Biographical Memoirs Volume 88 (2006) / Chapter Skim
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David Mahlon Bonner
David Mahlon Bonner
Pages 40-61
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From page 41... ...
He started life as a plant physiologist and became a biochemical geneticist working with Neurospora crassa after joining the group of George Beadle and Edward Tatum as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. Initially he explored the use of Neurospora for biochemical investigations and identified intermediary steps in biochemical pathways.
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From page 42... ...
became an applied mathematician and computer specialist. The family lived in a semirural environment on the outskirts of Salt Lake City.
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From page 43... ...
For example, brother James was a research assistant for Theodosius Dobzhansky during the family's year in Pasadena. After returning to Salt Lake City and graduating from high school, David majored in chemistry at the University of Utah and received his honors A.B.
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From page 44... ...
thesis with Arie HaagenSmit dealt with leaf growth factors. He found that "adenine in the presence of potassium nitrate largely replaces the effect of crude pea diffusate in promoting leaf growth in excised pea embryos and in immature excised leaves.
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From page 45... ...
FROM NUTRITIONAL GROWTH FACTORS IN PLANTS TO AUXOTROPHIC MUTANTS IN NEUROSPORA David is best known for his work on the chemical genetics of the bread mold Neurospora crassa. The switch from plants to molds occurred in 1942 when he became a research associate at Stanford University in the integrated research group of George Beadle, a geneticist who was then professor of biology, and Edward Tatum, a biochemist who had been a research associate and had just become an assistant professor.
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From page 46... ...
They were cited for their discovery that "genes act by regulating chemical events," work to which David Bonner contributed substantially while at Stanford. At Stanford, David was also engaged in isolating strains of Penicillium notatum that overproduce penicillin; this was a major project in the Beadle and Tatum group and was their contribution to the national war effort.
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From page 47... ...
Several young people soon joined his lab, including Otto Landman, Naomi Franklin, Gabriel Lester, William Jacoby, André Jagendorf, Elga Wasserman, and Charles Yanofsky. According to his own account7, Yanofsky had applied both to Caltech to work with Beadle and to
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From page 48... ...
In the third year of his dissertation research Charley Yanofsky turned his attention to tryptophan desmolase (now called tryptophan synthase) , the enzyme that catalyzes the coupling of L-serine with indole to form L-tryptophan.
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From page 49... ...
Roper had made the same discovery in Aspergillus nidulans at the same time.9 André Jagendorf, who joined the group as a graduate student in 1948, did the last work on plants with which Dave's name is associated. However, Dave was principally immersed in biochemical genetics of Neurospora, and most of Jagendorf's guidance on a project involving the effect of the synthetic auxin 2,4-D on root growth in cabbage seedlings came from Aubrey Naylor, then a young faculty member at Yale.
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From page 50... ...
Stadler, the renowned maize geneticist, who spent a sabbatical semester in the Bonner lab in 1950. In 1952 David was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma and to get the needed treatment (first surgery and then periodic radiation therapy)
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From page 51... ...
, and this permitted greater interaction with the immunochemists housed there. Peter Treffers, an immunochemist, was chair of the Microbiology Department, and the Bonner lab grad students interacted with grad students like Stanley Mills who were using immunochemical techniques.
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From page 52... ...
Yanofsky had decided to study tryptophan synthetase in E coli, and E coli extracts were found to catalyze three reactions: the reversible hydrolysis of indole-3-glycerol phosphate to indole and triose phosphate; the condensation of indole and serine to form tryptophan; and the overall reaction, the conversion of indole-3-glycerol phosphate (InGP)
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From page 53... ...
According to Stanley Mills, a graduate student with Peter Treffers in the Microbiology Department in the mid1950s, Dave's status at Yale was a subject of discussion and speculation among the students. He had the biggest and most active lab in the Microbiology Department, he had all the prerogatives of a professor, but he was said not to be "on the tenure track." Dave's not being on the tenure track is one of the most pervasive myths I have encountered in writing this memoir.
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From page 54... ...
David invited Charley Yanofsky and Gabe Lester to move with him. They all went to Oak Ridge to scout out the possibilities.
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From page 55... ...
Jonathan Singer of the Department of Chemistry. Together with other former or present Yale grad students or postdocs like Stanley Mills and Jack DeMoss they would nucleate the new department.
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From page 56... ...
Even those who knew him fairly well did not expect him to exhibit such academic administrative skills and extraordinary vision of the future of academic biology and medicine, in contrast to his devil-may-care and free-wheeling approach to everyday matters at Yale. Having experienced the benefits of an integrated biology department at Stanford and the drawbacks of the fragmentation of biology into different departments at Yale as well as their partitioning between the main campus and the Medical School, Dave saw the opportunity to create "a forward-looking community of scholars, teachers, and students in biology and medicine, unhindered by the dead hand of the past."10 His vision was that UCSD would have only one group of science departments that would provide the education for all graduate students (Ph.D.
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From page 57... ...
After moving west, David and Miriam bought a home in Sorrento Valley, an area of San Diego that in the early 1960s was rural and yet close to UCSD. Although he was busy, research on the problems close to his heart was carried out in his lab and collaboratively in the labs of two associates he had brought to UCSD: Jack DeMoss and Stanley Mills, who were now UCSD faculty members.
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From page 58... ...
Many details about David's life were supplied by his brother Francis T Bonner, and some are at variance with the description of the Bonner family in the National Academy of Sciences biographical memoir of James Bonner.
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From page 59... ...
Yanofsky. David Mahlon Bonner.
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From page 60... ...
Cold Spring Harb.
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From page 61... ...
Yanofsky. Allelic strains of Neurospora lacking tryptophan synthetase: A preliminary immunochemical characterization.
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