Melvin Calvin — chem (nobel / photosyn.) with roots in the Russian Empire
Melvin Ellis Calvin was born in St Paul, Minnesota, on 8 April 1911, as the Nobel Foundation puts it, of Russian emigrant parents. By his own account, his father, a cigar maker, came from Kalvarija, then in the Suwałki Governorate of the Russian Empire and now in Lithuania, and the surname Calvin was given at immigration after the town; his mother, Rose Hervitz, came from Georgia, also then part of the Empire.
Soon after his birth the family moved to Detroit, where he showed an early interest in chemistry and physics. In 1927 he won a full scholarship to the Michigan College of Mining and Technology in Houghton, where he was the school's first chemistry major and took his degree in 1931. He completed his doctorate at the University of Minnesota in 1935, with a dissertation on the electron affinity of halogen atoms, and with a Rockefeller Foundation grant spent the next two years at the University of Manchester with Michael Polanyi, who introduced him to an interdisciplinary approach and to the chemistry of chlorophyll-like compounds.
In 1937 he joined the University of California, Berkeley, as an instructor, and he remained there for the rest of his career, becoming a full professor in 1947. With Gerald Branch he wrote The Theory of Organic Chemistry (1941). When carbon-14 became readily available after the war, he began in 1946 to use it to trace photosynthesis. His group fed short bursts of radioactive carbon dioxide to the green alga Chlorella and stopped the reaction at intervals, identifying the compounds formed. In this way Calvin, with Andrew Benson and James Bassham, mapped the route by which carbon passes from atmospheric carbon dioxide into sugars, the cycle now named after him; it was the first use of carbon-14 to work out a chemical pathway.
He received the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone. He directed Berkeley's Laboratory of Chemical Biodynamics from 1960 to 1963, which now bears his name, and his later interests ranged from chemical evolution and organic geochemistry to brain chemistry and the analysis of moon rocks. He was president of the American Chemical Society in 1971 and received its Priestley Medal in 1978 and the National Medal of Science in 1989. He died in Berkeley on 8 January 1997, aged eighty-five.
Tracing the roots — Kalvarija, Suwałki Governorate (father) (now Lithuania); Georgia, then in the Russian Empire (mother)
Born in St Paul, Minnesota, in 1911 'of Russian emigrant parents', as the Nobel Foundation puts it. By his own account his father came from Kalvarija, in present-day Lithuania, and the family name derives from the town; his mother came from Georgia, also then in the Russian Empire.
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Kalvarija, Suwałki Governorate (father) (now Lithuania); Georgia, then in the Russian Empire (mother). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.