Melvin Schwartz (November 2, 1932 - August 28, 2006)) was an American physicist. His interest in physics began at the age of 12. Schwartz and his colleagues ( Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger) performed experiments which led to their Nobel Prize (1988) in the early 1960s, when all three were on the Columbia faculty. The experiment was carried out at the nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory where they developed the neutrino beam method and demonstrated the doublet structure of leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino. In 1966, after 17 years at Columbia, he moved west to Stanford University, where SLAC, a new accelerator, was just being completed. There, he was involved in research investigating the charge asymmetry in the decay of long-lived neutral kaons and another project which produced and detected relativistic hydrogen-like atoms made up of a pion and a muon. He died in 2006 after struggling with Parkinson's disease and hepatitis C.