Biographies » Hanson & Glynn Family Histories

As I have indicated in our family history, I am very much a product of my family genetic and cultural background and the physical environment that I grew up in.

We were relatively poor by modern standards. We lived without electricity, running water, indoor facilities and a telephone. We did not heat the house at night in the winters that were very cold. We did not know what air conditioning was. We did have one of the few refrigerators in the area, which burned kerosene to evaporate the refrigerant while neighbors used ice cut on Academy Lake, and stored in an icehouse in Academy. It was a cooperative effort and ice was free to the best of my knowledge. These conditions persisted as long as I was home. Of course, this was before the invention of television, cell phone and other things that I cannot imagine living without in my present circumstances. Our culture did not include expectations of an education beyond high school. My early environment was agrarian with wide-open spaces and a sparce population that promoted a great deal of time by oneself and a sense of independence that does not exist in most cities or even towns in South Dakota.

I was not a very good student in grade school in LaRoche #1, a country school in Academy, Charles Mix Co., SD in the estimation of most of my teachers. My report cards, saved by my mother, were not very positive in terms of comments by my teachers. I was much better under some teachers than others and did well under one that was a professional teacher, Miss Loraine Melmer. Most of our teachers were housewives and some mothers of children in the area. I was an good speller and excelled at running short distances in the annual field days held in Platte for country schools. I was, and remained, short in stature and was quite shy as a young person partly because I thought expectations for my future were not great. This was related to the fact that most did not further their education and their futures depended on their ability to perform hard physical work.

When I went to high school, I found school more stimulating and found some encouragement from teachers and older friends like Mrs. John Benda who was a longtime family friend and one of the nicest ladies I can remember. During the latter part of my high school education, the owners of a drug store, Slates Drug Store, thought I had good prospects and encouraged me to go on to college and major in Pharmacy. I got to know them because Doreothe worked in the drug store and I would stop in on occasions. Doreothe was understandably reluctant to visit at work so Hazel Slate Qunlin, the pharmacist and I would talk a bit. She was a Slate and they owned the store at the time.

Few of the high school graduates in Platte at that time went to college. Several children from Academy did. Russell Nash became a nationally recognized runner of the mile and went on a scholarship. Nachtigals sent four of their 6 children to college. A few of our fellow graduates went to nurses training. Most went back to the farm, some to the military and, I think only one or two other students out of 35 in the class Doreothe and I were members of went on to college.

I did fairly well academically in high school although I think my report cards now seem rather modest, mostly Bs and some As. They must have graded on a tough curve because I ended up as valedictorian. I also held the record in my high school for the 100-yard dash that had stood for many years. Jim Iverson who became a professional basketball player previously held it. I held the record only from 1953 until a boy named Ringling broke it in 1956. I also performed OK on occasion in football. Platte high school had many very good athletes including a, nationally rated distance runner in the mile in college (Russell Nash from Academy), a pro basketball player (Jim Iverson) and a former Green Bay Packer as alumni. My performances were weather dependent because I had rather severe hay fever that flared up on windy days, particularly in the fall and spring. It affected my ability to breath well and thus perform well in athletics on some occasions. Medications then were not very effective. The hay fever seemed to disappear in my 20s particularly after I returned from the army.

After high school, I started to college at South Dakota State University. It was difficult because my father objected to me continuing my education. He thought that I should get on with earning money rather than procrastinating. The worth of a man at that time was measured by his ability to do hard manual labor well and productively. He favored my entering the service as my brother Dwight and many other graduates did. My money was in a bank account under his control so I had to work to pay for tuition, room and board as I went to college. I had $27.00 in cash when I went to Brookings to register. I had paid my first quarters tuition and for a room in a dormitory. I had to work so much to stay in school that I was too worn out to have the enthusiasm for my studies that they deserved. I worked weekends as a painter, in a restaurant during meals, washing dishes and busing tables, and doing routine work in a plant sciences laboratory. I majored in Pharmacy because I thought that I could earn a sufficient salary to support a wife and family. Tuition was $27.00 per quarter and a room in the dormitory was $27.00 per quarter. Wages were uniformly 60 cents per hour. I didn’t go hungry and had some good friends but did not sleep much. I did not like a 5:30 AM call for ROTC drills that were compulsory.

I now feel that the harder times that Doreothe and I experienced in our young lives were a good preparation for the rigors of our future life. Our expectations were modest and our ability to cope with difficulties was strengthened by our early years.

I volunteered for the draft during the summer after my first year of college. I would have been drafted, as there were only a couple of holdouts in Charles Mix County. Some of draft eligible age had deferments during the Korean War that was really over when I went in but the draft was still going strong. I completed basic training and radar school at Fort Bliss, TX and was stationed in a radar unit in the boondocks not far from Eielson AFB, Alaska. This was about 35 miles from Fairbanks that had a population of about 4000 at the time. Most of those were associated with one of the military bases or worked for the government. My army career was pleasantly memorable because of the experiences that broadened my exposure to different people and ways of thinking. Alaska, before statehood and the discovery of oil, was unpopulated except for the southern coast and was beautiful. The state had very diverse ecosystems and great mountains, ocean, tundra and forests. Wildlife was abundant with moose, fox, wildcats, Kodiak bear, many birds and other animals. During the time of the midnight sun, the nocturnal animals would be out and visible at night. Large Kodiak bear wondered near the perimeter of the compound we lived in. I had chances to move about with fellow soldiers in our unit. We could use vehicles from the air base to go fishing or sightseeing if we had a proper escort.

