Vincent Du Vigneaud

Biography

 Vincent du Vigneaud was born in Chicago, Illinois, and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned his B.S. in organic chemistry in 1918 and his M.S. in 1924. He then joined John R. Murlin at the University of Rochester to do graduate work and demonstrated that cystine was the source of the disulfide in insulin. He finished his degree in 1927 and began postdoctoral studies on insulin at Johns Hopkins University with John J. Abel, where he showed that insulin was a protein, thereby establishing that proteins could be hormones. He then carried out further postdoctoral studies at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Dresden, Germany, with Max Bergmann. Upon returning to the United States in 1929, du Vigneaud joined the physiological chemistry faculty at the University of Illinois. In 1932 he accepted an offer from the George Washington University School of Medicine to serve as a full professor in biochemistry and chairman of the department. In 1938 he was made professor and head of the Biochemistry Department at Cornell Medical College in New York City. He remained there until 1967, when he joined the Chemistry Department at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Research Interest

 du Vigneaud's early research set the course for his subsequent work on sulfur-containing compounds. In 1940, he and his collaborators discovered that both vitamin H and coenzyme R were identical to the vitamin biotin. A year later he reported the structure of biotin. In 1946, du Vigneaud and his colleagues announced their production of a synthetic penicillin (penicillin G). du Vigneaud's laboratory also isolated and synthesized oxytocin and vasopressin. This work was featured in a Journal of Biological Chemistry Classic