Nobel Prize Recipient. John H. Northrop, an American biochemist, received international notoriety after being awarded the 1946 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He jointly shared half of the coveted award with Wendell M. Stanley, while James B. Sumner received the other half as his monetary reward. The men received the award, according to the Nobel Prize committee, "for their preparation of enzymes and virus proteins in a pure form." Well-respected in the scientific community, he received 45 nominations for the Nobel candidacy. Around 1929 he managed to produce pure crystals of pepsin, trypsin and chymotrypsin enzymes, which are active in the digestive process. His research showed that these enzymes are also proteins. Born the son of scientists, his father was a zoologist and his mother a botanist. His father was killed in the flames of a laboratory explosion less than two weeks before Northrop’s birth. His mother returned to teaching after his birth. An ancestor of his gifted Havemeyer Hall, the Chemical Laboratory, to Columbia University and his father was a professor at the same facility. After attending public schools, he attended Columbia University in New York City, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in 1912, Master of Arts in 1913 and received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1915. He was appointed the W.B. Cutting Travelling Fellow and spent the next year in Jacques Loeb’s laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute. . During World War I, he served as a captain in the United States Army Chemical Warfare Service. Starting in 1916 he held the post of an assistant and then later a member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research for most of his career. He retired in 1961, becoming an emeritus professor. From 1949 to 1958, he was also a visiting professor of bacteriology and biophysics at the University of California at Berkeley. He was the editor for several years of the “Journal of General Physiology.” Besides a number published papers, his 1938 book “Crystalline Enzymes” became an important scientific textbook. He married Louise Walker and the couple had a son and a daughter. Their daughter, Alice, married Dr. Frederick Chapman Robbins, who shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Depressed with failing health, he committed suicide, becoming one of the seven Nobel Prize recipients who died from suicide; this includes legal euthanasia.