Harry Beevers

Harry Beevers (born January 14, 1924 in County Durham , † April 14, 2004 in Carmel , California ) was an American plant physiologist.

Beevers studied at Newcastle University (King's College), where he received his PhD in plant physiology from Meirion Thomas . In his dissertation he made early contributions to the Crassulacean acid metabolism . After completing his doctorate, he was at WO James in Oxford, where he worked on plant respiration (cyanide-resistant respiration). In 1949 he went to the USA as a visiting scholar at Purdue University , where he became a professor. In 1969 he moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz (after rejection of an appointment at Oxford University) , where he mainly dealt with cell biology.

He studied metabolic cycles in plants. In the 1950s he was involved in proving the existence of animals with known mitochondrial respiration and other fundamental metabolic processes such as the Krebs cycle in plants. He then turned to the question of how plants convert stored fats into sugar, which is then available to the embryo in the seed in a water-soluble form. He was with Hans Adolf Krebs and Hans Leo Kornberg (with whom he was in a sabbatical year in Oxford in 1956/57) co-discoverers of the glyoxylate cycle (Krebs-Kornberg or Krebs-Kornberg-Beevers cycle) of plants and discovered glyoxysomes , special microbodies in some plant cells in which the plant glyoxylate cycle takes place (and the β-oxidation of fatty acids).

He was an honorary member of the German Botanical Society , since 1997 a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , member of the National Academy of Sciences (1969) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973). In 1961/62 he was President of the American Society of Plant Physiology and in 1970 he received its Stephen Hales Prize. In 1987 he was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize at the University of Regensburg .

In 1958 he became a US citizen.

Fonts

• Forty years in the New World, Annual Review of Plant Physiology and Plant Molecular Biology, Volume 44, 1993, pp. 1-12

Web links

• Honorary members of the German Botanical Society, with biography