Frederick C. Neidhardt

John L. Ingraham

Moselio Schaechter

Schaechter, Moselio

Ingraham, John L.

Neidhardt, Frederick C.

Hemeroteca Cientifica Catalana

EDITORIALThe year 2007 commemorates the 50th anniversary of thepublication of The Microbial World, the seminal microbiolo-gy textbook that shattered the microbiology world and whosefirst edition was coauthored by Roger Y. Stanier, MichaelDoudoroff and Edward A. Adelberg. The year 2007 marksalso twenty-five years of Stanier’s passing away. TheSpanish Society for Microbiology (SEM) with the support ofFundación Ramón Areceshas organized a Sympo-sium, in the frame of the21st national congress ofthe SEM (Seville, 17-20September 2007), to com-memorate those anniver-saries, and has invited us(Schaechter, Ingraham andNeidhardt) to contributeto this celebration.Writing The Micro-bial World. One of us(Ingraham) was coauthorof The Microbial Worldfrom its fourth edition. Inthe summer of 1974 hereceived a life-changingletter from Stanier askingto join him and Edward Adelberg in writing the next editionof the book. He would replace, if such were possible,Michael Doudoroff, one of the original authors and a brilliantscientist, in doing the parts on physiology, biochemistry, andapplications. Adelberg would continue his stewardship ofgenetics, immunology, and infectious diseases. Stanierwould do all the rest and, of course, he would lead, direct,oversee, synthesize, orchestrate, and criticize. RicardoGuerrero, current SEM president and young postdoctoral fel-low in Ingraham laboratory in the years 1972-1973, was pay-ing him a visit during the summer of 1974 and surely recallsIngraham’s excitement after receiving Stanier’s letter.The three authors ofthe coming edition metthe next summer atIngraham’s house inDavis at Stanier’s insis-tence to put the booktogether. Stanier wascommitted to presenta-tion almost as deeply ashe was to science. Thebook had to sound rightas well as be right.Stanier’s sound test wasto read the other author’sofferings aloud, pausingfrequently to commentand suggest rewriting.Ingraham recalls hispausing while readingsomething he had writtenabout the chemostat, horrified that Ingraham had called it adevice. “Device sounds so sinister.” Marjorie—Ingraham’swife—fed them, typed the complete manuscript with three carboncopies, and proofread it. She also sewed the cuffs on Roger’s newtrousers. She had the toughest job and busiest summer of all.INTERNATIONAL MICROBIOLOGY (2007) 10:153-156DOI: 10.2436/20.1501.01.22  ISSN: 1139-6709 www.im.microbios.org Moselio Schaechter,1 John L. Ingraham,2 Frederick C. Neidhardt31San Diego State University and University of California-San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA.2University of California-Davis, Davis, CA, USA. 3University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USAThe road fromThe Microbial worldto Microbe154 INT. MICROBIOL. Vol. 10, 2007At Stanier’s request, Ingraham went on to lead the writ-ing of the fifth edition without Staniers’s help, as by then hebecame quite ill, but with the valuable participation of MarkL. Wheelis and Page R. Painter. The publishers, of course,were anxious to do subsequent editions, but somehow itnever seemed quite right to Ingraham, who found himself(during the preparation of the fifth edition) attempting towrite with Roger’s voice and hearing him read it aloud. Hedecided that the book should appropriately end with Roger. Stanier was a remarkably productive microbiologist.Certainly, his essay on what is a bacterium, and studies onmetabolism of aromatic compounds, taxonomy of pseudo-monads and cyanobacteria are monuments of modern micro-biology. But his proudest achievement, as he said, was writ-ing The Microbial World. He mentioned that often in hisfinal days. He always said that his purpose for writing it wasto make microbiology a part of biology from which it hadalways been curiously isolated. The book certainly was aforce in that movement, now accomplished—so fullyaccomplished that it is difficult to imagine that it was notalways so.Stanier’s major aim in science was to present microbiol-ogy as a logical, coherent science and The Microbial Worldwas one of his major vehicles. His classic 1962 paper withC.B. van Niel, “The concept of a bacterium” [4] reveals thatpassion, as do his intense investigations on taxonomy ofPseudomonas and cyanobacteria. Of course, things changedsince those studies—the archaea were discovered, as werepowerful new molecular methods to deduce microbial phy-logeny. Roger would have embraced them fully as he did ear-lier molecular methods such as DNA hybridization.Inexplicably, some have concluded that Roger’s earlyattempts at finding structure and coherence in microbiology,probably because they were clearly and convincingly pre-sented, were an impediment to the science’s progress [2]. Ofcourse, crisply defining questions and clearly stating posi-tions are always stimulants, never an impediment. ThisSymposium shows that many of us continue to valueStanier’s clarifying contributions to microbiology. Origins of Growth of the Bacterial Cell andPhysiology of the Microbial Cell. One of us(Neidhardt) was a graduate student at mid-twentieth century,and was pleased and relieved when he opened a textbook thatfinally showed him how his interest in bacterial growth fittedinto the larger scheme of the biological world. As another ofus (Ingraham) has said, The Microbial World clarified thenotion of a bacterium, and placed microbial studies firmlywithin the framework of biological thought, providing astructure that served microbiologists and biology studentswell