Gunny
Gunny |
With others I participated in recruiting Gregorio Weber from Sheffield to Illinois, where I worked with him for three decades.
As we all know, Gregorio was trained as a physician, though he never worked as one. When his youngest daughter was late in arrival, he ransacked the chemical stores in the corridor, which were left over from the days of the conscientious objectors undergoing starvation, followed by exploration of restoration of nutrition to have a base for the liberation of the Japanese concentration camps. After much effort, he tracked down castor oil and next morning was a proud dad.
A more salacious story: Vince Massey needed a nucleotide terminal phosphatase, and human semen is a quick place to go. So Vince quietly visited all the faculty, leaving each with a small flask. John Teale marched into the loo, suprising Maurice Kaye , much to Maurice’s embarrassment .So when they all assembled in Vince’s lab for lunch, his technician had the flasks, each with volume and name all lined up, and Gregorio expressing sporting angst over the competition
I had very limited contacts with Gregorio, and the only clear memory I have of him was his humour at tea-time in the Scala.
His opinion of the Americans sending up a manned space rocket (John Glen): “Astronaut grilee a la Americana”
His comment on the fixation with glass-distilled water: “All slaves to the purifying flame”
I dare say there are other humerous comments that others may recall. Sorry mine are so limited, but his good temper and good humour were characteristics which don’t appear in many of the articles.
I had lost touch with Gregorio but your letter pointed to the websites and I was able to catch up on the latter part of his career. I first met him in Cambridge while I was a research student before we both ended up in Sheffield. Our research interests were quite different but he was a very helpful colleague.
Gregorio was aphacic, and we have a PNAS paper on uv vision, I think, of NADH fluorescence.
 Britton Chance and his "magic machine" for studying stop-flow kinetics, 1947 |
Unfortunately, I really only knew Gregorio Weber as an undergraduate in Sheffield, and the Biochemistry Department was decimated soon after I moved to John Peel's group in Microbiology in 1962. But I do owe Dr Weber an enormous debt of gratitude. He provided the first explanation of oxidation-reduction potentials that I understood, and fortunately I kept the notes that I had made at his lectures so that in later years I could refer to them for my own teaching.
When I joined Vince Massey’s group as a postdoc in 1966 and required a fluorimeter to measure the kinetics of the interaction of protein and flavin, the only properly thermostatted instrument available was one that was quite advanced for its time because it gave partially corrected spectra. It had been built in-house by a predecessor (Phil Brumby I think) to a design described by Weber and Lorna Young (Weber G, and Young, L.B. JBC 239, 1424-1431, 1964).
The instrument was located in a tiny room that also housed a photographic enlarger used to analyse data from a Durrum-Gibson stopped-flow spectrophotometer, and therefore, in best Weber tradition, most of those fluorescence measurements were done in almost total darkness.
I heard him speak on a couple of occasions in the USA, once at a FASEB meeting I think (Chicago, Atlantic City, San Francisco?), and the last time at a colloquium held in Ann Arbor in 1996 to mark Vince's 70th birthday. His talk was excellent of course, beginning as always from the basics of thermodynamics. I was astonished that he still remembered me as an undergraduate in Sheffield. He was still the Gregorio Weber that I remembered, but much thinner (he must already have been quite ill). Theo Hoffman was there too, as were many of Vince's associates of old including Graham Palmer and Woody Hastings.
| Gregorio Weber in Cambridge | The First Floor | Memories | Reminiscences | Gregorio Weber at Cambridge | Friendship Renewed in Sheffield | Gregorio Weber, friend and mentor | Gregorio Weber: Some recollections | Appreciation | Recollections of Gregorio | Gregorio | "Stay in Sheffield": Gregorio's Sage Advice | Gregorio as Teacher | Golden Age | Memories of the Biochemistry Department Sheffield, 1961 | My Best of Times: With Gregorio in Sheffield and Urbana 1954-1964 | Weber Memoir | A Roman Connection | My Mentor at Urbana, Rome, Corvallis | Fond Memories | Two Memories in Parallel | A Superb Interaction | An Appreciation | Short snippets |