Featured Biography: James B. Sumner

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               Featured Biography: James B. Sumner

Early Life

James Batcheller Sumner was born in Canton, Massachusetts, on Nov. 19th, 1887, as the son of Charles Sumner and Elizabeth Rand Kelly. His ancestors were Puritans who came from Bicester, England, in 1636 and settled in Boston. His father owned a large country estate, while his grandfather had a farm and also a cotton factory.

Young Sumner attended the Eliot Grammar School for a few years and then was sent to Roxbury Latin school. At school he was bored by almost every subject except physics and chemistry. He was interested in fire-arms and often went hunting. While grouse hunting at the age of 17, he was accidentally shot in the left arm by a companion; as a consequence, his arm had to be amputated just below the elbow. Having been left-handed, he then had to learn to do things with his right hand. The loss of his arm made him exert every effort to excel in all sorts of athletic sports, such as tennis, skiing, skating, billiards, and clay-pigeon shooting.

Academic Work

In 1906 Sumner entered Harvard College; he graduated in 1910, having specialized in chemistry. After a short interval of working in the cotton knitting factory owned by his uncle, a type of work that did not interest him in the least, he accepted a teaching post at Mt. Allison College, Sackville, New Brunswick. This was followed by an assistantship in chemistry at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass., in 1911, from which he resigned in 1912 in order to study biochemistry with Professor Otto Folin at Harvard Medical School. Although Folin advised him to take up law, since he thought that a one- armed man could never make a success of chemistry, Sumner persisted and obtained his Ph.D. degree in June, 1914. A few months later while traveling in Europe he was stranded in Switzerland for about a month by the outbreak of World War I. During this time he received a cable inviting him to be Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Cornell Medical School, Ithaca, N.Y., a post which he held until 1929, when he was made full Professor of Biochemistry.

Sumner’s research work at Cornell first centered around analytical methods; but despite hard work he was unable to obtain any interesting results. He then decided to isolate an enzyme in pure form, an ambitious aim never achieved by anyone up until then, but a type of research suited to his scanty apparatus and very small laboratory staff. He decided to focus on the enzyme urease.

For many years his work was unsuccessful, but he continued despite discouragement from colleagues who doubted whether any enzyme could ever be isolated in pure form. In 1921, when his research was still in its early stages, he had been granted an American-Belgian fellowship and decided to go to Brussels to work with Jean Effront, who had written several books on enzymes. The plan fell through, however, because Effront thought Sumner’s idea of isolating urease was ridiculous. Back in Ithaca, he resumed his work until finally, in 1926, he succeeded (“I went to the telephone and told my wife that I had crystallized the first enzyme”, he wrote in an autobiographical note). His isolation and crystallization of urease was met with mixed response; it was ignored or disbelieved by most biochemists, but it brought him a full professorship in 1929.

Nobel Prize

Recognition followed gradually. In 1937, he was given a Guggenheim Fellowship; he went to Uppsala and worked in the laboratory of Professor Svedberg for five months. He was awarded the Scheele Medal in Stockholm in the same year. When Northrop, of the Rockefeller Institute, obtained crystalline pepsin, and subsequently other enzymes, it became clear that Sumner had devised a general crystallization method for enzymes. The opponents gradually admitted Sumner’s and Northrop’s claims – Willstätter last of all – and the crowning recognition came in 1946 when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Sumner and Northrop. In 1948, Sumner was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

During his Nobel Laureate Lecture in Stockholm in 1948, while explaining his decision to isolate enzymes, Sumner stated:

“I wish to tell next why I decided in 1917 to attempt to isolate an enzyme. At that time I had little time for research, not much apparatus, research money or assistance. I desired to accomplish something of real importance. In other words, I decided to take a ‘long shot.’ A number of persons advised me that my attempt to isolate an enzyme was foolish, but this advice made me feel all the more certain that, if successful, the quest would be worthwhile.”

Publications

Sumner’s publications included books as well as his many scientific papers. He wrote a Textbook of Biological Chemistry which was published by the Macmillan Company in 1927. With G. Fred Somers, one of his students, he wrote the book, Chemistry and Methods of Enzymes, published first in 1943 by the Academic Press, and now in its third edition. He and Somers were also authors of Laboratory Experiments in Biological Chemistry, published in 1944 by the Academic Press and revised and republished in 1949. Sumner and Karl Myrba’ck of the University of Stockholm edited a mammoth work entitled The Enzymes, Chemistry and Mechanism of Action, which was published by the Academic Press as four books, comprising two volumes of two parts each. These volumes appeared over the period, 1951-1952. They totaled some 2,800 pages and contained articles written by seventy-eight scientists. Each article received a careful reading by Sumner. In several cases, where he questioned whether a reported method would work, he tested it out in the laboratory before approving the article in question.

Later Years

On May 25-26,1955, Cornell University held a symposium in joint honor of Sumner and of L. A. Maynard, who were retiring on July 1st. At this symposium, former students of both men presented papers dealing with either biochemical or nutritional topics. At the dinner meeting Sumner gave a short speech and charmed his audience with his philosophy and his wit. This was an amazing performance, since he was in pain at the time and undoubtedly knew that he had only a short time to live. Actually, he was taken to the hospital the next day and never left. He died of cancer on August 12, 1955, at the Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, New York.

References:

James Batcheller Sumner, A Biographical Memoir by Leonard A. Maynard, National Academy of Science, 1958. 

Nobel Lectures, Chemistry 1942-1962, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1964.