|
OBITUARIES
Bruce
Bernot Stowe
It is with sadness
that we report the untimely death on September 21, 2003, of our long-time
colleague, Bruce B. Stowe, from congestive heart failure. In 1999, only
a year following his retirement from the Yale University faculty, Bruce
suffered a severe stroke while engaged in research near Aberystwyth, Wales.
He was flown back to New Haven, Connecticut, where he was hospitalized
and later received therapy in a succession of rehabilitation centers.
Unfortunately, despite the latest treatments for stroke at the University
of Florida Medical School, the severity of his stroke precluded significant
recovery. At the time of his death, he was living at home in Gainesville,
Florida, with his son Mark.
Bruce Stowe was born
on December 9, 1927, near Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. His father
was the distinguished World War II correspondent Leland Stowe, and his
mother, Ruth Bernot, was one of the first women qualified to practice
dentistry on a professional basis. He received his early schooling in
Yonkers, New York, where he showed great aptitude and interest in science,
especially biology and astronomy. These interests led him to apply to
the California Institute of Technology, from which he obtained his B.S.
degree with honors in 1950.
One of us (AWG) was
a young faculty member at Caltech in the late 1940s when Bruce was an
undergraduate. The team of Sam Wildman, George Laties, and Art Galston
taught plant biology to sophomores in biology. Bruce’s class included
Carl Price, who became a lifelong friend and also went on to a career
in plant physiology. (Other Caltech contemporaries of Bruce who chose
careers in plant physiology include Bill Purves of Harvey Mudd College
and Del McCune of the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University).
Bruce impressed us all by his scholarly approach to learning. He also
showed his adherence to principle when he sternly informed me that I had
violated (albeit unknowingly) the sacred Caltech Honor Code by proctoring
an examination.
With the concurrence
of James Bonner and Frits Went, we recommended Bruce to Kenneth Thimann
at Harvard for graduate work. He received his M.A. in biology in 1951
and his Ph.D. in 1954. His thesis work identifying indoles by paper chromatography
included the first unequivocal identification in plants of indolepyruvic
acid, a possible intermediate in the biosynthesis of indoleacetic acid
from tryptophan.
As a National Science
Foundation postdoctoral fellow, Bruce went to the Department of Agricultural
Biochemistry at the University College of North Wales, where his lifelong
admiration for anything Welsh began. He invariably wore a leek in his
buttonhole on St. David’s day! Returning to Harvard in 1955, he served
as instructor, tutor, and lecturer in biology. During this period, he
helped train the graduate students in Thimann’s lab. He further developed
techniques of analytical and quantitative chromatography and pioneered
gas chromatography for studying indole metabolism and later lipids. In
those days, radioactively labeled IAA at high specific activity was not
readily available commercially. Bruce worked out syntheses for both C14-carboxyl-labeled
IAA and 3H-IAA, enabling Thimann’s students to pursue some of the
early studies on the location and distribution of auxin in plants without
always having to resort to tedious bioassays for detecting the hormone.
Margaret Wickson examined auxin’s role in apical dominance, Barbara
Gillespie Pickard studied auxin distribution during gravi- and phototropisms,
and Mary Helen Goldsmith investigated polar transport.
By the mid-1950s,
it was clear that one hormone was not sufficient to account for all the
phenomena. Bruce was aware that while auxin was not notably effective
in initiating flowering or enhancing the growth of certain genetic dwarfs,
gibberellins were. When Toshio Yamaki, a young Japanese professor, arrived
in Thimann’s laboratory in 1956, Bruce took advantage of the opportunity
to learn more about gibberellins and suggested that together they examine
the Japanese literature. Toshio asked colleagues in Tokyo to mail copies
of the relevant papers, which Toshio translated and, after extensive discussions,
Bruce summarized. The outcome of their partnership, titled “The History
and Physiological Action of the Gibberellins,” appeared in Annual
Reviews of Plant Physiology, volume 8 (1957). Gibberellins were the
first major new group of plant hormones to be discovered since auxin,
30 years previously. Now we had two chemically unrelated molecules with
overlapping regulatory functions in development, yet clearly distinct
roles as well. This review brought gibberellins to the attention of western
scientists, creating quite a stir. Science immediately requested
a review, published in 1959, with the latest research. Almost overnight,
Bruce became so well known that he soon found himself secretary of the
American Society of Plant Physiologists and responsible for organizing
the national meetings almost single-handedly.