in assimilating the additions, corrections and amend-ments provided by later molecular studies.The Microbial World opened a trail that has led to the cur-rent introductory text Microbe, through two advanced bookson bacterial physiology. Two of us (Ingraham and Neidhardt)along with Ole Maaløe worked on one of these books in theearly 1980s trying to summarize our thinking about theprocess of bacterial growth, our conception of the subject thatwas molded by what we had learned from The MicrobialWorld. The product was Growth of the Bacterial Cell(Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA, 1983). Our decision tofocus on growth as a preeminent property of bacteria (and acentral property of all living systems), was easily made, for itgrew out of studies that had engaged the three authors formany years, in Davis, Copenhagen, Paris, West Lafayette,and Ann Arbor.Three features of Growth of the Bacterial Cell distin-guished it from any other treatise on bacteria. One was theattention it placed on the need, in quantitative bacterialgrowth studies, to establish reference conditions and toachieve balanced growth, recognizing that these were essen-tial for reproducibility of bacterial cultures. This subject wasgiven prominence by placing it as the book’s opening argu-ment. Today its message is heeded by a new generation ofstudents, who are coming recently into bacterial growth stud-ies from physics, engineering, and systems modeling.Organizing metabolism into an all-embracing frameworkwas a second feature—one that has become widely adopted.Every metabolic reaction was placed into one of fourdomains: fueling, biosynthesis, macromolecule synthesis,and assembly. From estimates of the composition of anEscherichia coli cell at a particular rate of balanced growth,the total consumption of carbon, ammonium, phosphate, ATPand reducing equivalents was calculated and tabulated foreach of the metabolic domains. This treatment of metabo-lism, with its material and energetic balances required forgrowth, and its concept of the 13 precursor metabolites, hadbeen the inspiration of H. Edwin Umbarger, a giant in thefield of 20th century bacterial biochemistry.The third unique feature of Growth of the Bacterial Cellwas the introduction of the concept of growth rate as a vari-able in growth physiology. The chapter bearing this title(“Growth rate as a variable”) dealt with the striking extent towhich one can, for a given temperature, predict the chemicalcomposition of the bacteria cell from its steady state growthrate. This concept still disturbs many investigators, whoobject to calling the growth rate a “variable” rather than adependent consequence of the nutritive richness of the medi-um. In fact, the beauty of the concept lies in the vision thatthe composition of the cell in any given medium is the cell’sSCHAECHTER ET AL.155INT. MICROBIOL. Vol. 10, 2007steady state solution to the integrative nutritive value of themedium, and to a first approximation is independent of theprecise chemical nature of the medium. It has been a closefamily. The same woman, Marjorie Ingraham (1923-2005),who mended Roger Stanier’s trousers 1975, also providedsupport for Neidhardt’s wife, Germaine, and infant son MarcChipault, as work progressed on Growth of the Bacterial Cellat her home in Davis seven years later.The novel elements of Growth of the Bacterial Cell werecontinued in its sequel Physiology of the Microbial Cell; aMolecular Approach (Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA,1990) written by the three of us. It will come as no surpriseto find that these elements have found their way into our newtextbook, Microbe (American Society for MicrobiologyPress, Washington, D.C., 2006).The phylogeny of Microbe. The three of us have writ-ten or edited microbiology textbooks at several academic lev-els. In the United States and in some other countries, didac-tic courses in microbiology are offered at various stages inthe academic process. The most basic level is aimed at first-and second-year university students of allied medical profes-sions, such as nursing, nutrition, and physical therapy. Thesestudents are not expected to have a thorough background inbiology and chemistry. The next level is for third and fourthyear students who consider biology, in some form, their prin-cipal field of study. These students are expected to be some-what proficient in biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biol-ogy. Finally, medical, dental, and veterinary students takespecialized courses of importance to their profession. We areaware that those who spent time in North American universi-ties are acquainted with this system, but others may be lessfamiliar with it.The textbook Microbe is intended for the second of theselevels. Its origin stems from our teaching experience for thesestudents. We agreed that the previously existing textbooks,although well written and illustrated, did not quite achievewhat we wanted in such a textbook. Most of them are intend-ed to be quite complete, serving as reference books, and themost representative of that genre are excellent for their pur-pose and we greatly admire them. However, in our view theydid not resemble the textbooks of old. Those were relativelythin books designed for actual studying rather than for con-sultation. We therefore endeavored to return to the older con-cept and to write a modern version of such a book. Our directforerunner was in fact the first edition of The MicrobialWorld, a book that in its time fulfilled the same purpose anddid it to near perfection. We approached writing this book with the