. Dr. Calvin is Director of the Bio-organic Chemistry Group at the Radiation Laboratory and is noted for his productive research in the chemical processes of photosynthesis. 

From my laboratory and the laboratories of Ef Racker, Frank Dickens and Melvin Calvin, the years that followed witnessed a series of parallel and often highly synergistic discoveries on the nature of the pentose phosphate pathway and the path of carbon in photosynthesis. Andrew Benson and others in Calvin s laboratory, had shown that phosphate esters of ribulose and sedoheptulose were early products of CO2 fixation in photosynthesis,and the immediate precursor of phosphoglyceric acid, and therefore the primary CO2 acceptor, appeared to be ribulose diphosphate. The major problems became (1) to find the enzyme or enzymes that catalyzed the formation of phosphoglyceric acid from ribulose diphosphate and (2) to define the reactions leading to the synthesis of ribulose diphosphate from triose and hexose phosphates. 

In the summer of 1962, in the laboratory of Melvin Calvin at Berkeley, I obtained amino acids, amino acid amides and UV absorbing compounds by electron bombardment of CH4, NH3 and H2O solidly frozen by liquid Nj in experiments simulating the irradiation of comets. In similar experiments C. Ponnamperuma, M. Calvin and coworkers,... 

From 1953 to 1955 Kazuo Shibata joined the research group of Melvin Calvin and Andrew Benson at Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, California. 

THE PATH OF CARBON IN PHOTOSYNTHESIS Our knowledge of the path of carbon in photosynthesis comes mainly from a series of brilliant researches initiated in 1946 by Melvin Calvin and his associates at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory of the University of Cahfornia. These workers made use of the radioactive isotope of carbon, C, from which they prepared radioactive carbon dioxide ( COj) and then fed this to unicellular algae Chlorella pyrenoidosa and Scenedesmus obliquus) and green leaves. 

Calvin, Melvin (1911-1997) Born of Russian emigrant parents in Minnesota. University of California at Berkeley in 1937, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory since 1946 and full professor since 1947 Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1961. 

Calvin, Melvin (1911-97) USblochemlst After World War 11, at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Berkeley, he investigated the light- independent reactions of photosynthesis. Using radioactive carbon-14 to label carbon dioxide, he discovered the... 

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