Bruce joined the Yale
faculty as assistant professor of botany in 1959. For many years, he taught
plant physiology one semester and plant biochemistry the other. He enjoyed
being an invited professor in the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental
Studies, and for a time he also served as director of Yale’s Marsh
Botanical Garden. In research, he continued to make important contributions
to understanding regulation of plant growth, especially by auxins, gibberellins,
and lipids. He also investigated such botanical exotica as the ripening
of figs and the biosynthesis of indigo in woad (Isatis tinctoria).
Generations of Yale
students were drawn to his classes to learn about plants. In his course
on plant biochemistry, Bruce introduced students to the wondrous biochemical
versatility of plants. The notion, prevalent early in his career, that
the myriad natural products plants produce—indoles, flavonoids, isoprenoids,
phenolics, alkaloids, glucosinolates, resins, and latexes—were simply
expressions of their biochemical exuberance was unsatisfactory. He recognized
these substances as products of biochemical evolution enabling plants
to survive, attract pollinators and dispersers, keep insects and other
herbivores at bay, and ward off disease and parasites.
His laboratory trained
a succession of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, including
Loyd Powell, John Gaunt, David Penny, James Perley, George Gardiner, Claus
Grunwald, Miguel Vendrell, Ephraim Epstein, Malcolm Elliott, Takashi Iwata,
and Sundararaman Mahadevan. Thanks to the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship
and various other awards, he was a guest investigator in France, Australia,
and Japan and at Stanford University during several sabbatical leaves.
Outside the university,
Bruce was a multifaceted man. He served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps
in occupied Europe for several years during World War II. He was an enthusiastic
bicyclist and hiker. For many years he led students from several New England
colleges on field trips in the White Mountains. The high point of these
trips was the climb above the timberline on Mt. Washington to view the
alpine flora at their peak of bloom. He grew grapes and made wine before
that became fashionable in Connecticut, and he tapped his own maple trees
for making syrup. He was the first secretary of the Yale College Faculty
to record the minutes directly using a laptop. His sense of public service
also caused him to assume responsibility for the Premedical Advisory Committee
at Yale. He served on the editorial board of Plant Physiology (1965–1984)
and Annual Reviews of Plant Physiology (1968–1973).
Bruce married Betty
Kwasny Stowe, and they had two sons, Mark, of Gainesville, and Eric, of
New Haven. During Betty’s long battle with multiple sclerosis, Bruce
gained the admiration of all by his loving care of his increasingly immobilized
wife. He designed ingenious devices to assure her comfort and took her
to St. Petersburg for the International Botanical Congress. Although in
a wheelchair, she accompanied Bruce on a sabbatical when he studied the
effect of oleanimins, of which olive oil is an example, on the ripening
of figs. We remember his delight in arranging to get three crops of figs
in one year by starting off in horticulture at the University of Osaka
in Japan, going to the Waite Agricultural Institute in Adelaide, and then
back to Osaka. Before Betty’s death, he established an innovative
self-help bookshelf at the Yale Health Services Center as a tribute to
her.
Bruce enjoyed many
intellectual pursuits, including astronomy and history. He packed his
telescope and headed off to Hawaii to view the last total eclipse of the
sun of the 20th century with friends and family. In retirement, he returned
to Wales to investigate the origins of the Yale family name. He discovered
that a forebear of Elihu Yale, the East India Company’s merchant
and Yale College’s benefactor, had chosen Iâl, meaning Yale,
the name of the family’s lands, in response to English King Henry
VIII’s decree that all Welshmen adopt English surnames. Thus, Yale
is an authentic early Welsh surname derived from the name of an actual
geographic place in a rugged region of north Wales lying just outside
the town of Wrexham.
Bruce was a scientist
of the highest integrity, widely respected for his scholarship and infectious
enthusiasm for learning. He was an unfailing fountain of knowledge for
both family and friends. Contributions in his name may be made to The
Nature Conservancy.
Arthur W. Galston
Mary Helen M. Goldsmith
Yale University
Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology
|
