Distinguished Biochemical Discoveries and Biochemists on the Berkeley Campus (1920-1970)

DISTINGUISHED BIOCHEMICAL DISCOVERIES AND BIOCHEMISTS ON THE BERKELEY CAMPUS (1920-1970) DAVID M. GREENBERG* Introduction This article describes a series of important biochemical discoveries on the Berkeley campus and gives biographical information on the scientists who made them. The original publications lack continuity and personal identification of the chief architects of these discoveries. In telling the story of discovery on one campus many relevant discoveries at other research centers are omitted. This is especially true of discoveries relating to the hormones of the anterior pituitary. I have written an account [ 1 ] of the founding of the Department of Biochemistry in the School of Medicine on the Berkeley campus of the University of California and the achievements of its faculty members and students. A series of exceedingly important discoveries in various areas of biochemistry were made and developed on the Berkeley campus in the period 1920-1970 by members of other university departments and institutes of the Berkeley campus. (The scientific work of staff members who joined the Berkeley faculty about 1948 and thereafter has been omitted.) The Hormones Hormones of the anterior pituitary gland.—Most of the physiological effects of the pituitary gland hormones on growth, male and female sex organs, and thyroid and adrenal activity were demonstrated by Herbert M. Evans (1882-1971) and his associates (particularly J. A. Long) by 1921, by means of the intraperitoneal injection of a slightly alkaline extract of beef pituitary glands. An account of * Cancer Research Institute, University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco , California 94122. 136 J David M. Greenberg · Biochemical Discoveries on Berkeley Campus this monumental work was given by Evans [2]. By this procedure, gigantism and changes in the various endocrine organs, including the gonads, were demonstrated by Evans and Long by injection into rats. In 1916 Philip E. Smith (1891-1971) at the University of California and B. M. Allen at the University of Kansas independently had removed the anterior hypophysis of frog tadpoles without brain injury [3, 4] and each described the general morphologic effects. Removal of the frog larvae anterior pituitary gland resulted in a depigmentation of the animals, retardation of growth, and atrophy of the thyroid and adrenal glands. In 1930 Smith published a procedure for the surgical removal of the pituitary gland of rats without brain damage [5]. All of the normal functions of this gland could then be demonstrated to be lacking in hypophysectomized animals. Work on the separation of the individual hormones of the anterior pituitary was begun in Evans's laboratory about 1925. An important requisite was the development of simple and rapid assay methods for measuring each hormonal activity. The assays were then biological in nature. Biochemists are indebted to histologists who, in most instances , devised the tests. The present state of purification and determinations of the aminoacid sequences of the individual hormones were made possible by concurrent advances in protein chemistry. Satisfactory simple isolation procedures were not possible until the invention and development of the ion exchange celluloses by Peterson and Sober, and a little later of the exclusion gels by Porath and others. Rapid aminoacid determination and amino-acid sequence determination were made possible by the development of the automatic ion-exchange system of Moore and Stein, the methods of Sanger of determining the amino-acid sequence of insulin, and improvements by later workers. Karl Meyer, Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat, and many others in the Institute of Experimental Biology made considerable progress in the separation of anterior pituitary hormones, but the methods were inadequate to secure complete separations. After leaving the Institute of Experimental Biology, Karl Meyer became distinguished in the study of the glycoproteins at Columbia University. Fraenkel-Conrat gained fame for his studies on the chemistry of tobacco-mosaic virus at the Virus Institute of the University of California, Berkeley. He demonstrated the infectivity of the nucleic acid moiety of the virus and analyzed the chemical composition Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Autumn 1972 | 137 and amino-acid sequence of the coat protein. In 1968 he was chosen to be the faculty research lecturer in Berkeley. Growth hormone.—Progress in the isolation of the growth hormones was aided by a test of the thickness of the uncalcified...