Many people in basic training through my service in Alaska were college graduates finally caught by the draft after college deferments. A couple in basic training had PhDs. I was not in a unit that had a combat role. We were a radar surveillance unit, and an antiaircraft artillery guidance unit with radar assisted targeting guarding an air base. I am grateful for the experience. I and another person managed the Post Exchange in the unit of about 100-150 people and we were paid a percentage of what we sold at the PX. For some reason the company commanding officer liked me and gave me the job after the person who proceeded me was caught with his finger in the till. I saved about $2,000 by the time I was released. That was a lot of money in 1956. I matured a great deal. I had the G. I. bill when I got out. I thought the benefits were, for that time, very generous, and I had motivation because of exposure to people who were graduates in the army. The Veterans Administration considers me a Korean War veteran and the G.I. bill lasted through three years of undergraduate work and 2 years of graduate work. I went back to college and soon Doreothe and I were married. I think I had a 4.0 GPA in my last three years. After returning, I decided that working in a drug store was not for me but engineering might be. I took courses that left several options like chemistry, engineering and other sciences open. I liked the idea of discovering knowledge and doing hands on research rather than something that used previously gathered information. I was blessed to this day with a great curiosity. So near the end of my undergraduate education, a research career in the Biological Sciences greatly appealed to me because of the great excitement some publications aroused in me.

There also seemed to be job opportunities. The rate of discovery of new information on DNA, RNA, ribosomal function, and gene regulation was formidable. I decided to try graduate school because I still had G.I. bill benefits that still were paid if I could get a fellowship or assistantship. I applied to Wisconsin and Illinois and chose Illinois because I had a chance to work with Salvador Luria (later a Nobel laureate) whose work I admired and they offered a better fellowship than Wisconsin. Luria left for Boston (Harvard Univ.) shortly after I arrived so I chose H. Orin Halvorson as an advisor. I followed two previous graduate students, Herbert Nakata and Robert Collier, who did excellent research for their theses and completed the groundwork for my thesis. They described changes in pH and acetic acid production during growth of a spore forming bacterium. The acetic acid was utilized during sporulation. In my thesis, I showed that the changes were due to repression and inhibition of enzymes of the tricarboylic acid cycle during growth and their production and activation during sporulation. Magasanik at Harvard and scientists in the Pasteur Institute group in Paris under Jacob and Monod were just describing regulation of enzyme synthesis and activity at the time. The publications on which my thesis was based aroused a lot of attention in the world and since my major professor was Dean of Biological sciences and not a biochemist, it was widely recognized that the work was rather independent. I did not want to leave Illinois because the research was very stimulating and it was a comfortable environment. My advisor and committee members put it simply. You don’t owe us anything and we will not teach you as much as you can get from a new scientific environment. I was told to write my thesis and submit it at the end of 2.5 years at Illinois, but the University required 3.0 years of residency for a Ph.D. so I could not defend it until completing the residency. I had three publications accepted or published at the time. At my advisors suggestion, I applied for and was awarded a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship to work in the Pioneering Laboratory of the USDA in Peoria, Illinois and registered for thesis credit. I don’t know how I was accepted as a postdoctoral without my Ph.D., but did not argue because the salary was quite good for our needs at the time. We rented a very nice 2-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood. I worked on photosynthetic reaction mechanisms, or more precisely, energy production involving light activated proton transfer that was not totally elaborated by Peter Mitchell yet. I published another good paper. I also enjoyed working with Jack Newton, a good Microbiologist/Biochemist who worked on bacterial photosynthesis and a chemist, Frank Stadola, who was a very well known natural products chemist. He first described the structure of penicillin G among many other natural compounds of interest as pharmaceuticals and other uses. After a year in Peoria during which I completed my Ph.D. degree, I applied for an NIH postdoctoral fellowship to work in France because of strenuous encouragement from Professor I.C. Gunsalus, a rather famous Biochemist at Illinois who discovered lipoic acid among other accomplishments. He took a liking to me during graduate school particularly after I brought my first paper to him to be published in a journal that he was editor-in chief of (Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications). After getting notice of the fellowship award, Doreothe and I packed up our home into storage, sold our car and left for Gif-Sur-Yvette. We had rented a nice house in a fine neighborhood with good neighbors and were reluctant to leave a comfortable environment.

In France, I worked with Kissel Szulmajster, a student of Sir Hans Krebs, the great biochemist and Nobel Lauriet who described the Krebs Tricarboxylic Acid Cycle. Krebs became a great hero of mine because of the work my group did for years on the fine and coarse regulation of this pathway and he was kind and complementary in my only meeting with him later at Oxford University.

