Donald Caspar, best known for his work determining the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, died on November 27, 2021 at the age of 94. He is also credited with creating the term “structural biology” to describe the burgeoning field.
Caspar was born in Ithaca, New York, on January 8, 1927. According to a tribute in Nature by Caspar’s former PhD student Lee Makowski, his father was a chemist and he became interested in topics discussed at home, particularly the first clues about the structure of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). He earned a physics degree from Cornell University in 1950 and attended Yale University for graduate school, focusing on the structure of TMV for his biophysics thesis.
After obtaining his PhD in 1955, he received a fellowship to King’s College London, where he worked under Rosalind Franklin until the following year. The pair published interrelated papers in Nature describing that ...
