American biochemist and corecipient, with John Howard Northrop (Northrop, John Howard) and Wendell Meredith Stanley (Stanley, Wendell Meredith), of the 1946 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Sumner was the first to crystallize an enzyme, an achievement that revealed the protein nature of enzymes.

After crystallizing the enzyme urease in 1926, Sumner went to Stockholm to study with Hans von Euler-Chelpin (Euler-Chelpin, Hans von) and Theodor Svedberg (Svedberg, Theodor H.E.). He crystallized the enzyme catalase in 1937 and also contributed to the purification of several other enzymes. He was a professor at the Cornell University Medical School in Ithaca, New York, from 1929 to 1955 and became director in 1947 of the Cornell laboratory of enzyme chemistry, an institution that was established in recognition of his work.