Sam Wildman

Samuel Goodnow Wildman (born May 26, 1912 in Placerville , † August 16, 2004 ) was an American plant physiologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is considered to be the discoverer of the important plant enzyme RuBisCO .

Wildman studied at Oregon State University with a bachelor's degree in 1939 and at the University of Michigan with a master's degree in 1940 and a Ph.D. in 1942. During World War II he was briefly at the USDA and from 1944 he did research in the group of James Bonner at Caltech on the tobacco mosaic virus . From 1950 he was at UCLA, where he became a professor and stayed until his retirement in 1979.

At UCLA, he integrated botany from the older College of Agriculture with the newly established group for plant physiology, with other former members of the Caltech group joining UCLA. In the early 1970s he was one of the first members of the Institute of Molecular Biology at UCLA.

In the 1960s and early 1970s he was visiting scholar at the Australian research organization CSIRO in Canberra and in 1975 for a sabbatical year at Kings College London.

In his research on plant viruses, he discovered the Fraction I protein (RuBisCO), one of the most important enzymes in photosynthesis and metabolism ( Calvin cycle ) in the chloroplasts and the most common protein in plants (it can make up half the total protein weight in plants ). At the same time, it is an extremely slow-acting enzyme. Wildman was able to isolate it in crystallized form, with which David Eisenberg succeeded in determining the structure using X-ray crystallography. He later studied chloroplasts (their photosynthetic membrane and dynamics) and other organelles in plant cells. The films made in his group of the inside of living plant cells were widely used in teaching.

In 1979 he received the Charles Barnes Life Membership Award from the American Society of Plant Physiologists.

Web links

• Elma Gonzalez, Elaine Tobin: Samuel Goodnow Wildman, In Memoriam , University of California