William Howard Stein

On February 2, 1980, he succumbed to heart attack in New York City at 68 years of age. Stanford Moore, who worked with him for years, wrote his obituary for the ‘National Academy of Sciences’.

He was born on June 25, 1911, in New York City, in a Jewish family to Fred Michael Stein and his wife Beatrice Cecilla (Borg) as their second child among three.

His father was a businessman who took early retirement to dedicate into matters related to healthcare. His mother was a child rights activist. His elder brother Fred Micheal Stein, Jr. became a health advocate and younger sister Cecilia Borg Stein Cullman was a child rights activist like her mother.

He attended the ‘Lincoln School of Teachers College’ of ‘Columbia University’, a private co-educational university laboratory school in New York City from 1926 to 1927. The ideas and methods of the school were considered to be most progressive of that time.

Thereafter he joined ‘Phillips Exeter Academy’, a co-educational independent school, in Exeter, New Hampshire and studied there till 1929. He was inspired to take up fundamental science or medicine by his parents.

He then joined ‘Harvard University’ from where he completed BS in Chemistry in 1933.

After completing his PhD he was inducted at the ‘Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research’ as a researcher in 1938 under renowned Jewish-German biochemist Max Bergmann. Here he had the opportunity to be associated with an outstanding group of researchers including Moore, Klaus Hofmann, Emil L. Smith and Joseph S. Fruton among others. It is at the Rockefeller that he conducted most of his significant research works.

He and Moore were delegated to chalk out precise analytical procedures to analyse amino acid composition of proteins. However the ‘Second World War’ interrupted their work on proteins when Moore was enlisted as a technical aid in the ‘National Defense Research Council’ in Washington in 1942. Moreover during wartime the entire research group of Bergmann was engrossed to work for the ‘Office of Scientific Research and Development’.

Following the death of Bergmann in 1944, the laboratory became devoid of a chief, although the research team carried on with their work.

Post war Moore returned to Rockefeller Institute after accepting an offer of the then Director Herbert Gasser who provided Stein and Moore with the liberty and space of conducting research work of their line of interest.

In 1952 he became Professor of Biochemistry at ‘Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research’ and served the post till 1965.