Science & invention
Melvin Calvin
1911–1997
· biochemist
Nobel Prize–winning chemist who traced how plants turn carbon dioxide into sugar; he grew up in Detroit, where his parents kept a grocery store, and finished Central High School in 1928.
- Born
Saint Paul, Minnesota- Died
Berkeley, California
aged 85- Birth name
- Melvin Ellis Calvin
- Detroit years
- until 1928
- Field
- Science & invention
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Calvin was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to immigrant parents, and the family moved to Detroit while he was still a small boy. His parents ran a grocery store, and he came up through the Detroit public schools, graduating from Central High School in 1928. From there he went north to the Michigan College of Mining and Technology in Houghton, where he earned the school's first bachelor's degree in chemistry, and then to a doctorate at the University of Minnesota. He spent most of his career at the University of California, Berkeley. Using radioactive carbon-14 as a tracer, his group followed the path of carbon through a photosynthesizing alga step by step. The sequence became known as the Calvin cycle and brought him the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Highlights
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1961, for work on carbon dioxide assimilation in plants
- The Calvin cycle of photosynthesis carries his name
- Graduated from Detroit's Central High School in 1928
- First chemistry graduate of today's Michigan Technological University
- National Medal of Science, 1989
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 1
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Studied here · until 1928
Central High School
Detroit's oldest public high school; Calvin graduated in 1928, two years after the school moved into its present building on Tuxedo Street.