Department History
Department History
Biochemistry Department History
Chapter I
Our Department of Biochemistry was born in 1944. Its founding was part of the transition from a two-year to a four-year medical school that started in 1943. Although there were lectures in biochemistry during the previous phase, the hiring of Dr. Leo Tolstoy Samuels as department chair signaled a commitment to an academic discipline with a strong research focus. During this same period, the Medical School made other significant recruitments, including Maxwell Wintrobe as Chair of Medicine and Louis Goodman as Chair of Pharmacology
Leo came from the University of Minnesota where he was an Associate Professor of Physiological Chemistry. His research interests lay in steroid hormones – their metabolism, how to measure their concentrations, and their physiological roles and effects. His Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, which he obtained in two years, was on the effect of nutrition on the male hormone system.
As chair, Leo began hiring faculty, recruiting graduate students and postdocs, and collaborating with the other departments in the medical school. He was part of the group led by Max Wintrobe and Frank Tyler that applied for and received the first extramural NIH grant (#00002) for studies of hereditary and metabolic diseases. Emil Smith, who later moved to UCLA and became a prominent protein chemist, was hired on the Biochemistry faculty to lead the Metabolic Laboratory. Another early recruit was Guarth Hansen, who mentored Bill Rutter for his Master’s degree in 1950 and took Bill with him to the University of Illinois later that year.
Emil Smith was said to be an excellent lecturer for medical and graduate students. He taught fundamental science in the context of what he called “disturbances of the human being” – i.e., diseases. According to his wife, Leo was not a good lecturer. He believed that teaching well was important but that too much emphasis on teaching drew faculty away from the primary source of their reputations, which was their impact on medical knowledge.
The Department’s first home was the attic of the Life Science Building that still stands (undergoing renovation) on the main campus.* In the 1950’s, funds were obtained from the Eleanor Roosevelt Cancer Research Fund to erect a Cancer Research Building that had one floor each for the Departments of Biochemistry, Physiology, and Anatomy. This small building became a link between the large School of Medicine and Hospital Building (Building 521, dedicated in 1965) and the Wintrobe Building (1980), and we continued to have space there until our move to the EEJMRB in 2005. It was torn down as part of the ongoing preparation for removal of Building 521 and the coming construction of the new Medical School Building.
Leo’s research on steroid hormones led to the publication of over 200 research papers and a number of awards. He served as President of the Endocrine Society, won the Koch Award from that society, was a member of the organizing committee for the First International Congress of Biochemistry (Moscow, 1961), served on a WHO Expert Advisory Panel, won the Utah Award of the American Chemical Society, and was awarded an honorary D.Sc. degree by the U. of U. He stepped down as chair in 1964, but continued research until his death in 1978. I knew Leo slightly and can confirm that he was a kind, gentle, and dedicated man.
* It was in Kent Golic’s lab in that attic that the very first successfully genome edited organisms were produced, using zinc-finger nucleases developed in my lab.
Biochemistry Department History
Chapter II
Barbara K. Samuels
The first installment of this recounting of our history focused on our founding Chair, Leo Samuels. The other member of the Samuels family who had a major impact on the department was Leo’s wife, Barbara. She worked with Leo and the department in a number of capacities. She was a capable research chemist and was a gracious host to the many visitors who came to work with Leo. With the community of biomedical science being a tiny fraction of its current size, researchers frequently traveled among labs and institutions to learn new approaches and techniques in their fields. The Biochemistry Department had a rich parade of visitors and trainees, many of whom had prominent careers in countries around the world.
Barbara was born in 1911 and grew up in Hollywood, California – not amidst its glamour, she claims. She got both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from UCLA, but gave up a Ph.D. program when she married Leo in 1935. She volunteered extensively in Salt Lake City, including teaching English to non-native speakers at the Guadalupe Center, and serving as a member and/or board member of Friends of the University Library, the UofU Women’s Club, the Aztec Club (a town-and-gown organization), the ACLU, NAACP, Common Cause and Planned Parenthood.
