Biographical Memoirs Volume 87 (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Thomas Foxen Anderson
Thomas Foxen Anderson
Pages 50-73
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Heinsinger John by Photograph
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Anton graduated from high school in the nearby village of Amherst and studied electrical engineering for two years at Lawrence College in Appleton before joining the Navy and serving as the chief electrician on the battleship USS Texas. After his honorable discharge from the Navy, Anton married Mabel Foxen, a young woman 51
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Anton organized and built the Oslo Power and Light Company, which supplied electricity to power lines connecting the many small towns and farms of Manitowoc County. He also established the Anderson Electric Company to wire subscribers' buildings and to sell and repair electrical fixtures and appliances.
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In Tom Anderson's case, it may have been a botany course at Rockford High School taught by Miss Agnes Brown. As described in an autobiographical essay by Anderson, Miss Brown, although physically handicapped, guided her students on many field trips to neighboring fields and woods to collect specimens that would later be dissected and studied with compound light microscopes.
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For his dissertation research, he showed how isotopes affected vibrational frequencies in boron compounds and in deuterium gas. For deuterium, in addition to effects on vibrational and rotational frequencies, the nuclear spin affected selection rules without influencing the force con
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Decades later cytochrome C surface films were used by Kleinschmidt and Zahn to coat nucleic acids and give them sufficient contrast to be visible in the electron microscope. Although brief, the year in the highly competitive Harkins laboratory provided Tom with other lessons for an aspiring scientist, which he related in his autobiographical essay.
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The committee, which was chaired by Stuart Mudd, a bacteriologist from the University of Pennsylvania, probably selected Anderson because of his strong background in physics and chemistry and his biological research experience in the Duggar laboratory. Working at an intense pace in the RCA laboratory of Vladimir Zworkin in Camden, New Jersey, Tom collaborated with a steady stream of microbiologists, embryologists, and geneticists, who were all eager to visualize their favorite specimens in a totally new way.
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He and Wendell Stanley were able to measure directly the sizes and shapes of various plant virus particles, and, in so doing, confirm the dimensions previously inferred from diffusion, ultracentrifugation, and flow birefringence measurements of viral suspensions. Importantly, the electron microscope had given these investigators the power to actually see as individual objects things that had been only mental concepts.
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One of Tom's most exciting discoveries during this period was made in late 1941 and early 1942 when he, Salvador Luria, and a little later Max Delbrück looked at preparations of the viruses that infect bacteria, the bacteriophages. Studying a variety of phage strains active on the bacterium Escherichia coli, they observed uniform sperm-shaped objects with distinct head and tail structures.
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From page 59... ...
These very important observations were contrary to a popular notion that bacteria harbored phage precursors that are converted to mature viruses upon infection. This provided the first compelling evidence that phages were not specified by genes of their hosts, but rather that they probably had genes of their own.
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Tracking down the explanation of this unexpected result, he found that the T4 and T6 phages would not attach to their host unless activated by an aromatic amino acid cofactor like L-tryptophan, which was present in the nutrient broth but not in the minimal medium. The cofactor phenomenon represented the first directly observed example of allosterism, for, as it was later shown, these cofactors cause the phage's long tail fibers to be released from the tail sheath so that the connectors on their tips can engage receptors on the surface of the host.
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Tom presented beautiful stereoscopic pictures of phages and other biological material prepared by this method at the First Congress of Electron Microscopy meeting, held in the charming amphitheater of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in 1952. His audience was
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An amusing popularization of this work occurred when one of the pictures was used to illustrate a story in the magazine Paris Match, which was titled simply "La Vie." The picture caption was "Un Accouplement de Bacterie." The 18-month stay in Paris, which was supported by prestigious fellowship awards to Tom from the Fulbright Scholarship Fund and the Guggenheim Foundation, was certainly a highlight in the lives of the Anderson family. The rich cultural experience, the challenge of a foreign language, and the vibrant scientific atmosphere of the Pasteur Institute all combined to make this a memorable experience for Tom, Wilma, and their two children.
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I came to the Johnson Foundation for postdoctoral training with Britton Chance and was mainly involved in projects dealing with mitochondria and respiration. In a study with synchronized populations of E
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He joined ICR in 1958 and maintained his affiliation with Penn as an adjunct professor in both the biophysics and biology departments. As I was completing my research at the Johnson Foundation, I received an American Cancer Society Fellowship to take additional postdoctoral training in a world-renowned laboratory of cell biology in Brussels, Belgium.
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As the techniques for specimen preparation were perfected, including thin sectioning combined with negative staining, finer and finer ultrastructure could be visualized. Tom was fascinated by the symmetry properties of the viral structures, particularly the connection between the icosahedral phage heads, which have fivefold symmetry and the phage tails, which have hexagonal symmetry.
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His reputation as an electron microscope virtuoso led several researchers to seek his collaboration in projects with various animal viruses. He was a member of the Council and the Executive Board of the Biophysical Society and served as its president in 1965.
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He was elected president of the Electron Microscope Society of America in 1955 and received its Distinguished Award in 1978. He also received the Pasteur Institute's Silver Medal in 1957 and was elected an honorary member of the German and French electron microscope societies.
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I OBTAINED A substantial amount of personal information from two autobiographical essays: "Some Personal Memories of Research," published in the Annual Review of Microbiology in 1975, and "Reflections on Phage Genetics," published in the Annual Review of Genetics in 1981. I obtained additional information from an article by John H
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National Committee, International Union for Pure and Applied Biophysics (Chairman, 1965-1969) International Union for Pure and Applied Biophysics, Member, Executive Committee of the Commission on Subcellular Biophysics (1971-1977)
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Free energy of formation of iodine monobromide in carbon tetrachloride solution.
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Mazé. Analyse de la descendance de zygotes formés par conjugaison chez Escherichia coli K 12.
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The surface structure of Escherichia coli.
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