Merton F. Utter

Merton Franklin Utter (born March 23, 1917 in Westboro , Atchison County , † November 28, 1980 ) was an American microbiologist .

biography

In the first year of his life, the family moved to New Market , Taylor County , because his father worked in a bank there. His mother worked as an organist in churches, establishing Merton's lifelong love for music. He first went to school in New Market, then the family moved to Coin , Page County . In 1934 he graduated from high school there. Then he went to college in Indianola , which he graduated in 1938. In 1939 he married Marjorie Manifold, who worked at Iowa State University as the secretary of Theodore W. Schultz . Merton studied at Iowa State University until 1942, where Chester Hamlin Werkman was his doctoral advisor. In 1944 Utter became an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and in 1946 he became an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University . In 1950 the son Douglas Max Utter was born, who became an expressionist painter. Merton Utter was appointed professor in 1956. Between 1965 and 1976 he also headed the department for biochemistry. During his time as a professor at Case Western Reserve University, he spent three years at other universities: 1953 with the help of the Fulbright program at the University of South Australia , 1960 at the University of Oxford and 1968 at the University of Leicester , where he worked daily Hans Leo Kornberg for a morning dispute on the way to the university.

Utter pioneered the field of bacterial metabolism. One of his key research findings was that gluconeogenesis is not reverse glycolysis . In 1966 he investigated the quaternary structure of pyruvate carboxylase of domestic fowl by electron microscope, which was one of the first applications for this purpose. The enzyme turned out to be a tetramer , which was later demonstrated for other organisms by researchers such as Gerhard Gottschalk . Towards the end of his career, he made contributions to the study of Leigh syndrome . At times he was co-editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry . In 1972 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1973 he was honored with membership in the National Academy of Sciences .

literature

• Harland Goff Wood , Richard Wadsworth Hanson : Merton Franklin Utter 1917-1980 . In: Biographical Memoirs . tape 56 , 1987, pp. 475–499 ( online (PDF; 1.2 MB) [accessed on May 18, 2013]).