Daniel Mazia

Daniel Mazia (December 18, 1912 – June 9, 1996) was an American cell biologist, best known for his research that isolated the cell structures responsible for mitosis. His research was the gateway for many later discoveries about the cell cycle, cell division, and many other areas in cell biology.

Biography Mazia grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in a Russian-Jewish family. He then joined the zoology faculty of the University of Missouri, where he taught from 1938 to 1950. During the first few months of his job there, he served in the United States Army throughout World War II.

From 1951 until his retirement in 1979, he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught Physical Chemical Biology for much of his stint as a professor at Berkeley. Due to his profound research in Woods Hole, many graduate students as well as postdoctoral students flooded his laboratory in California. This research was done in conjunction with Katsuma Dan where they completed the first successful isolation of a mitotic apparatus from sea urchin eggs. This was a discovery that shocked the cell biology community. This discovery ended doubt of what the apparatus looked like, as well as opened a variety of new questions about the makeup of the apparatus, and how the appearance and disappearance of the structure was controlled. He never lost interest in the apparatus, and continued to research it throughout his career.

Accomplishments Mazia was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the E. B. Wilson Medal in 1981 for his contributions to cell biology along with George Emil Palade and Keith R. Porter.

Quote Excerpt from Daniel Mazia speech, Jan. 1996 (source for quote)