After Leo’s death, Barbara established the Leo T. and Barbara K. Samuels Presidential Endowed Chair in Biochemistry, a post currently held by Wes Sundquist. She was kind and modest and a great supporter of the department. The University gave her an honorary doctorate in 1985. She used to come to the department picnics until her health prevented that, and she died in 2010 at the age of 99.
Marjorie R. Gunn
The Department also provided an early home for Marge Gunn, who was hired in her twenties as a secretary before moving to the Department of Medicine. Her long association with the School of Medicine was further solidified by her marriage to Francis Gunn, who was then the Chair of the Department of Pathology. Marge was a generous donor and good friend to our department up to her death in 2023.
Emil L. Smith, PhD
The Samuels years also saw the beginning of protein biochemistry research in the department, due to the arrival of Emil Smith. Maxwell Wintrobe, the Chair of Internal Medicine who was hired in 1943, obtained the very first NIH research grant for a project to study inherited diseases, including muscular dystrophy. To pursue that research, Smith was hired in 1946 and joined the Biochemistry Department as his natural academic home. The grant provided generous funds to remodel space in old Fort Douglas buildings, to purchase high-end (for that time) equipment, to buy supplies and hire personnel. Among the purchases was the second commercial analytical ultracentrifuge ever made. Smith established an outstanding research program based on protein purification, protein sequencing, and enzymology, and attracted domestic and international visitors, including outstanding students and postdocs. He was also an excellent teacher who linked lessons in biochemistry to medical conditions and processes.
The department was quite small in those early years. The University catalog for 1951-52 lists only four tenure-track faculty members, just three of whom ran research groups, plus a range of research track appointees and fellows. Nonetheless, a number of prominent biochemists received early training here during that time.
Bill Rutter received a master’s degree in 1950 and went on to a very distinguished career in academic science and the private sector. He brought the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF to prominence as chair from 1969-1982. In 1981 he co-founded Chiron Corporation, one of the most successful early biotech companies. He founded and still runs the biotech incubator company, Synergenics, which has provided support for the commercialization efforts of his nephew, Jared Rutter. Bill is a very generous donor to our department and the U.
Among Emil Smith’s trainees were graduate student Alex Glazer (Ph.D., 1960) and postdocs Rufus Lumry and Bob Hill. Glazer was a postdoc with Fred Sanger in Cambridge, UK, then had faculty positions at UCLA and UC Berkeley. Lumry had a distinguished career at the University of Minnesota, and Hill was the long-time chair of Biochemistry at Duke. Emmanuel Margoliash spent two years as a visitor in Smith’s lab determining the first sequence of a cytochrome c. Rutter, Glazer, Hill, Margoliash and Smith himself were all elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Emil Smith expressed an interest in becoming department chair after Leo Samuels retired, but he wasn’t considered for the job and moved to UCLA as chair in 1963. Given his prominence in protein biochemistry, this was our loss.
Biochemistry Department History
Chapter III
The Velick Years
Sid Velick initially thought he might have a career as a writer but discovered an affinity for science and graduated from Wayne State University with a degree in chemistry. He got his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1938 at the University of Michigan for work on the metabolism of bile salts. As a postdoc at Johns Hopkins, Sid worked on metabolism in a malarial parasite and at Yale investigated the lipids of Agrobacterium (then called Phytomonas) tumefaciens. In 1945 he was recruited by Carl Cori, one of the world’s most famous scientists at the time, to the Department of Biochemistry at the Washington University of St. Louis Medical School. There he switched his focus to proteins, including protein turnover and enzymology. It was during this period that he began to use fluorescence techniques in his research.
