William Parry Murphy was born 1892 in Wisconsin, to Congregational minister Thomas Francis Murphy and his wife, Rose Anna Parry. He attended public schools in Wisconsin and received his B.A. in 1914 from the University of Oregon. Murphy taught high school math and physics for two years in Oregon before entering the University of Oregon Medical School in Portland, where he also worked in the anatomy department as a laboratory assistant. He later received the William Stanislaus Murphy Fellowship award and entered Harvard Medical School in Boston, from which he graduated in 1922.

In 1925, Murphy began a collaboration with George Richards Minot that would ultimately earn them the Nobel Prize. Minot recruited Murphy to join his study, in which pernicious anemia patients were fed one-quarter to one-half pound of liver daily. Reputed for his diligence and dedication, Murphy assumed the painstaking, time-consuming responsibility of counting the microscopic reticulocytes (red blood...