Protocell: The Origin of Cellular Life
Sidney took a position as a laboratory technician at the Rockerfeller Institute in New York City. He was the first U.S. employee of Nobel Prize winning peptide chemist Max Bergmann. Sidney returned to Los Angeles a year later. Prodded by Linus Pauling, he enrolled at California Institute of Technology for graduate study. Pauling remained a life long friend and mentor. Sidney became a graduate student of Hugh Huffman in biology assaying the thermodynamic heats of formation for amino acids. His minor professor was T.H. Morgan from whom he learned the details of evolution. Sidney married Raia Joffe in 1937.
After receiving his Ph.D. at Cal Tech, Sidney spent a year as a postdoctoral student in the Linus Pauling Laboratory. Sidney took a Job at Cutter Laboratories isolating vitamin A from shark livers which was used to enhance night vision of pilots in the war. He was drawn away to create a protein chemistry diagnostic laboratory at the University of Michigan Medical School in 1941. In 1942, the Foxes returned to Berkeley where Sidney conducted research on fish meal protein for a fishery in Oakland.
In 1943, he was attracted to an academic position at Iowa State College in Ames. His seminal publication was a blueprint for sequencing proteins. This extended his experimental work on peptide sequencing to proteins. With Joe Foster he also published the first textbook on proteins.
In 1955 Sidney accepted the position of director of the Oceanographic Institute at Florida State University in Tallahassee. In the mid 1950s his laboratory demonstrated the simple technology of converting thermally activated amino acids into proteinoids. This was the basis of the scientific work on the origin of life which dominated the remainder of his life. The demonstration of the conversion of these proteinoids into microspheres, primitive cells, by the addition of water to the thermal proteinoid completed the demonstration of the simplicity of an experimental approach to the origin of life.
Sidney moved to the University of Miami in 1964 where he spent the next 25 years of his professional life as director of the NASA supported Institute for Molecular Evolution. His laboratory conducted analyses of the first moon rock samples. His research received international acclaim during this period. He is mentioned in many biology textbooks for his pioneering work- In 1989 Sidney accepted the position of Distinguished Research Professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. In 1993 Sidney and Raia relocated to the University of South Alabama.
Sidney is survived by his beloved wife of 60 years Raia, and three sons, J. Lawrence Fox of Chicago, Ronald F. Fox of Atlanta and Thomas O. Fox of Boston; four grandchildren, and one great grandchild.
In lieu of flowers, the family would appreciate contributions in his name supporting biomedical research.