When Leo Samuels stepped down in 1964 after 20 years as Chair of Biochemistry, Sid was recruited as his successor. Upon arrival, he was told by the Medical School Administration that he would be provided only half the space and half the funding he had been promised. This meant that his first two faculty recruits – LeRoy Kuehl and Ollie Richards – had to share a lab. The department was also a bit spread out, and apparently there was little interaction among research groups, although there were regular poker nights involving some faculty and students.
At that time each basic science department was responsible for a year-long course for first-year medical students. As soon as he arrived, Sid insisted on giving all the lectures in the course, so he would know what was being presented and how the course might be improved. The offerings for graduate students were rather meager, consisting of a year-long basic biochemistry course and special topics in areas of individual faculty interest. Sid maintained his research program at a modest level, with a focus on glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase.
Several faculty members who preceded Sid to Utah had active research programs. Steve Kuby was a protein physical chemist, who claimed he never worked on a protein he couldn’t crystallize. That was less a boast about his technique than a demand for a high level of purity so as not to waste good experiments on bad preps. Steve was also famous for asking questions in graduate student committee meetings. If anyone mentioned ATP, he would demand to know whether that was magnesium-ATP. Not an idle question, since not everyone understood that ATP is a metal chelator and high levels of the nucleotide could deplete the free Mg++ in the sample.
Hans Rilling was an outstanding lipid biochemist, who was particularly interested in prenyl transferase and polyprenyl compounds. He collaborated frequently with Dale Poulter and Bill Epstein in the Chemistry Department. Joe Goldstein was known to cite Hans’s work in presentations on Joe’s own Nobel Prize-winning steroid research. Hans had a nice coda to his career when he independently discovered prenylation of proteins in 1989 while on sabbatical at the Jackson Lab in Bar Harbor, Maine. During that stay, he also acquired a new wife, Alison Baker, who subsequently wrote a book of short stories called “How I Came West and Why I Stayed.”
Other faculty included Sherm Dickman, who had variable interests that included amino acyl-tRNA synthetases, ribonucleases, aconitase, and more. Fred Linker, who had a primary appointment in Pathology, was an excellent carbohydrate biochemist at a time when almost no one was interested in carbohydrates. He identified and isolated a number of enzymes of carbohydrate metabolism.
LeRoy Kuehl was interested in what goes on in the cell nucleus, including non-histone proteins and the possibility that the nucleus contains ribosomes that support protein synthesis. Floyd Sweat, who was also added to the faculty during Sid’s reign, was interested in adenyl cyclase and the role of cAMP in glycolysis. Ollie Richards studied chloroplast DNA from Euglena, but in the 1980’s he joined Ellie Ehrenfeld’s lab as a senior scientist and became an important fixture in that group working on poliovirus.
Speaking of Ellie, she arrived in Utah in 1974 along with her husband, Don Summers, who was the new chair of the then Department of Microbiology. Ellie took a primary appointment in Biochemistry to avoid the appearance of nepotism, but her lab space was adjacent to Don’s in Microbiology. She was, and still is, a very productive poliovirus researcher. The level of activity in Biochemistry prior to her arrival was, by one report, “sleepy”, and her presence definitely livened things up. (By the way, the Microbiology Department changed its name to Cellular, Viral and Molecular Biology in 1977, and then became Oncological Sciences when the Huntsman Cancer Institute was formed.)
When he reached the age of 65 in 1978, Sid Velick resigned the chairmanship and, being more interested in research than in administration, became a “postdoc” in Ray Gesteland’s lab in Human Genetics. He began to work toward an understanding of celiac disease, from which he suffered. Later he did a second “postdoc” with John Roth in the Biology Department, where he helped the geneticists develop biochemical assays for NAD, etc. He earned the U’s Distinguished Research Award in 1976 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1981, principally for his work on the physical biochemistry of enzymes using fluorescence methods.
Sid and his wife Bernadette were also active in the community. Their daughter suffered from serious mental illness, which both occupied their time and led to their co-founding the Utah Alliance for the Mentally Ill. They were also instrumental, along with Sherm Dickman, in the founding of the Chamber Music Society of Salt Lake City in 1966. This organization, which brings world-class musicians to Utah from all over the world, is still going strong (with me as a board member).
