For his work on crystalline enzymes, John Howard Northrop was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1946, which he shared with Wendell M. Stanley and James B. Sumner. A graduate of Columbia University, Northrop spent much of his career at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City. He began his work on enzymes and proteins in the early 1920s, and in 1939, he was the first to isolate a bacterial virus. In 1940, he crystallized diphtheria antitoxin. During World War II, Northrop served as a consultant and investigator with the National Defense Research Committee, where he developed methods for the detection of chemical weapons. Northrop, born on July 5, 1891, died in 1987.

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