Rockefeller Institute

William Howard Stein fl 911-1980) was born in New York City and received his Ph.D. in 1938 from the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. He immediately joined the faculty of the Rockefeller Institute, where he remained until his death. In 1972, he shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work with Stanford Moore on developing methods of amino acid analysis and for determining the structure of ribonuclease. 

Stanford Moore (1913-1982) was born in Chicago, Illinois, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1938. He was a professor at the Rockefeller Institute and shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in chemistry with his colleague and collaborator, William Stein. 

Petir Victor Edman (1916-1977) was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and received an M.D. in 1946 at the Karolinska Institute. After a year in the United States at the Rockefeller Institute, he returned to Sweden as professor at the University of Lund. In 1957, he moved to St. Vincent s School of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, where he developed and automated the method of peptide sequencing that bears his name. A reclusive man, he never received the prizes or recognition merited by the importance or his work. 

Bolin, B. and Eriksson, E. (1959). Changes of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and sea due to fossil fuel combustion. In "Atmosphere and Sea in Motion" (B. Bolin, ed.), pp. 130-142. The Rockefeller Institute Press. 

Levene, a physician by training, was by all accounts a true genius, a self-taught chemist and pioneer biochemist. The environment of the Rockefeller Institute, with its provision for research opportunities for younger scientists, was a perfect situation for Tipson to exercise his experimental research talents to the fullest while absorbing the drive and dedication manifested by Levene in addressing immensely difficult problems of the chemistry of life processes. 

In his editorial, entitled "War Chemistry and the Alleviation of Suffering," Herty pointed out that in the area of medicinal chemistry the chemist cannot work alone. He must rely on the pharmacologist and the physiologist to determine the therapeutic potential of a product. Cooperation between the chemist and the biologist was thus essential. Herty complained that universities often lacked the funds and the necessary spirit of cooperation to undertake such studies, that most manufacturing establishments had inadequate facilities for these purposes, and that government laboratories suffered from insufficient appropriations for research. Certain privately-endowed institutions, most notably the Rockefeller Institute, provided the appropriate environment for such cooperative research, but there were few such institutions and their capacity for work was necessarily limited. 

These included Johns Hopkins pharmacologist John J. Abel (by letter only, as he could not attend), Rockefeller Institute biochemist P. A. Levene, Chief of the U.S.D.A. Bureau of Chemistry Carl Alsberg, Wisconsin pharmacologist Arthur Loevenhart (engaged at the time in chemical warfare work), Acting Director of the Mellon Institute for Industrial Research E. R. Weidlein, and two industry representatives, Frank Eldred of Eli Lilly and Company and D. W. Jayne of the Barrett Company. The addresses were published in the December 1918 issue of the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, and were also reprinted and circulated to numerous individuals whose views were solicited (21). 

Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg in 1890, and the Kitasato Institute in Tokyo in 1892-3, commemorating von Behring s discovery, with Kitsato, of diphtheria antitoxin. In New York, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was incorporated in 1901 and in London the Lister Institute for Medical Research was established by 1903. 

In 1933, Schoenheimer, who was medically qualified and had been working with Aschoff in the Pathology Institute in Freiburg, moved to Columbia University, New York, and was joined the next year by David Rittenberg. Rittenberg had just spent some time in Urey s laboratory in the Rockefeller Institute learning techniques for handling deuterium. Their first experiments concerned the metabolism of deuterated fatty acids in rats and the demonstration (see below) that 2H from heavy water was incorporated by the animals into fatty acids and cholesterol. 

From 1951, Moore and Stein at the Rockefeller Institute refined the quantitative separation of amino acids on Dowex-50 which led to fully automated amino acid analyses. In early models two columns were needed one of 100 cm to separate most of the acidic and monobasic monocarboxylic acids between pH 3-11 and a short, 15 cm column for the basic amino acids which were eluted at pH <7. The columns operated above room temperature to give more rapid results, and the elution was monitored automatically by quantitative ninhydrin reactions. By the late 1950s a protein hydrolysate could be analyzed overnight. 

Comer, G.W. (1965). A History of the Rockefeller Institute, 1901-1953. The Rockefeller Institute Press, New York. 

Another modern exponent of studying constitution in relation to disease susceptibility was Wade H. Brown of the Rockefeller Institute, whose findings in the field of anatomy have already been mentioned (p. 19).6 A few quotations from his work will serve to illustrate the best medical thinking of his time with relation to the problem under consideration. Regarding constitution he says ... 

From the Laboratories of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York)... 

Rockefeller Institute Press and Oxford University Press, New York 1959. 

More attention began to be paid to nucleic acids in 1945 when Oswald Avery of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research found that he could cause a nonvirulent The bacterium was strepto- strain of bacterium to produce virulent offspring by incubating them with a substance... 

An early pioneer of cell culture was the French surgeon Alexis Carrel, who won the Nobel prize in Medicine in 1912 for his research at the Rockefeller Institute (Spier, 2000). Harrison was, above all, the inventor of analytical solutions, while Carrel, with his extensive clinical practice experience, sterility concerns, and capacity to develop appropriate culture media and culture flasks, created the change in the technological paradigm that led to the start up of animal cell technology. By careful manipulation, Carrel insured the maintenance of chicken embryo cells for several decades in culture. 

---