I remember Sid as a deeply thoughtful scientist and a genuine human being with a wry sense of humor. His focus was on the realities of science and the world, not the hype and the hullabaloo. His son, Bill, is a generous donor to our department.
In Remembrance of Curt Atkin, PhD
Curtis Atkin was a Research Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine (Hematology, Nephrology) and of Biochemistry for many years. He was a scientist’s scientist, always curious, always eager to learn how the world works.
Curt was born in Salt Lake City in 1942. As a boy, in approximately 1950, he visited our School of Medicine as a patient and was seen by Dr. Frank Tyler. He had early symptoms of Alport Syndrome, a genetic disease that ultimately leads to kidney failure, loss of hearing, and a variety of other complaints. Curt thus became a subject in one of the earliest genetic disease studies at the U.
After 3 years at BYU, Curt obtained his bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Caltech in 1964, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970. A prestigious Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellowship supported 3 years of research at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, where he also met his wife, Elisabet Thor. He returned to Utah in 1973 on the research track faculty. His training was in the area of metalloproteins and metal trafficking, and he continued to do research in this field. But he also maintained a scientific interest in the disease that was increasingly affecting him, and he obtained grants for the effort to further define its genetic basis.
With the advent of human molecular genetics on our campus, the tools to discover the gene responsible for Alport Syndrome were close at hand. Curt began a collaboration with David Barker, who had come to Utah initially as a postdoctoral fellow with Ray White, but who later established an Alport project in his own lab in the Department of Physiology. This collaboration resulted in identification of the gene for a specific collagen subtype – Collagen IV A5 – as the culprit. Different mutations were present in different families, but all affected the same gene. This discovery was published in Science in 1990.
At about this time, we asked Curt to give a seminar on Alport in the Biochemistry Department. He described the hunt for the gene and showed a slide with the various mutations that had been identified to that date. He pointed at one and said, “This is the sucker that’s killing me.” I think it was a source of great satisfaction to Curt that he had participated in both the beginning and the end of the genetic study of Alport Syndrome. In doing so, he linked the early days of genetic research at Utah with the modern era of gene discovery.
Curt suffered from hearing loss and kidney failure, had two kidney transplants, and was on dialysis for 18 years. He succumbed to his very personal disease in January 2000. I remember him as a very unassuming but very dedicated scientist and a gentle human being.
Biochemistry Department History
Chapter IV
The Resurrection
In 1977 Sid Velick announced that he would leave the chairmanship of the Department the following year. Hans Rilling was installed as interim chair, and a search committee was formed to find Sid’s replacement. In fact, five search committees worked toward this end for 8 years. External candidates of various calibers were considered, but none landed, at least partly because the recruitment package was rather meager. Hector DeLuca, discoverer of vitamin D and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, said after his visit that he would need an entire new building to make the job attractive to him. Even more modest demands were unlikely to be satisfied with the resources available during much of that time.
The fifth search committee, which included Steve Prescott and Costa Georgopoulos, was frustrated with the earlier failures, and ultimately suggested that Marty Rechsteiner – then in the Biology Department – and Dana Carroll – from Cellular, Viral and Molecular Biology* – be offered the position as equal co-chairs. There was a precedent for having co-chairs. When the Department of Human Genetics was formed earlier in 1985, it proved similarly difficult to recruit an eminent human geneticist from outside the University to head the department, so Ray Gesteland and Ray White were installed as co-chairs. In some quarters, they were dubbed the Rays of Hope – hope that was fulfilled, I should add.
Cecil Samuelson was the Medical School Dean at the time, and he acted on the search committee’s recommendation. Marty and I had known each other ever since my arrival at the U in 1975 and had even taught a graduate seminar course on chromatin together. On a sunny September day in 1985, we met for lunch at the Market Street Broiler on 1300 East (in the old fire station now occupied by Rio Grande Restaurant). Each of us came with a list of goals for the department and found that our lists matched pretty much item for item.
