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14 JANUARY 1926 * 18 JUNE 2000
ROBERT ABELES has been described as a founder of modern enzymology and one of the most influential biochemists/chemical biologists of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna in 1926, Abeles escaped with his family to Chicago in 1939, at the age of thirteen. His undergraduate education was in Chicago, and his doctoral studies at the University of Colorado, but the transformational influence in his early career was postdoctoral study from 1955 to 1957 with Frank Westheimer in the chemistry department at Harvard. There he began to hone the mechanistic framework for appreciation of the chemical reactions of life that distinguished his subsequent forty-year academic and research career.
After initial faculty sojourns at Ohio State and Michigan, Abeles moved to the then-new department of biochemistry at Brandeis in 1964 and remained there for thirty-six years till his death in June 2000. He and his colleague William Jencks defined the heyday of Brandeis as a national center for chemically oriented biochemistry for thirty years.
Abeles, more than any other individual I have met in the past four decades, combined deep chemical intuition about biological transformations with an inimitable ability to prospect for novel reactions. He specialized in a particular form of biochemical pattern recognition. When a reaction occurred in nature for which respected scholars could not formulate a reasonable mechanistic pathway, Abeles and his research group would march in, isolate the responsible enzyme(s), and begin the unveiling and demystification. Out would come definitive and elegant findings, supported by methodologies and experiments that would lead to rational mechanisms that would become the mechanistic paradigms for whole classes of chemical reactions in living organisms. Out also would come new insights into enzymology, which always tied back to fundamental principles of organic, inorganic, and physical chemistry. Through their corpus of work, Abeles, his colleague Jencks, and his mentor, Westheimer, changed the rules for chemists and biochemists in their thought processes about the chemistry of life. Every biochemical transformation could ultimately be explained by the rules of chemistry, and nature was shown repeatedly to be a superbly inventive chemist.
Abeles excelled in two areas of enzymology. In addition to the unmasking of...