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Who Was Melvin Calvin And What Did He Discover About Plants?

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Melvin Calvin was an American scientist born in 1911. He came from a Russian immigrant family. Calvin was interested in science from an early age and studied at prestigious universities and became interested in the large protein molecules that transport electrons.

His main life achievement was to work out the intricate chemical process by which plants are able to use the energy from sunlight to fix carbon dioxide and to combine it with water to form simple sugars such as glucose. This process takes hundreds of tiny chemical steps in involves hundreds of different enzymes and transport molecules. Part of the process of photosynthesis is cyclical and this cycle is now called the Calvin cycle, after Melvin Calvin.

Calvin received the Nobel prize in the early 1960s for his work. He also did a lot of experiments with plant oils, showing that the oils from some plants in the Amazonian forest can be used as a substitute for diesel oil.

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