Sumner, James Batcheller

Sumner, James Batcheller, 1887–1955, American biochemist, b. Canton, Mass., Ph.D. Harvard Medical School, 1914. He was a professor at Cornell from 1914 until his death in 1955. In 1946 Sumner was a corecipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Northrop and Wendell Stanley; Sumner was awarded the prize for his discovery that enzymes can be crystallized. His research on the enzyme urease, which is found in jack beans, laid the foundation for subsequent work by others that elucidated the crystal structures of a large number of biological macromolecules.

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