The students and technicians in the laboratory at Gif-Sur-Yvette, France did not speak English so my French improved steadily until I felt very comfortable with the language. We first lived in the village of Palaiseau a short distance from Gif-Sur-Yvette in the beautiful Chevreuse Valley. After about a month, we moved to a small house in Gif-Sur-Yvette and I could walk about half a mile to work. I would walk home, picking up a hot baguette that we used to make delicious sandwiches for lunch. Later, we moved to Isle Saint Louis in Paris for about 6 months, a great place to live and explore Paris. I commuted by train to Gif. I did very well continuing my thesis research on the regulation of the Tricarboxylic acid cycle and discovered that it was subject to catabolic repression when substrates like glucose were present as an energy source and when glutamate was simultaneously provided as a carbon source, The biosynthetic functions of the pathway were also repressed (citrate synthase, aconitase and isocitrate dehydrogenase). The second half of the pathway continued to function in a catabolic role. Because cellular differentiation was also subject to catabolic repression, sporulation was under somewhat similar regulation, the discoveries led to generous grants from the National Cancer Society and the National Science Foundation for many years. We later discovered through genetic studies that the first enzyme in the pathway, citrate synthase had isoenzymes, one with a biosynthetic function and one with a catabolic function. Later, Link Sonnenshien at Tufts Univ. discovered a third enzyme.

This work reflected my life long curiosity about the intracacies of metabolic pathways that formed networks that were tightly regulated to direct carbon flow to where it was required and energy production to meet the needs of a cell. It was a marvelous experience to observe how these goals were achieved particularly through our work with central metabolism of cells. The advent of molecular biology greatly expanded our opportunities to acquire new information and knowledge progressed at a remarkable rate. It has often been said that 90% of what we know about biology was acquired during my academic life. My life was exciting and a continuous educational experience. I now do not have the ability to keep up with developments.

Early research when I had my own University laboratory also involved work on bacterial endospores that are remarkable stages in the developmental cycle of a group of bacteria. They are formed during starvation, particularly the absence of sugars in their environment. They are a survival mechanism. The other properties of these structures are probably secondary phenomena of the dormant nature of the endospores. The endospores formed have no metabolism because their interior is devoid of water. In the absence of water, they do not decompose and survive in this dormant state for centuries. Many have been isolated from ancient plant materials. They are heat, chemical and radiation resistant. They can be boiled for hours and survive well. Sterilizing agents like chloroform, alcohols, and several other harsh chemicals that kill most microbes, viruses and higher forms of life do not destroy them. Several models to explain the mechanisms of their resistance and dormancy were developed and all had a role for calcium dipicolinic acid, a compound almost unique to endospores that was present in the spores in very large amounts. We tested this hypothesis by isolating mutants devoid of dipicolinic acid and found that they were heat resistant. This result caused a great deal of controversy mostly articulated by one of the proponents of his models requiring dipicolinic acid. He convinced our scientific society to appoint a committee of scientists to repeat and evaluate the published results. They did, and their analysis confirmed our results. Our data supported a model proposed by Graham Gould in the UK that was based on data on the structure of spores from Prof. Murrell in Australia and some Canadian scientists (Fitz-James and Murray). I was invited to be a keynote speaker at the Society for General Microbiology meeting in Coventry, UK. Graham Gould and his colleagues were in the audience and I attempted to explain how their model explained heat resistance without requiring dipicolinic acid could be reconciled with the presumption that heat resistance required dipicolinic acid. This was well received in the UK but not in the US for a period of time due to a rather influential man who held strongly to an alternative theory. The Gould Model has now held up for 30 years as the best explanation of heat resistance and dormancy. My interest in this project was inherited from my advisor who retired as Dean of the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Illinois shortly after I received my PhD degree so I was free to continue the research. He had spent much of his life on food preservation and its prevention by inhibiting or killing endospore forming bacteria.

I had interviewed for positions before going to France and decided to accept the one academic position offered to me at the University of Illinois Medical School in Chicago. I liked the Department of Biochemistry in the medical school and really appreciated a great department head, Richard Winzler. I liked teaching biochemistry to dental students. They were a better audience than medical students because the wanted to learn the subject beyond just passing my exams. They really wanted a working knowledge of the material that they could apply to their profession. My research went very well with good publications. Winzler accepted a position at Buffalo, NY and wanted us to go there with him. I was also being recruited by Wisconsin, which at the time had the number 1 ranked Department of Bacteriology in the country. I interviewed and was offered an Assistant Professorship before my interview trip was over. I accepted immediately although for a lesser salary than I was earning at Illinois mostly because we did not enjoy living in the Chicago area and the cost of living was high compared to Madison. My commute in Chicago was long by train and bus and demanded that I keep a rigid schedule to catch my train home in the evening. We had Michael and Doreothe was pregnant and we did not like the idea of raising children in the Chicago area. We lived in Vila Park west of Chicago and we knew very few of our neighbors. In Madison, we lived short bus rides from the University and the buses ran on very convenient schedules from early morning to late evening and driving to work at night took only minutes. We knew all our neighbors well within several blocks.

