Harvey Washington Wiley

Harvey Washington Wiley (October 18, 1844 – June 30, 1930) was an American chemist who advocated successfully for the passage of the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and subsequently worked at the Good Housekeeping Institute laboratories. He was the first commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration. In 1904 Wiley was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 1910 he was awarded the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute. Early life and career Wiley was born on October 18, 1844, in a log farmhouse in Republican Township, in Jefferson County, Indiana, the son of a lay preacher and farmer, Preston Pritchard Wiley and Lucinda Maxwell. The sixth of seven children, Wiley was raised on a 125-acre farm with a creek that emptied into the Wabash River, a tributary of the Ohio River. Wiley's parents were conductors on the Underground Railroad as the southernmost point in Indiana, across the river from slave-owning Kentucky.