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14 MAY 1912 * 29 JULY 2007
JOSEPH S. FRUTON died on 29 July 2007 in New Haven, Connecticut. He was Eugene Higgins Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and professor emeritus of the history of medicine at Yale University. He had been at Yale, where he led the conversion of the historic Department of Physiological Chemistry into a modern Department of Biochemistry in the Yale graduate school and school of medicine, since 1945. A gifted teacher in the lecture hall, he co-authored with his wife, Sofia Simmonds, General Biochemistry, the first comprehensive and rigorous textbook of biochemistry (Fruton and Simmonds, 1953, 1958). The book was translated into Japanese and various European languages. Several generations of biochemists in many countries were educated using this book, including many who steered the development of molecular biology by merging biochemistry with genetics. Fruton's primary research interests throughout his life were the specificity and mechanism of proteolytic enzymes. His historical research into the history of biochemistry was as distinguished as his laboratory work.
Like many others in his generation, Fruton credited Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith as his inspiration for becoming a scientist. As an undergraduate at Columbia College he majored in chemistry. When he graduated from Columbia in 1931, he was already accepted as a graduate student by Hans Thacher Clarke, who was chair of the Columbia Department of Biological Chemistry. The laboratory community provided his first truly sympathetic environment, and several of his colleagues there became his lifelong friends. His thesis research under Clarke concerned the chemical reactivity of cystine derivatives, and he received the Ph.D. degree in 1934.
With Clarke's support, Fruton was appointed as research assistant to Max Bergmann at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University). Bergmann, a distinguished and accomplished peptide chemist, had recently arrived in the U.S. in one of the earliest waves of fine German scientists escaping from the Nazi regime. Leónidas Zervas, the gifted Greek peptide chemist, had joined Bergmann for a two-year stay. Earlier, Bergmann and Zervas had collaborated on the development of the seminal carbobenzoxy method for peptide synthesis and studied the dipeptidase of intestinal mucosa. Fruton was asked to continue this work, with special attention to the stereospecificity of the dipeptidase, a matter of great interest to Bergmann....