Biophysical Newsletter - June 2014

4

BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER

2014

JUNE

Obituary

Six Society members, listed below, were re- cently elected members of the National Acad- emy of Science for their work and achieve- ments in original research. Members in the News National Academy of Sciences in 1987. He was a strong supporter of women in science through- out his career. Crothers passed away on March 16, 2014. He is survived by his wife of 54 years Leena Kareoja-Crothers, two sisters, two daugh- ters, and four grandchildren. — Jason D. Kahn , University of Maryland, College Park

Donald M. Crothers

Donald M. Crothers was a pioneer in nucleic acid physical chemistry and protein-nucleic acid interaction. He graduated from Yale University in 1958, earned a second BA from the University of Cambridge, completed his PhD.with Bruno Zimm at UCSD, worked with Manfred Eigen in Göttingen, and then joined the Chemistry faculty at Yale in 1964. He served for 12 years as chair of the Chemistry Department and was a founding member of the Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Department. He trained 67 PhD graduates and ~25 postdocs before retiring from Yale in 2003 and becoming a partner and consultant for biotechnology companies. Croth- ers’ work was characterized by interpreting bio- chemical and spectroscopic experiments with the greatest possible physical rigor. He was admired for his remarkable intellectual agility and deep insight. He made fundamental contributions to understanding the helix-coil transition in DNA, the thermodynamics of nucleic acid secondary and tertiary structure, DNA-drug interactions, hierarchical tRNA folding, chromatin structure and nucleosome positioning, sequence-directed and protein-induced DNA bending, the speci- ficity of DNA- and RNA-protein recognition, the regulation of transcription initiation, DNA cyclization kinetics, and the mechanism of ribo- switches. He co-invented the Zimm-Crothers viscometer and the electrophoretic mobility shift assay, and after retiring he worked on long-range chromosome mapping. He published more than 350 papers, cited more than 20,000 times to date. With Victor Bloomfield and Ignacio Tinoco , Crothers co-authored two influential books on nucleic acids. With David Eisenberg , he wrote the 1979 textbook Physical Chemistry with Applications to the Life Sciences , for which they received the 2008 Emily M. Gray Award from the Biophysical Society. Crothers received many research awards, including election to the

Donald M. Crothers

Dale Boger Scripps Research Institute Society Member since 2014

Joseph Puglisi Stanford University Society Member since 1998

Brenda Schulman St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Society Member since 2011

Howard Stone Princeton University Society Member since 2010

G. Marius Clore (not pictured) National Institutes of Health Society Member since 2009 David Shaw (not pictured) D.E. Shaw Research Society Member since 2010