Of prime importance was the recruitment of genuine biochemists. The existing departments of Biology, CVMB, Human Genetics and Pathology had cell and molecular biologists on their faculties, but there was a dearth of people working on biomolecular structure and mechanism. Another goal was to hire excellent scientists, using “people smarter than we are” as the standard. We also agreed not rush the recruitment process but to insist on finding people who fit our vision for the department.
By this time the Medical School was experiencing a period of financial stability, and Dr. Samuelson was able to offer us a package that included 6 new faculty slots in addition to our own, funds for recruiting those people, and prime research space in the Wintrobe Building. This was enough for the co-chairs to sign on and begin the process of revitalizing the Biochemistry Department.
The first item of business was to recruit new, young faculty members. While that was getting started, we made some local additions by offering research track or adjunct appointments to biochemically-oriented faculty already on campus. This included Bill Gray and David Goldenberg from Biology, Dale Poulter from Chemistry, Steve Prescott and Tom McIntyre from Internal Medicine, and relying to a greater extent on Dennis Winge, who also had a primary appointment in Medicine. This made the Department’s catalog entry appear more robust and got these people engaged in the rebuilding process. Ellie Ehrenfeld remained a productive member of and contributor to the department, but her lab and much of her effort was in CVMB.
During the initial search, Marty and I both read every application and gave each applicant an A, B, C . . . grade to winnow the list before presenting candidates to the larger search committee. Some years we saw well over 200 applications, but as with the case of the goals for the department, our scores matched for essentially every one of them. I think it is fair to say that the proportion of very promising applicants was lower and the proportion of disappointing ones much higher than our searches see these days. That was probably because our Biochemistry Department had a low profile at the time and the pool of available, well-trained candidates was smaller. Some years we interviewed 6 or 7 candidates without making an offer, thus maintaining our high standards.
A key to the recruiting process was to “hire the person, not the project.” We either had very good taste or were extremely lucky in the choices we made. We were extremely fortunate to hire Tom Alber as our first addition to the faculty. Tom trained as a protein crystallographer with Greg Petsko at MIT and Brian Matthews at the University of Oregon. He had very broad scientific tastes and unique insights; he was also a delightful person. During his time here, he determined the first structure of a coiled coil, in collaboration with Erin O’Shea, who was at that time a graduate student in Peter Kim’s lab at MIT. Tom stayed nearly 5 years then left for a position at UC Berkeley. Over the years the Department has lost a few faculty members to other institutions, but they always went to very highly rated places. Tragically, Tom died of ALS in 2014, shortly after his 60th birthday.
Next, in close succession, were Tim Formosa and Brenda Bass, both of whom trained with outstanding scientists. Tim got his Ph.D. with Bruce Alberts at UC San Francisco and did a postdoc with Lee Hartwell at the University of Washington. This combined background led to Tim’s productive career using a combination of biochemistry and genetics to elucidate aspects of DNA replication in yeast. Tim’s recruitment was assured when he and his wife Fran went cross-country skiing in a gentle snowfall on his second visit.
Brenda got her Ph.D. with Tom Cech at the University of Colorado during the period when catalytic RNA was discovered and characterized. As a postdoc with Hal Weintraub at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, she discovered the activity that was ultimately named ADAR (adenine deaminase that acts on RNA) and has formed the basis of her independent career. Brenda famously rejected our initial offer, but later had rejector’s regret and ultimately agreed to join the Department.
*The Department of CVMB was initially called Microbiology but changed its name in 1979 to better reflect the interests of its faculty. It was renamed again in the 1990’s as Oncological Sciences and became the academic home of basic scientists in the new Huntsman Cancer Center.
About the Author
Dana Carroll, PhD, authored the History of the Biochemistry Department series. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and is one year older than the Department.