He earned his undergraduate degrees from the Michigan College of Mining and Technology in 1931 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Minnesota in 1935. Following post-doctoral studies at the University of Manchester in England, Calvin was invited to join the UCB faculty by the illustrious chemist Gilbert Lewis who introduced him to Ernest Lawrence. In response, Calvin organized a team of Rad Lab researchers to study photosynthesis, the process by which green plants convert sunlight energy into chemical energy, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. Calvin in the old Radiation Laboratory with the apparatus used in his groundbreaking work on photosynthesis. His research earned him the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Photosynthesis involves a complex series of reactions that are extremely difficult to study.
Not only are the reactions rapid and short-lived, the process can only take place in living plant cells, which means scientists cannot directly study extracts or processed samples. The experiment was slow and painstaking. Leaf cells of the algae would be exposed for a few seconds at a time to carbon dioxide that had been tagged with radiocarbon. The leaves would then be immersed in boiling alcohol so that whatever compounds had been synthesized during the exposure to carbon dioxide could be extracted and identified. By 1957 Calvin and his group had mapped the complete route that carbon travels through a plant during photosynthesis, starting from its absorption as atmospheric carbon dioxide to its conversion into carbohydrates and other organic compounds.