James Batcheller Sumner

James Batcheller Sumner (1887-1955), American biochemist and Nobel Prize winner. For his work in isolating enzymes, Sumner shared the 1946 Nobel Prize in chemistry with fellow American biochemists John H. Northrop and Wendell M. Stanley.

Sumner was born near Boston, Massachusetts. He initially studied electrical engineering at Harvard but soon switched to the study of chemistry. When he was a young boy, Sumner was involved in a hunting accident in which he lost his left forearm and elbow—an especially tragic loss, as Sumner was left-handed and was subsequently forced to train himself to be right-handed. Nevertheless, he continued to pursue his boyhood activities of tennis, canoeing, and shooting, and eventually developed ways of executing laboratory procedures one-handed.

After his graduation from Harvard in 1910, Sumner briefly taught college chemistry in New Brunswick, Canada, after which he taught at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1912 Sumner returned to Harvard to pursue his Ph.D. degree. His doctoral dissertations, which he completed in 1914, concerned the liver's role in urea formation from amino acids. Shortly after receiving his doctorate, Sumner became an assistant professor of biochemistry at Cornell University Medical College. He spent the rest of his academic career at Cornell, becoming a professor of biochemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Zoology in 1938. Later, in 1947, he founded the Laboratory of Enzyme Chemistry in Cornell's biochemistry department.

Sumner's work in isolating an enzyme signaled a departure from the accepted theory that enzymes had low molecular weights and that proteins easily absorbed them. Working with proteins of the jack bean, he isolated what he believed to be urease, a plant enzyme involved in breakdown of urea. He spent years afterward trying to convince the scientific community that enzymes are proteins and can be crystallized. Finally, in 1930, he received the support of fellow biochemist John H. Northrop, who had succeeded in crystallizing the enzyme pepsin. Their work paralleled that of the biochemist Wendell M. Stanley, who had worked with Northrop at Rockefeller Institute to prepare enzymes and virus proteins in pure form. Prior to Sumner's work, the chemical nature of enzymes was unknown scientific territory. His achievements accelerated the study of biocatalysis—a development that greatly advanced research into the fields of viruses and viral diseases, such as influenza and poliomyelitis, as well as laying the foundation for new research in nutrition.