My first 15 years at The University of Wisconsin were like a dream. My older colleagues, particularly Prof. Perry Wilson, Stanley Knight, Prof. Frasier, Prof. Joe Wilson, Prof Robert Burris, Prof. Luis Sequira and Prof. Arthur Kelman and a few others were great teachers, scientists, and role models. We had seven members of the National Academy of Sciences in the Department and a previous Nobel Lauriet who left for the Scripts Institute in California. Another joint appointment that offered a virology course in the department, Howard Temin, received his Nobel Prize while I was chairman. I did not understand his work at the time although we were friends and I admired him as a person. He discovered reverse transcriptase, the unique enzyme required for retrovirus replication. The HIV virus is a retrovirus. I made good friends in Plant Pathology, Arthur Kelman and Luis Sequira in particular. Arthur and Luis were also members of the National Academy of Sciences. I had several friends in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Julian Davies is the most memorable colleague with whom I communicated regularly in Biochemistry. We had great Thursday night meetings of a new Molecular Biology group and a few gathered for lunch and science once a week.

I was able to develop a course on the physiology of bacteria which dealt with metabolism, cell structure and the regulation of metabolism or what was known about the subject at the time. The class had about 30 registered students but attendance in lectures averaged about 50 persons. In one of my lectures early in my career a Noble Laureate, Ghobin Khorana, and Howard Temin, who later won the Nobel Prize, Jack Strominger, Harlyn Halvorson and a couple of other rather famous faculty attended. This is a bit disconcerting to a young Assistant Professor but I was congratulated by all on a fine lecture. Many other graduate students also attended in order to prepare for their preliminary examinations for the PhD degree. I had developed a laboratory manual describing experiments in physiology and we did exciting things in the laboratory part of the course. The students were wonderful, bright and responsive. I had a great time and regretted leaving this course more than anything when we left for Minnesota.

The graduate students at Wisconsin were as good as any in the country in my field. Graduate students are the heart of a Professors research program. As the Professor ages, they supply the talent that drives the research through applying new technologies and supplying new ideas and directions to a research program. They make a program strong and supportable by granting agencies. In time the Professors are simply administrators in most laboratories who write grants and grant reports, teach, serve on committees and have less and less time for laboratory research as time goes on. The best laboratories have the best graduate students and postdoctoral trainees and I was indeed fortunate to attract some of the very best because of our research and because we were at Wisconsin. With them, research progress was very good and grant support was assured for the program. I was indeed very blessed because I was surrounded by great scientific talent in my laboratory.

I was awarded tenure in 3 years and a full professorship in 5 years after going to Wisconsin.

Two graduate students, Donald Cox and Michael Hampton, came with me from Illinois to Wisconsin. Valerie Flatter, Jean DePamphilis, Ralph Carls, Keith Hutchinson, Thomas Patt, Nobimasu Tanaka, Muriel Curry and Gloria Cole were early graduate students. Jean, Ralph, Don, Nobumasu and Valerie, continued the work on the regulation of the Tricarboxylic acid cycle including new areas like Valerie’s work on enzyme kinetics that showed allosteric regulation of some enzymatic activities (the first out of other than purely biosynthetic enzymes) and Ralph Carls work on the genetics of the regulation. The enzyme kinetics research fascinated me and I was surprised that I liked this research so much because I had to really brush up on my mathematics. Prof. Cleland, perhaps the world’s best-known scientist studying enzyme kinetics became a friend and offered extraordinary advice and help. Before Ralph Carls, only one Krebs cycle mutant had been isolated. He isolated many mutants in every gene encoding enzymes of this pathway. We knew there were isoenzymes of citrate synthase with different functions (one catabolic and one anabolic) as the result of his work; we furthered the links between the regulation of the Krebs Cycle and sporulation through his work and that of a postdoctoral Dr. Allan Youston. Judy Peterson was in the lab and worked with Allan until she got a masters degree. With only a couple of exceptions, these are people I am very proud to have been associated with and nearly all have gone on to very successful scientific and/or academic careers.

The work on the regulation of the Tricarboxylic acid cycle had gone so well that the head of the NSF grant section through which I was funded, visited me an encouraged me to apply for a very large grant that was basically a program grant that would support an institute with faculty on soft money and several students. The University, or course also encouraged me also as it meant a great deal of overhead support for them. I decided that I had barely learned to run a laboratory of about 15 students and technicians and did not want to administer a larger program that would take me away from direct contact with the laboratory work, so I turned it down. I was asked to consider a chair position at the Univ. of Texas, El Paso which our chairman said I should not take because it was not a first rate institution in terms of other scientific resources and I was too young. He was right on both counts so I did not consider it.

