2006 John Phillips Award Recipient
Citation for Daniel E. Koshland '37
Awarded at assembly on October 3, 2006

Daniel E. Koshland—Throughout your 65-year career as a research scientist, educator and leader among your peers, you have exemplified how one person’s pursuit of an intellectual passion can benefit society at large. When you talk about science, you never fail to mention fun. At the same time, your research is applied in addressing some of humanity’s most pressing problems. Your impact on the world has been both molecular and monumental.

You were born in 1920 in New York but soon moved to California, where your father was a founding executive of the Levi Strauss Company. When you were 12, a book called The Microbe Hunters awakened in you an interest in science that was rivaled only by your passion for baseball. You brought both interests with you on the long train ride to Exeter, but science prevailed. At Exeter, you learned to distinguish theory from experiment and you learned to write—a skill that would serve you well later on as editor-in-chief of Science magazine. You graduated in 1937 and matriculated at the University of California at Berkeley. There, you distinguished yourself as a chemist. So much so, in fact, that when the Navy rejected you during World War II on account of your poor eyesight, your former professor approached you about joining scientist Glenn Seaborg in Chicago to do what he called, “the most important work in the world.” So it was that you joined the Manhattan Project and spent the next three years working on the chemistry of plutonium. In the meantime, you married your first wife, Marian, an immunologist who was then working on her own classified project, the development of a cholera vaccine. Over the next 52 years, you and Marian would raise five children together while supporting each others’ careers in the research sciences.

But first, to enter academia you needed a graduate degree. Molecular biology was a nascent field, so you concentrated on chemistry at the University of Chicago, but your work had an impact in biology labs. You developed a method for synthesizing glucose molecules labeled with radioactive carbon that became important in the study of metabolism. Then, in 1958, after post-doctoral work at Harvard and while working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, you published the controversial “induced fit” theory for how enzymes convert one substance into another during life-sustaining chemical reactions. Your theory superseded the conventional wisdom of a century and is found in every biology text book today. Later, in 1965, your beloved Berkeley convinced you to join its biochemistry department. Your research there has led to major advances in the understanding of enzymes and protein chemistry, how memory works, and to the development of drug therapies for diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Your current interests include neutralizing toxic compounds in the environment and using energy from sunlight to make fossil fuels.

Your talent for the nonconformist approach also emerges in other areas of your work. At Berkeley, you led an unprecedented reorganization of 17 biological disciplines into three consolidated departments with outstanding research facilities. One of these facilities is named in your honor. From 1985 to 1995 you were the editor-in-chief of Science magazine, where you brought your signature wit and humor to the editorial page, which you signed “Dr. Noitall.” You turned the writing over to scientists and instituted a review process that dramatically increased the number and quality of submissions to the magazine. Science is now the world’s leading journal of original scientific research, global science news and science commentary, and is considered important reading for scientists and policy makers alike. Meanwhile, you maintained an active lab at Berkeley and published many original papers alongside your more than 200 editorials for the magazine. After the death of your wife Marian in 1997, you took a lead in promoting the public understanding of the importance of science by endowing the Marian Koshland Science Museum in Washington, D.C., which opened in 2004. Six years ago, you married Yvonne, whom you had first dated in college and whose spouse had also died.

For these and other achievements, you have received more than 30 professional honors, including membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the National Medal of Science, the Lasker Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science and, in 2006, the prestigious Welch Award in Chemistry. Nobel Laureate Joseph Goldstein has said you are among the “handful of scientists who are held in universally high esteem by their colleagues because of their human qualities of honesty, kindness, unselfishness, originality and wisdom.” And in your case, he says, “there is also wit.” Welch Foundation Chairman J. Evans Atwell has said it is difficult to overestimate the importance of your discoveries and their potential to improve life.

Dan Koshland, in honor of your vision, accomplishments and lifelong devotion to meaningful research, and for the deep and lasting impact you have had on science and humanity, Phillips Exeter Academy is pleased to present you with the 2006 John Phillips Award.

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