“Could I major in this as a Pre-Med?”
“Yes” “Isn’t it dangerous to work with
bacteria?” “No, it’s FUN!!!!.” And I
was hooked. Major A changed to
Major B and I never looked back. For
some freaky reason relating to the fact
that I was an honors major, I had the
Chairman of the English Department as
my advisor freshman year, and he
urged me to go for a B.A. degree
instead of a B.Sc.—and this turned out
also to be quite lucky—in addition to
science, I took honors courses in creative
writing, advanced English literature, and
also many extra courses in Russian and
spent a summer in Russia back when
the cold war was really cold. It’s true
that I lived my life with a secret fear
all my life that I never was a strong in
math and chemistry as my other col-
leagues. Yet I really hate the specializ-
ation we impose on our science majors
now—and have no regrets at having
such an enriching undergraduate
experience.
I loved Bacteriology—I think as much for
the terrific faculty as for the discipline—
and, to my father’s disappointment, I
decided that graduate school was a
more appealing choice than medical
school. Escaping the boyfriend meant
going away as far as possible from
Indiana for graduate school—and so I
chose Marine Microbiology at the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography in
California—but soon found that I got
seasick easily. Again, on a random
choice, I moved sideways to the new
Biology Department on the new
campus of UC San Diego. Again, fate
played a role, and I was given a rotation
with Carlos Miller who was on sabbati-
cal at UCSD. Carlos had a key role in
the discovery of the plant hormone cyto-
kinin, and was a lovely gentle fellow
who had much patience with this
student who had never studied botany
because of all those English and
Russian courses. But he convinced me
to stay with plants, and I ended up
doing my thesis work characterizing
the pathway for tryptophan biosynthesis
in plants. By then I was married to a
graduate student in astrophysics who
was offered a great post-doctoral oppor-
tunity at the University of Colorado.
Wanting to stay with plants, I arranged
my own post-doc at Colorado with an
up-and-coming young fellow named
Peter Albersheim who was just begin-
ning his groundbreaking work on the
structure of the plant cell wall. It was
this focus that was to set me on my
own career path that focused for the
rest of my academic career on the
study of plant cell walls.
Although Peter had concentrated on cell
wall structure, I felt more inclined to
enzymology and decided to tackle a
major unanswered question that occu-
pied me for the rest of my career—the
mechanism of biosynthesis of the
world’s most abundant organic com-
pound—cellulose. By now I was a
young faculty member at Michigan
State University, and I chose the cotton
fiber as a model system because it was
a veritable factory for cellulose. We
struggled without success trying to
identify an enzyme system that could
make cellulose—but here is a lesson
for the young. While still maintaining
our focus on the key issues, I also
knew that one has to show pro-
ductivity—and so I initiated some
other projects that were “easier” to
succeed with—the first demonstration
of the role of lipid intermediates in
plant glycoprotein synthesis, the pore
size of plant cell walls, insights into
the biosynthesis of callose, and a rather
comprehensive characterization of
cotton fiber development.
Again, fate intervened when for personal
reasons, I relocated to The Hebrew
University in Jerusalem. There we con-
tinued to focus on cellulose biosynthesis
with two of my “favorite” projects—the
finding that sucrose synthase—a key
enzyme in synthesis of the precursor
to cellulose, UDP-glc, had a plasma
membrane-associated as well as theLIFE BOX 4.2. DEBORAH DELMER 109