Mark Jaffe

Mark Jaffe

Mordecai “Mark” Jaffe, a distinguished plant physiologist, died at his home on Sunday, October 14, 2007. He was 74. During his three decades of teaching career, Mark was an innovative teacher and researcher. He published more than 100 research papers that crossed from plant physiology to biophysics, neurology, and anthropology. He retired in 1988, but he never gave up being a research experimentalist. He set up his own laboratory in a room above his garage, a laboratory that he called the Jaffe Institute for the Absorption of Jaffe Funds (JIFAJAF). When he died he had just published a paper on contractile roots and was currently doing experiments on thigmo reactions in Parmecium. It was a characteristic of his research career that he would pursue highly original research on entirely new areas of study. Examples include his seminal thesis work on tendril coiling, and then his surprising finding of acetylcholine in plants, and then his origination of the new field of thigmomorphogenesis as a basic phenomenon in plant growth and differentiation. He made numerous contributions to areas of growth regulation, phytochrome actions, tissue differentiation, and signal transduction.

Mark did his doctorate work at Cornell and a postdoc at Yale under Art Galston. He became an endowed professor at the University of Ohio, then Charles Babcock Professor of Botany at Wake Forest University. After his official retirement, he moved to Ithaca, where he continued his research activities as an associate in the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research.

Mark found joy in the search for answers to questions about underlying units of nature—a true intellectual researcher.

Carl Leopold
Emeritus Scientist
Boyce Thompson Institute of
Plant Research, Cornell University