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On 13 December 2010, the phycological community lost one of its most distinguished members, with the passing of Jack L. McLachlan, PhD, FRSC.
Jack was born 1 April 1930 in Huron, South Dakota, and lived in that state until his family moved to Anacortes, Washington, in 1938. His postsecondary education was undertaken first at Western Washington College in Bellingham and then at Oregon State College, Corvallis. There he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees, completing his PhD in 1957 on culture and autecology of Aphanizomenon flos-aquae, under the direction of Prof. Harry K. Phinney.
Jack's focus on microalgae continued, with emphasis on culturing, during several postdoctoral appointments: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Massachusetts, 1957-1959), the Haskins Laboratory (New York, 1959) and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) in Ottawa (1959-1960). In 1961, Jack took up a continuing position at the NRC's Atlantic Regional Laboratory (ARL) in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he remained until 1991, retiring as a Principal Research Officer. It was early in his time in Halifax that Jack and Dorice, whom he had married in 1951. He realized that this was home for the long term and Jack acquired Canadian citizenship.
In Halifax, Jack initially continued to work with microalgae, in company with Drs James S. Craigie and G.H. Neil Towers, but he soon shifted into macroalgae (seaweeds) in response to a major initiative begun by the then-Director, Dr Arthur C. Neish. Armed with the princely sum of $500, Jack began investigations of intertidal and near-subtidal seaweeds of the region and founded the laboratory's marine algal herbarium (NRCC, now held at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History, NSPM). However, he never abandoned his interest in microalgae - study leave during 1967 at the laboratory of the Marine Biological Association of the UK, in Plymouth, produced publications on both Platymonas and seaweeds of Britain - and microalgae were to return to the forefront of his research in later years at the NRC. Joined during the 1960s by Dr Tikvah Edelstein (1964), Lawrence C.-M. Chen (1967) and Carolyn Bird (1969), Jack became Section Head of a group centred on floristics, life history and culture of northwestern Atlantic seaweeds. During this time he determined the nutritional requirements of fucoids and other marine algae and formulated...