I. L. Chaikoff, Biochemical Physiologist, and His Students

/. L. CHAIKOFF, BIOCHEMICAL PHYSIOLOGIST, AND HIS STUDENTS LESLIE L. BENNETT* And some there be, which have no memorial; Who are perished as though they had not been, And are become as though they had not been born: With their seed1 shall remain continually a good inheritance.—Apocrypha: Ecclus. 44 Dr. I. L. Chaikoff came to the University of California in 1930 as an instructor in the Department of Physiology of the School of Medicine, which at that time was geographically located on the Berkeley campus. He continued on the Berkeley faculty after the return of the Medical School Department of Physiology to the San Francisco campus in 1958. He died in Berkeley inJanuary 1966, the victim of chronic and progressively severe bronchial asthma, approximately 5 months before his sixtyfourth birthday. His 35V2-year career was unusual for most University of California professors during those years in that he was research mentor for a very large number of graduate students, of whom 64 received the Ph.D. degree. Some of these are now deceased, but among the survivors are professors emeriti plus many individuals still active in the sciences in both universities and the National Institutes of Health as well as industry and other research organizations. It is impossible to reconstruct with accuracy the precise number of students who were recipients of Master's AU quotations other than those from cited references are from letters or tape-recorded interviews in the UCSF archives, among which are the author's personal letters from or interviews with 37 of Chaikoff's former students. The author is particularly indebted to Samuel Abraham, James Felts, Francis Greenspan, Philip Hirsch, Alvin Taurog, and Jan Wolff, who read all or sections of this manuscript at various stages in its preparation. *Professor of Physiology Emeritus and Vice Chancellor Emeritus, University of California , San Francisco. Address: 959 Peralta Avenue, Albany, California 94706. 111He told me that even though he never had any children of his own, he felt that all of his students were his children and that his life was full because of them."—Taken from a letter to the author.© 1987 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 003 1-5982/87/3003-0529$0 1 .00 362 I Leslie L. Bennett ¦ I. L. Chaikoff degrees, who dropped out of graduate work, or who transferred to other fields, or the total number, probably over 50, of postdoctoral students from throughout the world. The results of research carried out by Chaikoff and his students and collaborators were published in approximately 550 papers, of which, after 1937, he very rarely was senior author . Even casual reviews of the above papers reveal an enormous diversity of research topics. In some instances, extending over a period of decades , many papers related to a common theme. An example is to be found in the papers beginning in 1933 and continuing even after his death that dealt with one aspect or another of the metabolic abnormalities of diabetes mellitus, a topic which had been his concern as a graduate student at the University of Toronto. Many of the most significant of these papers involved using radioactive isotopes of phosphorus and carbon. The latter isotope was essential to another series of papers on steroid metabolism that began in 1948 and continued throughout his career. The third long series of papers tied by a common theme began in 1941 and continued until 1968, 2 years after his death. During this period, his laboratory was using radioactive iodine as a tool to investigate problems of iodine metabolism and thyroid function as well as structure. Beginning in 1933, the year of his first publications not dependent on work done at the University of Toronto, he was senior author or coauthor of a large number of papers unrelated, or at best tangentially related, to any continuing field of research. Usually these papers reflected the interests and/or abilities of one of his students or a fellow faculty member of the University of California or Stanford. The year of 1933 furnishes typical examples of these, with a paper by Chaikoff and Robinson reporting the influence of high- and low-fat diets on the quality of the fat formed...