Tom Patt, a graduate student decided to study the oxidation of methane in waters of Lake Mendota, Madison, WI. My reasons for suggesting this project had to do with my interest in sporulation and the methane oxidizing bacteria described in the classical work of Prof. Roger Whittenbury in Edinborough Scottland. He indicated they formed exospores. Tom, and simaltaneously a group in Winnipeg, published papers describing that the oxidation of methane occurred in the metalimnion of Lake Mendota and Canadian lakes. Both his group and ours reported that the oxidation of methane in the summer in oligotrophic lakes (polluted lakes) occurred at the boundry between the anaerobic and aerobic layers (metalimnion) and required oxygen. John Rudd was the senior author on the manuscripts from the Winnipeg group and became a good friend of our group. While Rudd’s group studied the oxidation in lakes in detail, Tom Patt and Gloria Cole worked on the microbiology of Methane oxidation and isolated the first described facultative methane oxidizing bacterium known. All those isolated and described in the very important manuscripts of Roger Whittenbury who was at the University of Edinborough before moving to Warrick University in the U.K. were obligate methanotrophs. Facultative methanotrophs use methane but are able to grow on other compounds like sugars while obligate methanotrophs grow only with methane. I took a lot of heat about my supposed heresy. Roger became one of my best scientific friends and we saw each other in the states or in England many times over the succeeding years and had great times together. We invited each other routinely to conferences one or the other of us organized. The bacterium best known of those described by Tom Patt and Gloria Cole, Methylobacterium organophilum, became well known in a short time. We began studying methane-oxidizing bacteria in ernest and went on to study the regulation of methanol metabolism in detail. Mary Lidstrom, a graduate student in my laboratory, began genetic studies of this group and organized a good and very large group of students and scientists when she took a faculty position at the University of Washington and later Cal. Tech., in Pasadena, CA. She has moved back to the Univ. of Washington and continues the work on the regulation of metabolism in this group of bacteria. At the GFBI in Minnesota, Sarah Machlin sequenced the first methanol oxidation gene and part of the regulon responsible for its synthesis.

Kyoshi Tsuji, a scientist on sabbatical leave from the Upjohn Co. and Greg Brusseau began to sequence 16S rRNA molecules from methane oxidizing bacteria and Bernard Tsien studied the regulation of isoenzymes involved in methane oxidation. We published the first phylogenetic trees describing relatedness of many diverse methane oxidizing bacteria and their remarkable ability to degrade toxic chemicals including trichloroethylene (TCE). We described the biochemistry of TCE degradation and that one isoenzyme of methane monoygenase was uniquely responsible. We still hold many patents for this work. The TCE degradation processes have been applied on a rather large scale by the U.S Department of Energy for cleanup of contaminated sites. The Air Force also had been interested but I do not know how far they went with it.

We received a great deal of venture capital to start a company, Biotrol Inc., and had a large group in a leased building. Lindsay Arthur Jr., head of a Minneapolis law firm, and I were the co-founders. We had several demonstration sites around the U.S. for the degradation of polychlorinated phenols and sold the company after about 6 years of existence. The venture capitalists owned most of it by then and the cofounders received little except good fees along the way for using our processes and as consultants.

Work in the U.K. had shown the potential for bacteria that grew on methane or methanol to be used for the production of chemicals by fermentation. A problem with getting products excreted was usually an obstacle to economic production of fermentation products. All the known methylotrophs were gram-negative. I reasoned that if we could isolate a gram-positive bacterium that grew on methanol like one that had been mentioned in a patent by Phillips Petroleum Co. but never published in the scientific literature, we could solve the problem. I am very proud of the approach I formulated to accomplish the isolation of a spore forming, gram-positive bacterium we named Bacillus methanolicus. Soon after our publication, the Dutch and Germans put large groups on research to produce products using this bacterium. We knew before publication that this bacterium was able to produce and excrete large amounts of lysine, used as the most important animal feed supplement produced by fermentation and glutamate that was used in very large amounts as a human food addative. We obtained large grants over time from Kyowa Hakko, Ajinomoto, other Japanese companies and Norsk Hydro, in Norway to improve the processes. We had several good patents approved but I was glad to be done with this research when I retired as there were always production goals for grants and it took us away from research that was based on a search for knowledge for the sake of improving our understanding of the microbial world and life’s processes for the sake of knowledge itself. We were not free to wonder where the work took us to satisfy fundamental questions of Biochemistry and Biology.

Antonito Pananganiban, an undergraduate student, working under my direction at Wisconsin isolated the first bacteria capable of metabolizing methane anaerobically. We also described this processes and where it occurred in a freshwater lake. It was very difficult to publish the work and I was ridiculed at some meetings where I presented the work in 1975. It was firmly believed that methane oxidation required molecular oxygen and the mechanisms of aerobic methane oxidation were well studied at the time. It was widely believed that we had measured another type of process or that we had traces of oxygen in our experiments. Ralph Wolfe a famous man working on anaerobic methane production finally accepted that our process existed but maintained that it was unimportant in the global carbon cycle. Finally others also were able to repeat the anaerobic oxidation and now it is recognized as one of the most important processes in the global carbon cycle accounting for nearly half of the methane turnover and the terminal step in global oxidation of carbon compounds in the absence of oxygen.

When I was near retirement, a scientist who furthered our work on the phylogeny of methane oxidizing bacteria, proposed naming a new bacterium that was the type species of a new genus of methanotrophs after me. The title of the manuscript when the proposal and the description were accepted for publication is Methylosphaera hansonii gen. nov. sp. Nov., a psychrophilic, group I methanotroph from Antarctic marine-salinity, meromictic lakes. It is a very rare honor that I am very proud of. Only a handful of American scientists have been similarly honored. The first author of the manuscript in the International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology, in which all new genera and species of bacteria must be published, to be recognized was Dr. John Bowman. The Journal is published in the United Kingdom. John Bowman the primary author is a very good scientist from Australia on the faculty at the University of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. The bacterium comes from a very severe environment and remade the point that all types of bacteria can live in environments where life was thought not to exist for many years after bacteria were discovered first by Leeuwenhoek.

