John Howard Northrop
Biologist
An American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946 for his studies on enzymes, proteins, and viruses. He was the first scientist to discover that the gastric enzyme pepsin was a protein.
He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at Columbia University in 1915, the same school where his father died in a lab explosion.
He became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1949.
He had two children with his wife Louise Walker after marrying 1917.
Like Irving Langmuir, he is among the first Americans to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.