Dear Biochemikers: August 1, 1980
The New Orleans meeting of the American Society of Biological Chemists afforded
a chance for a number of past and present Biochemickers to get together socially in
Don's room, with the overflow packing the corridor outside.  The emergency exit which
was through his window, just a floor above the swimming pool, was not required.
The phrenetic roar of research can be heard throughout the building, or it may
be the sound of the new air handling system.  This custom-designed equipment completely
replaces the air in the building every five minutes with automobile exhaust fumes,
thus perfectly simulating the out-of-doors and relieving the occupants of that locked-in
feeling.
The campus is presently the scene of great geological translocations accompanied
by a monumental deposition of dust.  Excavation is now going on for the new Agricultural
Research Building in the parking lot across the street.  In addition, there are three
other excavations underway.  (Expansion of the Rec Gym, addition of Vol IT of the Main
Library and a U.S.D.A. Soils Lab, the last appropriately enough since there is more
soil on the campus than any other area of equal size in the world.)  The truck drivers
unable to find any place to dump their loads, race around on the campus until they
have scattered their cargo into the air.  All of this passes unnoticed in contrast to the
events atop that sainted mountain out West, although locally the volumes of mineral
matter and the total seismic activity (integrated) equal the values observed in the
Cascades.  Shows what a good press can do.  Souvenir hunters among you can have a vial
of dust, just by writing us (or shake it out of the envelope this letter came in).
The Parkers just returned from the West Coast (one of their sons was just married
in Portland) and happened to be staying on Mt Hood when the eruption occurred.  They
brought back samples of Mount St. Helens ash for the folks here who are having a hard
time finding a place for it.
It is not enough to do good research but it must be communicated.  A number of the
staff have heeded their obligations and gone off to foreign lands to spread the new
knowledge.  Claudia Kent went to Paris to a meeting on membranes.  Jack Dixon was in
Hamburg for a rumble on neuropeptides and other good things and stopped in Cambridge
to further spread the word.  Hank Weiner spoke at a symposium on biochemical aspects
of alcoholism in Cardiff, Wales (the place where the greatest stiff of all times was
discovered) and did encores at Leeds and Dublin.  Gunter Kohlhaw has returned from
the upper reaches of the Rhine where he has been enlightening the natives about
coordination of enzyme synthesis in eukaryotic pathways. He spoke at the Biozentrum
at the University of Basel and at the E.T.H. in Zurich.  Gunter is now about to push
off to the International Congress on Yeast in London.  This is the London in Ontario
which is practically as good as that other place since it is on the Thames and anyway
the hotel rates are 1/2.  Lee Weith made a quick foray in Germany and England to
exchange new information on constructing polynucleotides.
Howard Zalkin has returned to lotus land to do another sabbatical with Yanofsky at
Stanford.  Mike Rossmann is taking off a half year to lecture and think deep thoughts
in Cambridge and vicinity.  Dave Krogmann should be getting back this fall from
Washington where he has been running the U.S.D.A. Office of Competitive Research Grants,
but not before he finishes a short odessey in Greece, where he will talk on photosyn¬
thesis and perhaps go to Delphi for some future suggestions.  See the forthcoming new
edition of the Iliad for details.
Bernie Liska, now Experiment Station Director, will become the new Ag Dean on
August 1 when Dick Kohls resumes teaching in Ag. Econ. The new Experiment Station
Director doesn't know who he is yet.