classroom inmind. We limited the coverage of material to only a littlemore than what can be reasonably covered in lectures. Theresult is that our book is about half the size of others (andweighs less than half as much). In addition, trying to providestudents with a book they could actually read, we strove fora discursive style, explaining to the reader why we thoughtthat a given topic was interesting and how it fits in a generalscheme. We have been told that we succeeded, at least in part.However, students who mainly like to look up facts, especial-ly for the purpose of memorizing them, may find this bookinadequate.We should share with you some details of our interac-tions. We have written or edited together five books. It is fairto say that by now we know each other’s way of thinkingand, not infrequently, can finish another’s sentence. We dis-agreed very infrequently and when we did, we asked: “Whocares the most about this issue?” Whoever did, won. We donot recommend this procedure for settling national issues ofwar and peace, but it worked well on our diminutive scale ofactivities.Yet another philosophical basis steered out efforts. In thepast, our writing had been greatly facilitated by the impetusfrom general guidelines, which a conceptual frameworks orscaffolds on which information could be placed in a logicalway. Here, we adopted as a guiding principle to make theconnection between what microbes do and what they looklike, and the relevance of these facts in space and time. Inother words, ecology and evolution. We appropriatedDobzhansky’s famous dictum that “nothing in biology makessense except in the light of evolution,” and extended it toinclude ecology. Of course, not everything that is importantabout microbes can be explained that way but even if it cannot, it is worth asking the question.Under the tutelage of such principles, we extended outinterests from laboratory based microbiology to the wideworld in which microbes exist. We should say that otherbooks have done the same thing and that modern microbio-logical textbooks are, generally speaking, ecologically-mind-ed. This is an absolute necessity because our field is under-going the third of its true Golden Ages [1,3]. In brief, the firstGolden Age was the origin of our science, the discovery ofmicrobes as disease agents and their role in the environment.This magnificent era was followed some 60 years later by thesecond Golden Age, the emergence of molecular biology andits firm basis in microbial model systems. Currently we areliving in the third such age. All of biology is undergoing aphenomenal revolution due to genomic, imaging, and othermethodological breakthroughs. But what distinguishesmicrobiology is the realization that microbes play a far moreimportant role on Earth than had previously understood.They not only make up perhaps half the total biomass, butTHE MICROBIAL WORLD156 INT. MICROBIOL. Vol. 10, 2007they participate in key ways in the metabolism of this planet,the state of health and disease of all its occupants, and holdhope for the future of food and energy sources. There is noconceivable end to the importance of microbes, now and inyears to come. Our political leaders all need a course inmicrobiology!We are very pleased that this small aspect of microbiolog-ical history is being recognized at the 21st national congressof the SEM, and that this meeting has provided another occa-sion for us to enjoy in person our half-century of friendship.References1. Maloy S, Schaechter M (2006) The era of microbiology: A GoldenPhoenix. Int Microbiol 9:1-7 2. Sapp J (2005) The prokaryote-eukaryote dichotomy: Meanings andmythology. Mol Microbiol Biol Rev 69:292-3053. Schaechter M (2003) Integrative microbiology—The third golden age. JBiosciences 28:149-1544. Stanier RY, van Niel CB (1962) The concept of a bacterium. ArchMikrobiol 42:17-35SCHAECHTER ET AL.About the authorsMoselio Schaechter was born in Italy, lived in Ecuador as a teen, and obtained his Ph.D. at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. He spent most of his academic life at Tufts University School of Medicineand moved to San Diego in 1995. His research interests involved aspects of bacterial physiology, includ-ing growth rate regulation, membrane biology, and chromosome transactions. He served as president ofthe American Society for Microbiology in 1985-1986. (mschaech@sunstroke.sdsu.edu)John L. Ingraham was born and raised in California. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, and spent his academic career at the University of California, Davis. He, too, stud-ied different aspects of bacterial physiology, including growth at low temperature, malolactic fermenta-tion, fuel oil formation, pyrimidine metabolism, and denitrification. He served as president of theAmerican Society for Microbiology in 1992-1993. (jingrah1@earthlink.net)Fred Neidhardt was born in Philadelphia. He majored in biology at Kenyon College in Ohio andreceived his Ph.D. at Harvard University. He held academic posts at Harvard University, PurdueUniversity, and the University of Michigan. His research focused on catabolite repression, growth rateregulation, aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, and heat shock and other global cell networks. He served aspresident of the American Society for Microbiology in 1981-1982. (fcneid@umich.edu)

The road from The Microbial world to Microbe

http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/IM/article/download/9619/9615

The road from The Microbial world to Microbe

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Hemeroteca Cientifica Catalana