I was asked by the faculty at Wisconsin to serve as Chairman of Bacteriology in 1971. The faculty at Wisconsin elected chairmen. I was elected to replace a chairman suffering from prostrate cancer. I agreed to do so if it would be understood that I intended to serve no longer than 4 years so my research would not suffer irreparable damage. I did resign in a little over 4 years with a commitment for funds for an addition to our building and the plans for the addition completed. I took two leaves at the University of Washington in Seattle. During one summer leave, I taught a special course for the Medical School that each year drew a Professor from somewhere in the World as a Distinguished Visiting Professor. It was a great honor and much fun to teach very good students. This group of former visiting faculty participated in a symposium at the University of Washington in 1983 that was one of the best I ever experienced. I also did a sabbatical with Prof. Eugene Nester in Microbiology for one semester. I worked on crown gall tumorigenesis with Gene and Dr. Mary Dell Chilton. It was a very good research experience and a graduate student at Wisconsin (see below) continued the project I started to show that bacterial genes were expressed in plant tumors. We made a remarkable set of friends in our neighbors where we lived in Seattle on the two occasions and still stay in touch with them. We also enjoyed many weekend trips and much camping and hiking in the mountains.

We continued work on tumorigenesis in plants in Corynebacteriaum fasciens and discovered that the bacterium produced a cytokinin that resulted in aberrant growth known as “witches broom”. Together with the famous botanist, Folke Skoog, we determined the structure of the cytokinin. After 17 years in Madison, I was offered several positions including Dean of Biological Sciences at Ohio State University, Chairman of Bacteriology at the University of Oregon and Chair of the Department at the University of Pennsylvania. They all suffered from less than desirable places for us to live compared to Madison. I was then offered to Directorship of the Gray Freshwater Biological Institute, University of Minnesota at Navarre, and Professor of Microbiology in the Medical School in Minneapolis. The laboratory was in a very beautiful location and was a very pleasant and well-equipped building. Eckard Munck, Kamil Ugurbil, Ron Crawford in particular were great colleagues, all of whom received endowed chairs when they left Minnesota as did Mike Garfield who was at the Institute a short time before it was closed by Dean Pete Magee.

When I interviewed for the position as director of the Freshwater Institute, I told the committees that I though the Institute should have a unique academic program. I had taught a bit in summer courses at the Woods Hole Marine Biology Laboratories for several years and proposed modeling the course after theirs only with a unique mission. I proposed studying environmental microbiology, of which we knew little using the techniques of molecular biology and modern biochemistry. This proposal gained favor with a member of the Freshwater Foundation and a member Charles Moose, convinced his wealthy family to give and endowment of $500,000 for this purpose to the institute. I proposed to hire summer faculty who would be Distinguished Malcolm Moose summer faculty at the Freshwater Institute and pay travel plus living expenses to elite groups of students who would attend the course. I received much support from a friend, Prof. Stanley Dagley, who was a very distinguished biochemist on the St. Paul campus of the University and he helped teach the course for many years. We recruited several outstanding scientists to teach their special techniques in lecture and laboratory courses. We also presented symposia of 2-3 days with very distinguished faculty participants that were open to anyone who could come. Because of space limitations, the laboratory portion of the course was limited to about 15 students from around the world. Several countries were represented by the students over the years with a student from Stanford University almost every year because of a special relationship I had with the faculty there in environmental microbiology. The course was taught for eight years with remarkable success and it gained great popularity around the globe. We had far more applicants than we could accept and many were faculty from other institutions. My son Tom helped with the course one or two years and attended all the laboratory sessions and lectures. He rubbed elbows with some great people, students and faculty. The course was intense. It was hard to kick the students out of the laboratory at night and on weekends so we could prepare for the next days experiments. They started independent research in groups while in the course once they learned the techniques and we were exhausted after a few weeks in the course. However, it remains one of the most satisfying experiences of my lifetime. A new Dean took over the College of Biological Sciences and others wanted to use the endowment for other purposes and they did use it for whatever.

I feel compelled to mention Catherine Bastein first and later Gregory Brusseau who filled out all the safety forms, did all the routine work to keep the laboratory going and did fine research of their own or with graduate students. They were two of the finest people I have been associated with. Greg had remarkable computer skills and could keep bacterial cultures that no one I have ever known could have kept growing. Our cultures were much in demand around the world particularly mutants and clones carrying genes inserted into plasmids. This was a large job. Tom Patt was the only microbiologist I have know with equivalent microbiological skills. Catherine was nearly as good and had unique and very valuable talents. I thought Catherine was over qualified for any position I could give her without an advanced degree so I arranged a position for her at the Upjohn Co. where she excelled and was promoted rapidly. She was found by us all to have extraordinary people skills and could charm anyone into doing a job that needed to be done. She developed breast cancer and had to quit work for a couple of years but recovered and was welcomed back by the company. I convinced Greg to apply to graduate school and he did so reluctantly because he thoroughly enjoyed doing what he was doing in our lab. He went on to complete his PhD degree in environmental engineering. After these two, I hired another quite remarkable technician, Patricia Olson, who worked on an industrial project funded by the Japanese firms. She was outstanding.

