George Oster

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George Frederick Oster (born April 20, 1940 in New York City - † April 15, 2018 ) was an American biophysicist .

Life

Oster made a 1961 Bachelor Accounts at the Academy of the US Merchant Marine ( United States Merchant Marine Academy ) in Long Iceland (where he grew up). He graduated with a patent as a naval officer in 1961, but seafaring was not to his taste. From 1961 he studied nuclear engineering at Columbia University , where he received his doctorate in 1967. The topic of his dissertation was High Temperature Saturated Liquid and Vapor Densities and the Critical Point of Cesium . He paid his tuition fees through periodic work as a ship's officer. From 1964 to 1967 he was an instructor at the City College of New York and from 1968 at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley , from 1971 as a permanent member of the laboratory. He was there already in 1964 with a scholarship from the United States Atomic Energy Commission when he was still working on his doctoral thesis in nuclear technology, but then switched to biology under the influence of Aharon Katchalsky , with whom he also worked in Rechovot at the Weizmann Institute at the statistical Mechanics of Biological Networks worked. In the early 1970s, he first worked on population biology of whales (in the Faculty of Mechanics, which, however, did not tolerate this for long), encouraged by his friend, the well-known whale researcher Roger Payne . For this he received the Levy Medal from the Franklin Institute. He then worked as a mathematical population biologist in the Faculty of Entomology . He met ant specialist Edward O. Wilson at Woods Hole summer courses, and they wrote a book about ant colonies. During this time he worked at Harvard University with Wilson and Richard Lewontin, among others . From 1978 he was professor of biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley.

In the late 1970s, he and Robert May wrote an early paper on chaos theory in population ecology. and began to be interested in developmental biology, where he and James D. Murray developed a new model of morphogenesis that took into account mechanical cell contacts in addition to chemical messengers (as in Alan Turing's classic model). Later he turned to the mechanisms of locomotion of bacteria (with myxobacteria he and others discovered a new mode of locomotion by expelling mucus) and the mechanisms of molecular motors. In 1998 he developed a chemical-mechanical model of the ATP synthase required for energy supply in molecular motors . He worked closely with experimenters in the development of mathematical-physical models of biological processes.

From 1985 to 1990 he was a MacArthur Fellow . In 2004 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and in 2006 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1971 and 1974 he received the Louis E. Levy Medal from the Franklin Institute and in 1975 he was a Guggenheim Fellow . In 2014 he received the Sackler Prize for Biophysics.

Web links

  • R. Nuzzo: Profile of George Oster . In: Proc. Nat. Acad. Sciences , Volume 106, 2006, PMC 1413643 (free full text)

References and comments

  1. ↑ Life and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ George F. Oster. National Academy of Sciences, accessed April 18, 2018 .
  3. ↑ He made the successful record Songs of the Humpback Whales (Song of the Humpback Whales , 1970)
  4. ^ Oster, Wilson: Caste and Ecology in the social insects . Princeton University Press, 2008
  5. ↑ May, Oster: Bifurcations and Dynamic Complexity in simple ecological models . In: American Naturalist , Volume 110, 1976, pp. 573-599
  6. ^ Oster, Murray, A. Harris: Mechanical aspects of mesenchymal morphogenesis . In: J. Embryol. Exp. Morphol. , Volume 78, 1983, pp. 83-125
  7. ^ Wolgemuth, Hoiczyk, Dale Kaiser , Oster: How myxobacteria glide . In: Current Biology , Vol. 12, 2002, pp. 369-377
  8. ^ Oster, Wang: Energy transduction in the F1 motor of ATP synthase . In: Nature , Volume 396, 1998, pp. 279-282, PMID 9834036
  9. ^ Oster, Xing, Liao: Making ATP . In: Proc. Nat. Acad. , Volume 102, 2005, pp. 16539–16546, PMC 1283826 (free full text)
personal data
SURNAME Oster, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Oster, George Frederick (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American biophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH April 15, 2018