In 1950, the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine was awarded to Drs Edward Calvin Kendall (1886–1972) and Philip Showalter Hench (1896–1965) for the discovery and clinical application of cortisone. They helped isolate, synthesize, and establish the clinical efficacy of the hormone. Kendall performed the chemical studies and Hench the clinical studies. They shared the prize with the Polish-Swiss chemist Tadeus Reichstein (1897–1996), who discovered cortisone independently of Kendall and Hench. Kendall was born in South Norwalk, Conn (about 30 miles southwest of New Haven), on March 8, 1886, the son of a dentist and the third of 8 children. Kendall's early education was at the Franklin Elementary School in South Norwalk. He spent 3 years at South Norwalk High School and then transferred to the high school in the neighboring town of Stamford, where he completed his secondary school education in 1904. Kendall enrolled at Columbia University in New York City, where he earned a BS degree in 1908 and an MS degree in 1909. He continued his graduate studies at Columbia University and received his PhD degree in 1910, with a thesis on the kinetics of pancreatic amylase. After completing his doctorate, he did research for a brief time (1910-1911) at Parke-Davis and Company, a pharmaceutical firm in Detroit, Mich. In 1911, he left the drug company to work in the new chemical pathology laboratory at St Luke's Hospital in New York City (near Columbia University). While at St Luke's Hospital, Kendall became interested in the thyroid gland and began research on thyroid hormone in thyroid gland extract. At the invitation of Dr William J. Mayo (1861–1939), Kendall left New York City to join the staff of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn, as head of the Section of Biochemistry on February 1, 1914. Kendall's early research at Mayo was concerned with the effects of the active constituent (thyroxine) of the thyroid gland. He crystallized thyroxine on Christmas Day in 1914. In the late 1920s, Kendall and his associates investigated thyroxine and its role in physiologic oxidation, which led them to the structurally undefined substance glutathione, important in enzyme activation and in oxidation. In 1929, Kendall and his group described glutathione as a tripeptide composed of 3 amino acids: cysteine, glutamine, and glycine. During the 1930s, Kendall isolated 28 different cortical hormones, or corticoids, from the adrenal gland. He discovered that 6 of these were active, and in 1935, he named these effective compounds A, B, C, D, E, and F. Compound A was synthesized in 1944 and compound E (later renamed cortisone) in 1946. In 1948, Kendall and Hench discovered that cortisone relieved the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. Their research on cortisone led to it being used in the treatment of many disorders that previously had been untreatable. From 1921 to 1951, Kendall was professor of physiologic chemistry at Mayo Foundation, and from 1945 to 1951, he was head of the biochemistry laboratory at Mayo. In 1951, Kendall retired from the Mayo Clinic, and in 1952, he became a research professor at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ). While there, he also did research in the laboratories of the drug company Merck and Company in Rahway, NJ. His research focused primarily on the nonsteroidal components of adrenal extracts that were of possible therapeutic value. Kendall had a myocardial infarction on May 1, 1972, and died on May 4. He was 86 years old. He was honored on a postmarked cacheted envelope issued by the United States on December 10, 2000. The envelope honored the 50th anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Kendall and Hench.