As a department head and Institute Director, I had several administrative assistants. Lucille Fimrite, the last, was outstanding. I count her as one of my good friends yet. The other 4 were adequate and one had to be graded as poor, lazy and tended toward dishonesty. She however did well in the University after she was transferred at my request.

Of the faculty that were at the Institute just before or when it closed by edict of the aforementioned Dean, Eckard Munck went to Carnegie Mellon University where he holds and endowed chair, Kamil Ugurbil holds the most prestigious endowed chair at Minnesota and has his own institute for magnetic resonance imaging, and is also director of a Max Plank Institute in Germany. Ron Crawford became head of Biochemistry and Biotechnology departments at the University of Idaho, and one other holds an endowed chair in Ugurbil’s Magnetic Imaging Institute. During my last year as director, the five faculty at the Institute had as much extramural grant funding as the Department of Microbiology currently has with about 25 faculty. We were good and made no apologies to our Dean for our mission that he did not like. It is true that we did not suffer idiotic Deans well and so suffered the fate (closure of the Institute) rather than succumb to his poor direction. He was fired soon after the Institute’s closure.

My tenure at the Freshwater Institute was a great experience for nine years but I did not enjoy life after that in the medical school except for my teaching and students in my classes. I moved to the Medical School to escape the Dean of CBS and jumped from the frying pan into a fire. My laboratory was moved often once I moved to the medical school as was my office and I was unable to claim enough space to continue my research funding at a level I needed to remain as productive as I had been. My research was not sufficiently medically related to be important to our Department Head Ashley, who was mostly interested in building his AIDS research group. It turned out that he was also a friend of our past Dean. I did not feel I could move and disrupt our family so suffered through a few years more. I took a phased retirement in 1999 and retired in 2004.

In looking back, I see many changes at Universities and the University of Minnesota in particular that disturb me. I find that the value of good teaching and serving students is not properly appreciated in larger institutions. The decreasing support for students, the decreasing loan budgets, and the lessening opportunities for the poorer young people in the population to improve their lot in the world are disconcerting. These became most evident in 2005, and the attitude concerning federal and state support for education K-12 through university degrees has been decreasing steadily for two decades. This may have been influenced in part by the political activism on the part of students beginning during the latter stages of the Vietnam War. Students now are much more conservative now and do not have the breath of political interests and involvement that they did in the 1960s and 70s in my experience. They are less concerned with peace and the welfare of all our citizens. There are outstanding exceptions.

The per capita support for faculty scientists and the increasing partitioning of the support into large projects selected by government agencies and committees has decreased the value of investigator initiated innovative research.

I have served on grants and fellowship panels for NIH, NIEHS, NSF, DOE, EPA, Minnesota Agricultural Support agencies, EPSCOR (State of Oklahoma) and on advisory committees for the State of Tennessee (Alliance for Science) and Carnegie Mellon College of Sciences. I was on several evaluation committees for various laboratories including the Los Alamos, Biotechnology Group, EPA Ada Oklahoma laboratory, The Upjohn Co., South Dakota State University, and others. The granting agency committees were of great value to me in learning the systems for grants evaluation, where the money was, etc. I found they were extremely fair, thorough and I felt they did the evaluations better than any system I could otherwise imagine. I met several scientists who taught me a great deal during panel meetings and in general felt I was doing something very worthwhile. It was a lot of work. The pressure to do a job equivalent to that of other panel members was assurance, on my part, that one did not take the job lightly. The integrity of the panel members and the fairness of the process were inspirations and sources of pride to me.

Universities are now trying to game the system and obtain grant dollars through political action rather than excellence in research. They seek money for facilities for the “in” research programs. Innovation and commitment to new ideas is considered risky and all progress is evaluated in the short term while real scientific progress takes a long time to transfer discoveries to processes useful to medicine and other fields.

I mostly remember colleagues that I met through research conferences particularly the International Conferences on One-Carbon Metabolism. I was at the first held in Edinborough, Scotland in the late 1960s and organized one in Minnesota. Friends from this group that I valued highly were Roger Whittenbury, Warwick University, Crawford Dow, Sir Howard Dalton, and J. C. Murrell also of Warwick University, Hans Schliegel of Goettingen University in Germany, Peter Green of the National Laboratories in Aberdeen, Scotland, Rudolf Thauer of the Max Plank Institute in Marburg, Germany, J. R. (Rod) Quayle, Bath University, UK and others. I was also organizer of two International Spores Conferences that were begun by my advisor, H. Orin Halvorson. These conferences also introduced me to many lasting friends. In Gif-Sur-Yvette, Doreothe and I became long term friends of Maryvonne Arnaud, Jeanine Blisharska, George Cohen, Pierre Schaeffer and others. We got to know the famous Jacque Monod and Francois Jacob at the Institute Pasteur but not well. Howard Temin was a joint member of our department when I was chairman at the time he won the Nobel Prize for his work on reverse transcriptase. Oliver Smithies, a 2007 Nobel laureate, helped me obtain approval for a building addition to the Microbiology building when I was chairman.

There is little doubt in my mind that I have lived in the best of times. In my career, funding and other opportunities in my field were much better than they have been for the past 3 decades. I avoided all the major world conflicts of the last century as and accident of the time I was born. The scientific freedom that I had was greater than scientists experience now because of current directed funding and policies within Universities and the government.

2006 and 2007 were very bad years for me as I closed down my research due to the fact that the Department head in the medical school did not give me laboratory space. It is one of the few departments in the University that do not. It is largely due to the fact that he and I did not get along. The department had a long history of training graduate students and research in microbiology and he is a physician without any appreciation for research that does not have medical applications. He puts all his resources in this direction. I was not considered a contributor to the medical area although I was considered one of the three good teachers in the department and one of the most productive researchers, albeit in an area not appreciated by Prof. Haase, the head.

In addition two of my closest colleagues in science, both in the UK, and both very distinguished members of the Royal Society died. They were Professors Sir Howard Dalton of Warwick University and Rod Quayle of Bath University. They were good family friends and we visited back and forth rather regularly at Madison and in Coventry. They and Roger Whittenbury were probably my closest scientific friends in my recent years with some scientists from the Freshwater Institute. We had communicated regularly until their deaths. Unfortunately, I quit going to meetings in the last few years where we would catch up on events and family activities. The Queen had knighted Howard Dalton sometime in the last 3 years.

Last night (1/14/08) I was kept awake remembering the past history of research on one-carbon metabolism. In the late 1960s, I was at a Spores Conference in Paris when I was invited to attend a symposium on one-carbon metabolism in Edinborough, Scotland by Roger Whittenbury. I was totally impressed by Rod Quayle, Roger, a very young scientist Howard Dalton, and a few others attending. The group grew at the next meeting to include other giants in the field: Hans Schlegel and Norbert Pfennig from Germany and a few other Englishmen. These meetings were small but it was astounding how the group of scientists changed the face of biochemistry and microbiology particularly how these fields related to global carbon cycling. The centers of science were clearly Warwick England, Goettingen Germany, Madison, Wisconsin and later the University of Minnesota when my group moved and Puschino in the Soviet Union. The field then attracted many very good scientists and grew to over 100 invited scientists at the following C-1 meetings. The original group remained good friends and communicated regularly as well as crossed paths frequently at various meetings. I feel very privileged yet to have been included and to have had such remarkable friends in my early life. Our former students now dominate the field with other additions from modern disciplines of biophysics etc. Thomas, our son, is now a very well known member of the C-1 community and it is wonderful to see him carry on in this field with very new and exciting contributions of his own.

My service on NASA committees was very exciting to me. I received a Lindberg Foundation Award at a banquet in Houston, TX attended by all the living Viking astronauts and Mrs. Lindbergh. Doreothe had a chance to meet and talk to her.

I am appending some obituaries to highlight the contributions of this group and at the end of this document. I will append my CV that was last updated completely several years ago.

Professor J. R. Quayle FRS 1926 – 2006

John Rodney (Rod) Quayle was born and grew up in Mold, North Wales.  Following his graduation in Chemistry from Bangor in 1946 he did a PhD with Professor E. D. Hughes FRS in physical organic chemistry.  His obvious talents were recognized with a senior research award from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and by Professor A. R. (later Lord) Todd who picked him to study the chemistry of blood pigments in Cambridge where he, unusually, took a second PhD in 1951.  It was his research on photosynthesis with Professor Melvin Calvin at Berkeley that ignited his career in microbial C1 metabolism where he held sway right up to the late eighties when his appointment as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bath in 1983 somewhat curtailed his active involvement in the subject.

Rod returned from Calvin’s lab in 1955 with a brief foray into pyrethrum insecticides at the Tropical Products Institute in London moving swiftly to Sir Hans Krebs’ laboratory in 1956 to continue his passion for the metabolism of C1 and its compounds when he collaborated with Hans (now Professor Sir) Kornberg and showed that bacterial growth on acetate involved a glyoxylate cycle.  He used his experience in photosynthesis from Calvin’s lab with labeled compounds to set out evaluating the metabolism of methanol formate and carbon dioxide in bacteria.  His work led to the discovery of the serine pathway and from studies with methane-oxidizing bacteria the ribulose monophosphate cycle that paved the way for the discovery of a variety of cycles and pathways in C1 utilizing bacteria and yeasts.

Much of this work was done during his feature as senior lecturer (1963 – 1965) and then Professor (1965 – 1983) at Sheffield University.  Rod’s pioneering work was recognized by his election to the Royal Society and the award of the CIBA medal and prize of the Biochemical Society both in 1978.  He served as President of this society from 1990 to 1993 and was awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Goettingen (1989), Bath (1992) and Sheffield (1992).

But most of all Rod will be remembered by most who knew him as the voice of reason, a serious intellect, generous in his advice and help bringing a compassionate almost genteel understanding of anyone’s problems be they be personal or scientific.  His valedictory lecture at the 1995 symposium on Microbial growth on C1 compounds in San Diego was typically of the man in which he highlighted all the achievements since the 1st symposium 22 years earlier and played scant attention to his own discoveries even though this had influenced nearly every facet of C1 metabolism for over 30 years.

He is survived by his wife Yvonne and children (Susan and Rupert).