Earl Reece Stadtman

Career Stadtman started his career as a research assistant in the Division of Plant Nutrition of the University of California. Subsequently, he was an Atomic Energy Commission Fellow with Fritz Lipmann in the Massachusetts General Hospital, but after 1960 he worked at the National Heart Institute, where he became chief of the Laboratory of Biochemistry. In addition, he spent sabbatical periods at the Max Planck Institute in Munich and the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

Research

Stadtman's research covered a wide field. Early in his career he worked with Horace Barker on bacterial fatty-acid synthesis, with a series of four papers. In the same period he collaborated with Fritz Lipmann on the function of coenzyme A. Later his work took on a more enzymological character, with investigation of, for example, aldehyde dehydrogenase, aspartate kinase, work carried out during a period in the laboratory of Georges Cohen in France and, most notably, glutamine synthetase, an enzyme that will always be associated with his name.

From the 1970s onwards Stadtman published many papers with P. Boon Chock on the capacity of cycles of interconvertible enzymes, based especially on his results with glutamine synthetase, to generate very high sensitivity to effectors.

Editorial work

Stadtman was active as an editor of numerous prominent journals, including the Journal of Biological Chemistry, 1960–1965, Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics, 1960–1969; Annual Review of Biochemistry, 1972–2000; Biochemistry, 1969–1976; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1974–1981; Trends in Biochemical Sciences, 1975–1978.

He was (with Bernard Horecker) founding editor of Current Topics in Cellular Regulation, a major series in the subject, and continued in the role up to volume 23 (1984).

Awards and honours

1953: Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry 1966: Medallion of the University of Pisa, Italy 1983: President, American Society of Biological Chemists 1999: Honorary Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania