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Sweet Dreams by Kathleen Cason
Intro
| Charting the course
| The team's beginnings
| The pitch |
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Charting the course
For Albersheim, 1983 was a watershed year. He had been on the Colorado faculty for nearly two
decades. At 49 years old, he was a well-established plant biochemist; in fact, that year he was
named a Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences. His laboratory had an
international reputation for its studies on plant cell wall structure and on the fate of cell walls
under attack by disease-causing microbes.
Albersheim spent most of his boyhood in Interlaken, N.J., near Asbury Park and the Jersey shore. In
those days, the town of 900 was situated in the nation’s third-largest agricultural-producing
county, supplying New York City with fresh vegetables and dairy products. His mother had a law
degree, although she didn’t practice law after marrying. His father, a German immigrant with a
doctorate in electrical engineering, contributed to development of radar and sonar at Bell Labs
during World War II. While his parents may have molded his intellect and stimulated a passion for
science, it was the rural setting that kindled his interest in agriculture.
“I wanted to become a farmer,” Albersheim said, “but after my first year working on a farm, I
realized I’d always be working for somebody else.”
So he decided on a career in agricultural research, studying chemistry and plant pathology at
Cornell University.
While cultivating corn fields for local farmers, Albersheim had noticed that healthy and sick
plants grew side by side. He wondered why the healthy ones didn’t get sick and why the sick ones
succumbed. He hoped to discover some answers in graduate school at the California Institute of
Technology.
“I decided to work on the plant cell wall because there was nothing known about it. It turned out
to be 90 percent carbohydrate, which I didn’t know when I started,” Albersheim said. “So it was a
challenge. I guess I liked a challenge.”
When he attended his first national scientific meeting in the late 1950s, he presented
the only paper on plant cell wall chemistry. The next year, there were two papers, both
from the same lab.
“Today, national meetings on plant cell walls attract 500 presentations; 1,000 if they pick a good
location,” Albersheim said.
He was a graduate student at Cal Tech and assistant professor at Harvard in the late ’50s to early
’60s. Those were tremendously exciting times in science.
Several Nobel laureates in-the-making were in his Cal Tech class and the late George Beadle, who
shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, headed the department. Beadle earned the
prize for the hypothesis that one gene encodes for a single specific enzyme. Albersheim had been
Beadle’s teaching assistant the year before and helped roast a pig for the celebratory Nobel Prize
luau.
Albersheim was at Harvard when James Watson received the 1962 Nobel Prize for his landmark paper
with Francis Crick that described DNA’s molecular structure and attended that Nobel celebration as
well.
Unraveling DNA’s structure and all the discoveries that followed in its wake not only had a
profound influence on the young scientist but also delivered two subtle messages. First, uncovering
a molecule’s structure often points to answers about how it worked. Second, solving the puzzle of
DNA’s structure required ideas and approaches from several disciplines: In the case of DNA, physics
and chemistry were essential to understanding biology.
Those themes — deciphering molecular structure and involving scientists from diverse backgrounds —
became ideas central to the carbohydrate research center Albersheim and Darvill would establish at
the University of Georgia.
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Intro
| Charting the course
| The team's beginnings
| The pitch |
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Research
Communications, Office of the VP for Research, UGA
For comments or for information please e-mail the editor: jbp@ovpr.uga.edu To contact the webmaster please email: ovprweb@uga.edu
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