Protocell: The Origin of Cellular Life
From The Mobile Register, August 13, 1998
FOX
Sidney W. (alter) Fox--86, was born in Los Angeles, California on March 24, 1912. He died on August. 10, 1998. He received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from UCLA. As. an undergraduate, he and his partner Paul Smith wrote musicals for student productions. Walt Disney offered both jobs to write the music for Snow White, Paul accepted, but Sidney's chemistry professor at UCLA, Max Dunn, said, "You are going to make a choice between music and chemistry, and it is going to be chemistry!" Sidney took a position as a laboratory technician at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City. He was the first U.S. employee of the Nobel Prize winning peptide chemist Max Bergmann who had emigrated from Germany to escape persecution. Sidney returned to Los Angeles. Prodded by Linus Pauling he enrolled at the-California Institute of Technology of graduate study, Pauling remained a life long friend and mentor. Sidney became a graduate of Hugh Huffman in Biology assaying the thermodynamic heats of formation for amino acids. He minor professor was T.H. Morgan from whom he learned the details of evolution. Sidney married Raia Joffe in 1937, much to the chagrin of his major professor who realized that his best student would no longer spend long hours through the night in the laboratory. After receiving his Ph.D. at CalTech, 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 might 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. With Joe Foster he published the first textbook on proteins. In 1955 Sidney accepted the position as Director of the Oceanographic Institute at Florida State University in Tallahassee. In the mid 50's, 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. He lived out his life and career as a Distinguished Research Scientist in the Department of Marine Sciences at USA. Sidney is survived by his wife of 60 years, Raia, and their three sons, J. Lawrence Fox of Chicago, Ronald F. Fox of Atlanta and Thomas O. Fox of Boston. No funeral services are to be held. In lieu of flowers, the family would appreciate contributions in his name supporting biomedical research. Arrangements by PINE CREST FUNERAL HOME, 1939 Dauphin Island Pkwy., Mobile, AL, 36605. 334-478-5227.
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