OBITUARIES

John Biggins

John Biggins, professor of biology emeritus at Brown University and a well-known member of the photosynthesis research community, passed away on September 14, 2004. He suffered a heart attack and did not survive emergency surgery.

John was born on March 30, 1936, in Sheffield, England. After attending grade school in Sheffield, he served in the British Army from 1954 to 1956, where, among other duties, he supervised a munitions decommissioning unit. This experience would serve him well in future encounters with Introductory Biochemistry students. John did his undergraduate studies at University College, London, from which he received his B.Sc. in 1960. While an undergraduate, John became interested in photosynthesis after seeing an exhibit at the World’s Fair in Brussels, and following his graduation he enrolled as a graduate student in the Laboratory of Chemical Biodynamics, headed by Melvin Calvin, at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in plant physiology in 1965, under the guidance of Rod Park and Ken Sauer. John’s Ph.D. thesis, titled “Studies on the Structure and Photochemistry of Chloroplast Lamellae,” drew a lot of notice, and the results were published in two prominent first-author papers, one appearing in Science in 1963 and the other in Nature in 1964. The attention from this work also garnered John a tenure-track assistant professorship at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965, directly out of graduate school and completely bypassing the usual postdoctorate career stage.

At Penn, John set up his lab and pursued independent research in the areas of respiratory and photosynthetic electron transport in cyanobacteria. He was promoted to associate professor in 1969.

While a graduate student at Berkeley, John met his future wife, Cathy Miller, and they were married in 1963. Trying to start a family in urban Philadelphia led to certain dissatisfactions with the inconveniences of city life in general and Philadelphia in particular. After his promotion at Penn, John took a sabbatical leave in 1969 back in Ken Sauer’s lab at Berkeley. When John and Cathy left Philadelphia and headed west, with one daughter in tow and another one on the way, it was their fond hope that they would not be returning to the East. As it turned out, their plans changed when John accepted a position on the faculty of Brown University as associate professor of biology in 1970. John became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1976, and he spent the remainder of his scientific career at Brown University. He was promoted to professor in 1977 and appointed the G. D. Eggleston Professor of Biochemistry in 1990. He served as chair of the Section of Biochemistry in the Division of Biology and Medicine at Brown from 1985 to 1993.

John’s research at Brown encompassed a wide range of topics within the “light reactions” side of photosynthesis. A paper published in 1974 was among the earliest to suggest a role for plastoquinone in photosynthetic cyclic electron transport, a role that has recently been established. John fearlessly employed exotic spectroscopic techniques, including rapid-scanning acousto-optic filtering and linear dichroism of magneto-oriented and stretched film–oriented thylakoids, to understand how thylakoid membrane components respond to light activation. Eventually, this led to an interest in the mechanisms of photosynthetic state transitions, and he used picosecond fluorescence excitation and time-resolved emission spectroscopy to determine the excitation pathway in antenna systems of cyanobacteria, red algae, and cryptophytes. This work established that state transitions in phycobilisome-containing organisms occur by fundamentally different mechanisms from those that operate in plants and green algae.

From 1986 to 1987, John spent a sabbatical year as a Fogarty International Fellow in the laboratory of Pierre Sétif at CNRS in Gif, France, where he embarked on another project, this time to determine the role of vitamin K1 in photosystem I. The results indicated that vitamin K1 has an important role as an early secondary electron acceptor in photosystem I, but it is not the primary acceptor. These experiments involved disassembly and reconstitution of the A1 acceptor site with various vitamin K–like quinones. The experiments on in vitro reconstitution of components on the acceptor side of photosystem I led to an interest in downstream electron acceptors that contain Fe/S clusters. John mastered the art of reconstituting Fe/S clusters in vitro, which enabled him to perform experiments to characterize the interaction of the FAFB-containing PsaC subunit with the FX-containing PsaAB core heterodimer. The interpretation of the results of these experiments led to predictions about how these proteins interact that anticipated the findings obtained from the recent determination of the photosystem I structure by X-ray crystallography.

Throughout his career, John maintained an active, competitive grant-supported research laboratory of a deliberately limited size so that he could have the time and opportunity to do bench work himself. His students and postdocs were few but well trained and productive. John always knew exactly what was happening in his lab, and he was always able to step in and do experiments himself, whether the procedures involved algal cell growth, enzyme characterization, spectroscopy, gene cloning, or in vitro mutagenesis and protein engineering. As a result of his intimate involvement with these experiments, the published results emanating from John’s lab were uniformly trustworthy and reliable.

John served the photosynthesis community in many ways. He was a member of several NSF and USDA grant panels and was program manager for the USDA panel on photosynthesis in 1983. John was co-organizer of the ASPP annual meeting in 1985, which was held on the Brown campus, and was congress secretariat for the VII International Congress on Photosynthesis, which was also held at Brown, in 1986. He was a founder of the Eastern Regional Photosynthesis Conference, which has been held at the Marine Biology Laboratory every spring since 1983.

John chose to retire early from Brown in 1998, at the age of 62, while still healthy and vigorous. By that time, both of his daughters, Sue and Ann, were out of the house and on their own. John and Cathy moved to the Sonoma County wine-making region of California and built a house in the hills overlooking the Alexander Valley. There John started a new “career” as home-scale grape grower and winemaker. He was enthusiastically accepted by the local winery establishment, in part because he could lucidly explain to them what was going on both in the vineyards and in the wine barrels, using his considerable experience in teaching microbiology, biochemistry, and plant physiology to undergraduates. In 2003, John returned to the East Coast for a too-short visit, during which he presented a delightful and informative seminar at the 20th Eastern Regional Photosynthesis Conference titled “Field Photosynthesis in California: From Vines to Wine,” followed by a lab practicum (wine tasting) using materials supplied by several Sonoma County wineries.

It is not easy to convey what made John so endearing. He had a reserved and somewhat crusty public demeanor, but it soon became apparent to everyone that this was a pretense, and underneath was a warm, friendly, and generous soul. In the classroom, John could make biochemistry exciting to even the most myopic premed students by using examples from within their restricted range of interests to illustrate the subtleties of metabolic regulation and energy metabolism. He was always willing to spend time with students to help them learn the material, but he had little patience for requests to regrade exams. He took departmental and university service duties seriously and always put in the time to make sure the job was done right. Above all, John was a patient and effective mentor. I am one of many colleagues who benefited greatly as a junior faculty member from his understated but sage advice, gentle guidance, and the example he set.

John is survived by his wife and daughters, two grandchildren, and a brother. His passing took us all by surprise. He had a lot of good years left, and he is sorely missed.

Sam Beale
Brown University