WOLFROM, MELVILLE LAWRENCE

(b. Bellevue, Ohio, 2 April 1900; d. Columbus, Ohio, 20 June 1969)

carbohydrate chemistry.

Wolfrom was the ninth and last child born to Frederick and Maria Louisa Sutter Wolfrom. His father died in 1907; his mother, a minister’s daughter, raised him in a strict Lutheran tradition. Lacking the financial means to continue his education beyond high school, he became a quality control chemist in 1917 for the National Carbon Company in Fremont, Ohio. In 1918 he moved to Cleveland, joining the Students’ Army Training Corps and taking courses at Western Reserve University, which he found unsatisfactory. A second attempt at higher education, at Washington Square College in New York, also ended in failure. After several odd jobs in Bellevue, Wolfrom entered Ohio State in 1920. He became an assistant to the carbohydrate chemist William Lloyd Evans and graduated cum laude in 1924. He enrolled at Northwestern to work with another carbohydrate chemist, Winford Lee Lewis, receiving the M.S. in 1925 and the Ph.D. in 1927. He married a Northwestern music student, Agnes Louise Thompson, on 1 June 1926. They had five children.

A National Research Council fellowship for 1927 to 1929 enabled Wolfrom to work with two eminent scientists, Claude Hudson at the National Bureau of Standards and Phoebus Levene at the Rockefeller Institute. They exposed him to the enormous challenge of the structural chemistry of complex natural products. His work with Levene led to the publication of three papers on the linkage positions in disaccharides and the ring structures of sugar derivatives.

In 1929 Wolfrom became an instructor in chemistry at Ohio State, advancing to professor in 1940, research professor in 1960, and regents’ professor in 1965. He belonged to the leading chemical societies in America and Europe and was a member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His interest in human personality and the motivations of scientists led him to publish several biographical memoirs, notably those of his mentors, Evans, Lewis, Hudson, and Levene.

Wolfrom’s researches were almost entirely devoted to the problems of the structure and reactivity of carbohydrates. His first important work was a contribution to the debate on whether simple sugars have chain or ring structures. By the 1920’s the cyclic structures of monosaccharides were well established, but in 1929 Wolfrom synthesized an acyclic free aldehyde form of D-glucose acetate, which he subsequently extended to other simple sugars. The disclosure that acyclic structures exist, either as reactive intermediates or, in many instances, as stable entities, rests largely on his work.

His studies on structural forms of sugars involved the development of several important synthetic methods. These methods enabled him to establish configurational relationships, including the correlation in 1949 between the configurations of D-glyceraldehyde and L-serine, the configurational standards for the sugar and amino acid series, respectively.

Wolfrom elucidated the structural and configurational nature of the antibiotic streptomycin. Following its discovery by Waksman in the 1940’s, he isolated and characterized its streptose and streptidine components. He also synthesized many amino sugars, including the complete series of 2-amino-2-deoxypentose stereoisomers. Much of his research after 1950 was on the synthesis of the nucleosides of 2-deoxysugars.

His most challenging task was the elucidation of the structure of heparin, the anticoagulant polysaccharide in animal tissue. By 1950 he had revealed the presence of a repeating unit of D-glucuronic acid and D-glucosamine. These investigations required all of the resources of organic chemistry in order to find derivatives amenable to fragmentation analysis and structural characterization.

Wolfrom continually sought to apply new chemical methods to his field. He made the first major applications of thin-layer resins to carbohydrate chemistry, and greatly facilitated research efforts by the ease and rapidity with which carbohydrate mixtures could be separated and identified.

For the last twenty-five years of his life, Wolfrom engaged in editorial work and tackled the problems of documentation in his chosen field. He, as much as anyone, helped make carbohydrate chemistry one of the best-documented chemical disciplines. He was responsible for the formation of an international committee to develop acceptable rules of nomenclature. In 1963 the committee published these rules and submitted them to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry for adoption. The importance of this project lay in the fact that decades of carbohydrate research had been accumulating without any fully recognized and agreed-upon principles of nomenclature.

Simultaneous with his nomenclature work, Wolfrom served as editor of newly created publications. He was the prime mover in the creation of Advances in Carbohydrate Chemistry in 1945 and its coeditor for twenty-two volumes. This annual series had the purpose of providing review articles on important developments in the field and became one of the best-known and most highly regarded of all annual reviews in chemistry. In 1962 Wolfrom became coeditor of the series Methods in Carbohydrate Chemistry, an invaluable collection of experimental procedures in the field. In 1965 the international journal Carbohydrate Research appeared with Wolfrom on the editorial advisory board. His work as editor, carrying on the concern for accuracy and high standards that characterized his research, made him an indispensable figure within the community of carbohydrate chemists.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Wolfrom published more than five hundred research articles, review articles, and chapters in books. Bibliographies are included in the obituaries by Derek Horton and W. Z. Hassid in Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences, 47 (1975), 487–549; and by Derek Horton in Advances in Carbohydrate Chemistry and Biochemistry, 26 (1971), 1–47.

Important articles by Wolfrom include “The Acetate of the Free Aldehyde Form of Glucose,” in Journal of the American Chemical Society, 51 (1929), 2188–2193; “A New Synthesis of Aldehydo Sugar Acetates,” ibid., 56 (1934), 1794–1797, written with L. W. Georges and S. Soltzberg; “Degradative Studies on Streptomycin,” ibid., 69 (1947), 1052–1056, written with I. R. Hooper, L. H. Klemm, and W. J. Polglase; “A Synthesis of Streptidine,” ibid., 72 (1950), 1724–1729, written with S. M. Olin and W. J. Polglase; “Synthesis of Amino Sugars by Reduction of Hydrazine Derivatives,” in Journal of Organic Chemistry, 27 (1962), 4505–4509, written with J. Bernsmann and D. Horton; “Thin-layer Chromatography on Microcrystalline Cellulose,” in Journal of Chromatography, 17 (1965), 488–494, written with D. L. Patin and Rosa M. de Lederkremer; and “Extrusion Column Chromatography on Cellulose,” ibid., 18 (1965), 42–46, written with D. H. Busch, Rosa M. de Lederkremer, Shoren C. Vergez, and J. R. Vercellotti.

II. Secondary Literature. In addition to the obituaries listed above, see McGraw-Hill Modern Men of Science II (New York, 1968), 614–616. Wolfrom’s contributions to chemical documentation are discussed in “Patterson Award Honors Wolfrom,” in Chemical and Engineering News, 45 (3 July 1967), 59.

Albert B. Costa