Biologjia Online

William H. Stein (1911–1980) graduated from Harvard in 1929 with a major in chemistry. He then spent a year as a graduate student in chemistry at Harvard but transferred to the Department of Biological Chemistry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, to study biochemistry. He completed his thesis research on the amino acid composition of elastin in 1937 and joined Max Bergmann at The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. Stein's initial project with Bergmann was to improve gravimetric methods of amino acid determination. In 1939, Stanford Moore (1913–1982), a graduate of Vanderbilt University who had just earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, joined the Bergmann laboratory. In what marked the beginning of one of the longest and most fruitful collaborations in science, the two postdoctoral fellows pooled their efforts to develop the gravimetric methods based on the solubility product of salts of the amino acids into a practical analytical procedure.