University of Wisconsin–Madison

The University of Wisconsin was founded at the same time that the eastern part of the Wisconsin Territory became the new state of Wisconsin and entered the union. In accord with its charter, the new state university was physically located in the state capital, Madison.

Today, the University of Wisconsin System has grown into an immense network of more than 180,000 students distributed across some 26 campuses. However, the original Madison location still remains the flagship campus with the largest student body (around 44,000 students) and the most distinguished faculty. The university’s $3 billion endowment allows it to rank third in the US for expenditures on fundamental research.

The university is still growing rapidly, with the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (for biomedical research), the Wisconsin Energy Institute (for alternative energy development), and the Human Ecology Building all having opened within the past ten years.

In 2007, the university’s Morgridge Center for Public Service undertook a five-year, fund-raising drive to take advantage of $1 million in annual matching funds that the Morgridge family made available to increase support for the Center’s programs and services, especially in the areas of community-based research and engaged scholarship.

Historically, a number of important scientific investigations have been conducted at Wisconsin, including:

• the “single-grain experiment” (1907–1911) to determine whether cows could live on a diet restricted to one kind of grain, marking the debut of modern nutrition science
• experiments on the diet of rats conducted by Elmer McCollum and Marguerite Davis in 1913, which led to the discovery of the first vitamin (vitamin A)
• experiments by Karl Paul Link in 1924 on “sweet clover disease” in cattle, which led to the discovery of anticoagulant compounds such as warfarin and heparin
• experiments by Har Gobind Khorana in the early 1960s, which led to the decipherment of the RNA code controlling protein synthesis
• research by Howard Temin, also in the 1960s, which resulted in the discovery of the genetic composition of viruses, as well as the co-discovery (with David Baltimore) of reverse transcriptase
• James Thomson’s synthesis in 1998 of the first line of human embryonic stem cells

Overall, some 19 Wisconsin-connected people have received the Nobel Prize, including:

• John Bardeen—physics
• Alan MacDiarmid and Paul Boyer—chemistry
• Joshua Lederberg and Edward Tatum—physiology or medicine (in addition to Elmer McCollum, Har Gobind Khorana, and Howard Temin, already mentioned)

Other prominent Wisconsin folks include:

• Naturalist, John Muir
• Conservationist, Aldo Leopold
• Architect, Frank Lloyd Wright
• Aviation pioneer, Charles Lindberg
• Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons, founders of the Wisconsin School of Economics
• Biochemist, Albert Lehninger
• Mathematician and population geneticist, Motoo Kimura
• Anthropologist, Clyde Kluckhohn
• Actors Fredric March, Agnes Moorehead, & Gena Rowlands
• Poet, Delmore Schwartz
• Playwright, Lorraine Hansberry
• Novelists, Marjorie Rawlings, Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, & Joyce Carol Oates
• Glass artist, Dale Chihuly
• 46th Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney