In Memoriam—Howard Green, Alfred Gilman, & Jeff Schatz

ASCB notes the deaths late last year of three cell biology pioneers—Howard Green, Alfred Gilman, and Gottfried “Jeff” Schatz. All three were longtime ASCB members.

 

Howard Green. Courtesy of Harvard Medical School. Photo by Gintaras Sekmokas

Howard Green. Courtesy of Harvard Medical School. Photo by Gintaras Sekmokas

Howard Green, who died October 31, 2015, age 90, was an early and influential investigator of epidermal stem cells. Although Green trained (reluctantly, he said) as an MD, Green always regarded himself as a research cell biologist. Ironically, his basic research culturing skin precursor cells in mice led him directly in 1983 to participate in the first successful clinical treatment of burns using skin grafts from a patient’s own cells.

Green was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1925 and, under family pressure, enrolled at the University of Toronto Medical School, graduating with his MD in 1947. After residency and an Army tour, Green began his research career at New York University School of Medicine in 1956, where he rose to chair of cell biology before moving to MIT in 1970, and then to Harvard Medical School (HMS) in 1980. Green chaired Cell Biology at HMS until 1993 but kept his lab going until 2013.

Green joined ASCB in 1979, moving to emeritus status only in 2008. Among his MIT mentees was former ASCB President Elaine Fuchs with whom he split the 2012 $250,000 March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology. In his characteristic down-to-earth style, Green told the New York Times, “I’m 86. I plan to spend it as quickly as possible.”

 

Alfred Gilman in 2009. Photo by David Gresham. Courtesy University of Texas Southwestern Medical

Alfred Gilman in 2009. Photo by David Gresham. Courtesy University of Texas Southwestern Medical

Alfred Gilman, who died December 23 at age 74, won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Martin Rodbell for his discovery of G-proteins and their role in signal transduction. G-proteins were “the missing piece” in the transduction pathway laid out by Rodbell but it was Gilman, working independently, who identified the binding protein for guanosine triphosphate (GTP). G-proteins are now known to make up a large family of molecular switches active in a variety of cell processes and defective in many diseases.

The son of a renowned Yale pharmacologist, Gilman was born in New Haven in 1941. He took his BS in biochemistry from Yale in 1962 and his MD-PhD from Case Western University in 1969 before joining the NIH laboratory of Nobel winner Marshall Nirenberg that year. He moved to the University of Virginia Medical School in 1971 and the University of Texas Southwestern in 1981. Before the Nobel, Gilman won the Canada Gairdner International Award in 1984 and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1989. Gilman joined ASCB in 1991.

Asked by a reporter how he had reacted to the news of winning a Nobel, Gilman recalled, “First I activated my receptor, then my G-protein. I was obviously extremely excited. I think I secreted all all the adrenaline I had.”

 

Jeff Schatz, Photo copyright Biozentrum

Jeff Schatz, Photo copyright Biozentrum

Gottfried “Jeff” Schatz, a co-discoverer of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and one of the first to identify a mitochondrial-related disease, died October 1, age 79. Schatz was a leader in the modern renaissance of European research biology as a founding member of the Biozentrum at the University of Basel in 1968 and as Secretary General of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) from 1984-89.

Born in Austria in 1936, Schatz studied at the University of Graz, receiving his PhD in 1961. He did research at the University of Vienna and emigrated to the United States in 1968. He spent six years at Cornell University in Ithaca before returning to Europe for the Biozentrum start-up.

Schatz joined the ASCB in 1971 and was awarded the ASCB’s highest scientific honor, the E.B. Wilson Medal, in 2000. In 1998, Schatz won the Canadian Gairdner International Award.

 

About the Author:


John Fleischman was the ASCB Senior Science Writer from 2000 to 2016. Best unpaid perk of the job? Working with new grad students and Nobel Prize winners.