Charles Stacy French

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Charles Stacy French (born December 13, 1907 in Lowell , Massachusetts , † October 13, 1995 ) was an American biochemist and inventor , known for research on photosynthesis .

Life

French was the son of a doctor and studied biochemistry at Harvard University from 1926 , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1930 and his doctorate in 1934. As a post-doctoral student he was at the Summer Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove and at Caltech and in 1935/36 with Otto Heinrich Warburg in Berlin. From 1936 he was a teaching fellow at Harvard Medical School and from 1938 assistant to James Franck at the University of Chicago , for whom he should set up a photosynthetic laboratory. In 1941 he became an assistant professor and later an associate professor of botany at the University of Minnesota . From 1947 until his retirement in 1973 he headed the plant biology department at the Carnegie Institution in Stanford.

He is known for spectroscopic investigations of the various chlorophyll complexes in vitro and in tissues, whereby he developed his own measuring devices. The first automatically recording fluorescence spectrometer comes from him. He developed a French pressure cell for breaking cells and a device for geodesy. In 1952 he demonstrated with Violet MK Young efficient energy transfer from phycobilins to chlorophyll.

French was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1963), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1963) and the Leopoldina (1965). In 1973 he received the Merit Award from the Botanical Society of America and in 1971 the Charles Reid Barnes Life Membership of the American Society of Plant Physiologists. In 1974 he received an honorary doctorate in Gothenburg.

He married the daughter Margaret of Julian Coolidge .

Fonts

  • Photosynthesis, Annual Review Biochemistry, 15, 1946, pp. 397-416
  • Light, pigments and photosynthesis, in: WD McElroy, Light and Life, Johns Hopkins University Press 1961, pp. 447-472
  • with JHC Smith: The major and accessory pigments in photosynthesis, Annual Review of Plant Physiology, Volume 14, 1963, pp. 181-224
  • Fifty years of photosynthesis, Annual Review of Plant Physiology, Volume 30, 1979, pp. 1-26
  • Algal culture from laboratory to pilot plant, Burlew 1953

literature

  • French, Charles Stacy, in: Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, ISBN 978-3-817-11055-1 , p. 155.
  • Govindjee, David Fork: Charles Stacy French 1907-1995, Biographical Memoirs National Academy, Volume 88, 2006, PDF (320 kB; English)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ French, Young, The fluorescence spectra of red algae and the energy transfer from phycoerythrin to phycocyanin and chlorophyll, J. General Physiology, 35, 1952, pp. 873-890
personal data
SURNAME French, Charles Stacy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American biochemist and inventor
DATE OF BIRTH December 13, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Lowell , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 1995