LEVENE, PHOEBUS AARON THEODOR

LEVENE, PHOEBUS AARON THEODOR (1869–1940), U.S. biochemist. Born in Sagor, Russia, as Fishel Aaronovich Levin, he immigrated to New York in 1892, and practiced medicine there till 1896. At the same time he studied chemistry at Columbia University and carried out research in the department of physiology. He worked at the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospitals (1902–05). He joined the newly formed Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, where he worked for the rest of his life, from 1907 in charge of the Chemistry Division. His main contribution was in the structural chemistry of nucleic acids, and the isolation of the two sugars (then unknown) which characterize them – D-ribose and its 2-deoxy derivative. His work embraced all classes of tissue constituents, especially proteins and sugar phosphates; in the latter connection he did a great deal of work on fundamental carbohydrate chemistry. He was a pioneer in numerous aspects of biochemistry. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: D.D. Van Slyke and W.A. Jacobs, in: National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. Biographical Memoirs, 23 (1944), 75–126; Tipson, in: Advances in Carbohydrate Chemistry, 12 (1957), 1–12; E. Farber (ed.), Great Chemists (1961), 1313–24. (Samuel Aaron Miller)