Stanford Moore was born in 1913, in Chicago, Illinois, but spent most of his childhood in Nashville, Tennessee, where his father was a professor at Vanderbilt University's School of Law. In 1935 Moore earned a B.A. in chemistry from Vanderbilt. Moore attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin and completed a Ph.D in organic chemistry in 1938. He accepted a position in 1939 as a research assistant in the laboratory of German chemist Max Bergmann at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (RIMR), later renamed Rockefeller University.

Bergmann's research group focused on the structural chemistry of proteins. During his early years at RIMR, Moore questioned whether proteins actually had specific structures. The direction of research in Bergmann's laboratory was greatly influenced by the arrival of William Howard Stein. At Bergmann's suggestion, Moore and Stein began a long-lived and successful collaboration.

The war interrupted Moore's initial investigation of chromatography--the process...