Originally published In Press as doi:10.1074/jbc.R200004200 on April 17, 2002
J. Biol. Chem., Vol. 277, Issue 23, 20113-20116, June 7, 2002
REFLECTIONS
The First Years of the Journal of Biological Chemistry
Joseph S.
Fruton
From the Historical Library, Yale School of Medicine,
New Haven, Connecticut 06520
 |
ARTICLE |
Two men were responsible for the establishment of the
Journal of Biological
Chemistry (JBC) in 1905: John Jacob Abel
(1857-1938) (Fig. 1) and Christian
Archibald Herter (1865-1910) (Fig. 2). Both had spent some time in German laboratories and come to admire the
Zeitschrift für physiologische
Chemie, founded by Felix Hoppe-Seyler in 1877. The joint
effort to promote the new science of biochemistry in the United States
brought together a pharmacologist and a physician of rather different
social background but with a shared enthusiasm about the place of
modern chemistry in medical research and education.
The son of a German immigrant farmer in Ohio, Abel overcame
considerable financial difficulties before receiving a Bachelor of
Philosophy degree at the University of Michigan in 1883. After graduation he married Mary Hinman and spent a year in the Department of
Biology at the Johns Hopkins University. With his wife's encouragement and material support, he went to Germany alone for a medical education (1, 2). The first two years of what turned out to be a seven-year stay
(1884-1890) were spent in Carl Ludwig's Institute of Physiology in
Leipzig. Abel then worked in Oswald Schmiedeberg's Laboratory of
Pharmacology in Strassburg near Hoppe-Seyler's Laboratory of Physiological Chemistry. After receiving his M.D. at Strassburg in
1888, he went to Vienna for clinical training and spent 1888-1889 in
Berne at the Biochemical Institute of Marceli Nencki. Abel derived
particular stimulation from Schmiedeberg's insistence on the academic
status of pharmacology and profited greatly from Schmiedeberg's and
Nencki's chemical programs of research. He published three chemical
papers from the Berne Laboratory and before returning to the United
States did some joint research with Edmund Drechsel in Leipzig (3).
Upon his return to the United States, Abel became lecturer (then
professor) of materia medica and therapeutics at the University of
Michigan, but in 1893 he moved to the new medical school at Johns
Hopkins University to be professor of pharmacology, with an obligation
also to teach the course in physiological chemistry. Among his numerous
research achievements were studies on epinephrine, posterior pituitary
hormones, and insulin (4).
Herter's father also came to the United States from Germany during the
1850s and ran a highly profitable firm of decorators and architects
that provided houses for the richest people in New York City. One of
these people was the grain merchant David Dows, whose daughter Susan
married young Herter in 1885, the year he received his M.D. degree from
the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. He then worked with
William Henry Welch in Baltimore and with Auguste Forel in Zurich, but
his initial interest in neurology derived from the latter gave way to
bacteriology and biochemistry. In 1893, he occupied a house at 819 Madison Avenue, with the fourth floor equipped as a chemical laboratory
and invited young scientists to work there on problems of their own
choosing (5). During 1903-1904, he worked at the Frankfurt Institute of Paul Ehrlich on 1,2-naphthoquinone-4-sulfonate as a staining material (6) and continued this investigation in New York (7). His
principal clinical interest was in the bacterial infections of the
intestinal tract (8). The lectures Herter gave as professor of
pathological chemistry at Bellevue Hospital Medical College (1898-1903) and professor of pharmacology and therapeutics at the
Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons (1903-1910) were said to
have been very popular.
In 1901, Herter met John D. Rockefeller, Jr. at the home of the
pediatrician L. Emmett Holt to discuss Frederick T. Gates' proposal of
a medical research institute. As the project developed Herter became a
friend of Simon Flexner and of Phoebus Aaron Levene, whom Flexner had
brought to the Rockefeller Institute in 1905. Herter was member of the
Board of Directors (and treasurer) of the Rockefeller Institute and was
involved in the planning of the addition of the hospital. By 1908, it
was under construction but Herter died on December 5, 1910. According
to George Corner, "the nature of Herter's illness, if it was ever
diagnosed, was not recorded. It seems to have been myasthenia gravis"
(9).
Although no letter has survived it appears that the stimulus for
the new journal came from Abel, and the enterprise was launched in
March 1905. Abel and Herter were the editors, and they selected 22 associate editors, who included Russell H. Chittenden, Phoebus A. Levene, Jacques Loeb, Lafayette B. Mendel, and Thomas B. Osborne. Herter also brought into service Alfred Newton Richards (1876-1966) (Fig. 3), a Yale College graduate who had
received his Ph.D. in physiological chemistry at Columbia in 1901 and
had become an instructor in Herter's department of pharmacology in
1903. In that year, Richards spent some months in Schmiedeberg's
laboratory in Strassburg, where he also met Franz Hofmeister, the
successor of Hoppe-Seyler (10). Richards later wrote that "it was
decided that the format of the Journal (of
Biological Chemistry) should closely resemble
that of Hoppe-Seyler's Zeitschrift der physiologische Chemie and that the price to subscribers should be so low that young workers could afford it" (11). The first issue appeared in
October 1905. There was a board of directors with Herter as president,
Edward Kellogg Dunham as treasurer, and Richards as secretary.
