Photo credit: Photolab, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, 1962 — Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
Melvin Calvin
1911–1997 · United States · 20th century
Nobel Chemistry 1961
American chemist who mapped the cyclic pathway by which plants fix CO₂ into sugars — the Calvin cycle — using the new tracer carbon-14.
Nobel Prize work
Prized for research on carbon dioxide assimilation in plants. Exposing algae to ¹⁴CO₂ for seconds at a time and separating products by paper chromatography, his team identified each intermediate and revealed the cycle in which ribulose bisphosphate carboxylation feeds 3-phosphoglycerate reduction and RuBP regeneration.
Fields
Related topics
Metabolism (glycolysis, Krebs cycle, electron transport chain)
Metabolism is a network of linked reactions that captures energy and supplies building blocks; ATP and reduced cofactors connect pathways.
Artificial photosynthesis
How light absorbers, catalysts and membranes can convert sunlight into hydrogen or carbon-based fuels, and why efficiency, stability and scale-up remain challenging.