In 1905, the Englishman Henry Drysdale Dakin (1880-1952) (Fig.
4) accepted Herter's invitation to work
in his private laboratory. By that time Dakin had become a skilled
chemical craftsman through experience as an analyst's apprentice,
pupil of Julius Berend Cohen (professor of chemistry in Leeds), work at
the Lister Institute, and research in Heidelberg with Albrecht Kossel.
Some 25 of his organic and biochemical papers (of 145) had already been
published, and he continued at his previous rate of productivity at the
Herter laboratory (12, 13).
Herter's untimely death in 1910 confronted the Journal with
a crisis. Abel had resigned in 1909 to devote his attention to the
Journal of Pharmacology and
Experimental Therapeutics, and the editorial
board appointed by the directors (Simon Flexner replaced Herter as
president) was composed of Dakin, Dunham, Mendel, and Richards (now
professor of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania) as
managing editor. In 1925, Dakin wrote in a letter: "Up to Herter's
death there was always a deficit to be made up out of private pockets
and to avoid this annual tribulation I pushed the idea of a Journal
Fund in Herter's memory" (14). In 1911, friends of Herter and
relatives of Mrs. Herter set up the Christian A. Herter Memorial Fund,
which has provided stability to the operation of the
JBC.
At the request of Herter's widow, Dakin took over the
laboratory. During 1913-1914 he had Harold Dudley as a guest; they
enjoyed considerable success, notably the discovery of the enzyme
glyoxalase. Near the beginning of his career, Dakin had discovered
arginase, and this association with enzymes led Dakin's friends to
call him "zyme." His book on oxidations and reductions in the
animal body (15) attracted considerable attention. In 1916 Dakin and Susan Herter were married, and two years later they moved to a house in
Scarborough-on-Hudson, with a laboratory in a separate building (16).
Dakin continued to serve on the editorial board of the JBC
until 1930 and as chairman of the financial committee for the rest of
his life.
Dakin retained his British nationality. When war broke out in 1914 and
he failed to find an opportunity to aid the war effort, he joined a
French unit organized by Alexis Carrel, a member of the Rockefeller
Institute, with which he had close contact in New York. Dakin gained
considerable fame for his development of the buffered hypochlorite
antiseptic solution.
In 1914, Richards asked to be relieved of his duties as managing
editor, and the directors persuaded Donald Dexter Van Slyke (1883-1971) (Fig. 5) of the Rockefeller
Institute to accept the job, and the business management was taken over
by the administrative offices of the Institute. Van Slyke came to the
Institute in 1907 after receiving his Ph.D. at the University of
Michigan for work with the organic chemist Moses Gomberg (17). Except
for a year in Emil Fischer's laboratory, until 1914 Van Slyke was a
member of Levene's group and worked on the chemistry and metabolism of proteins. In 1911, he invented an apparatus for the quantitative determination of primary aliphatic amino groups for these studies. This
nitrous acid method was the first of many valuable gasometric procedures devised by Van Slyke.
In 1914 Van Slyke was offered the post of chief chemist at the recently
opened hospital of the Rockefeller Institute. After accepting the offer
with some trepidation he proceeded to lay the foundations of a
quantitative clinical chemistry through studies of acidosis and kidney
disease (18, 19). Equally noteworthy were his studies of gas and
electrolyte equilibria in blood (20) and the discovery of
5-hydroxylysine as a constituent of collagen. In 1948, Van Slyke
reached the Rockefeller retirement age and moved to the Brookhaven
National Laboratory, where he continued his research. He concluded his
service to the JBC in 1925, when the Rockefeller Institute
decided to discontinue publication of the Journal. The
directors offered the management of the JBC and the Herter
Fund to the American Society of Biological Chemists, who accepted in
December 1925.
For further details see the valuable articles by Alfred N. Richards
(11) and John T. Edsall (14).
| |
FOOTNOTES |
Published, JBC Papers in Press, April 17, 2002, DOI 10.1074/jbc.R200004200
| |
REFERENCES |
| 1.
|
Voegtlin, C.
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John Jacob Abel.
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| 2.
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Dale, H. H.
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John Jacob Abel.
Obit. Not. Fell. Roy. Soc.
2,
577-585
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| 3.
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Abel, J. J.,
and Drechsel, E.
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Ueber ein neues Vorkommen von Carbaminsäure.
Archiv für Physiologie
, pp. 236-243, Veit & Co., Leipzig
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Murnaghan, J. H.,
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Ehrlich, P.,
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Corner, G. W.
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A History of the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research, 1901-1953. Origins and Growth
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Schmidt, C. F.
(1971)
Alfred Newton Richards.
Biogr. Mem. Natl. Acad. Sci.
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Richards, A. N.
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Journal of Biological Chemistry: recollections of its early years and of its founders.
Fed. Proc.
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803-806[Medline]
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Hartley, P.
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