Tuxedo Park to Greenwich -- The Loomis Legacy

Anthony Canamucio Alfred Lee Loomis I met tycoon and amateur scientist Alfred Lee Loomis in 1954 as a postdoctoral researcher working with his son Farnie. After a cordial introduction, Alfred peered over my shoulder, watching me plot growth rates of freshwater hydra. "Growth dynamics are pretty universal," he said. "In the investment business I noticed that around World War I; railroads had reached stationary phase, whereas automobiles were just taking off logarithmically. Around 1928, we could see that the log phase for most of our investments was somewhat erratic. So we began selling most everything except utilities. Then I could devote full time to enjoy my laboratory at Tuxedo Park [NY]." At the moment it did not dawn on me how extraordinary a man Farnie's father was. I soon learned that he was the Alfred Lee Loomis, a secretive, philanthropic, and politically connected man, who had convinced the U.S. government prior to WWII to move his New York laboratory to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to start the "Rad Lab." There, he assembled a group of American and British scientists to develop the radar that allowed the Allies to deter Nazi bombers and rockets, detect submarine periscopes and conduct night bombing raids on Germany. So began my relationship with these two amazing men, who taught me that good science can be generated by creative individuals distanced from major centers where large research teams often prevail. Alfred was not a formally trained researcher, but his impact on science has been remarkable. Jennet Conant's best-selling book about Alfred, Tuxedo Park (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2002), emphasizes this point. Conant quotes physicist Lee DuBridge at the book's end: "Radar won the war; the atomic bomb ended it." Loomis played major roles in the development of both technologies. Before the war, Loomis had pioneered research on brain waves and on the biological effects of high-frequency sound waves. With E. Newton Harvey, he developed a centrifuge microscope, allowing for high-speed photomicrographs of living cells subject to high gravitational forces; this invention paved the way for Harvey's wife, Ethel, to separate nuclear and anuclear portions of sea urchin eggs. Farnie, formally known as W. Farnsworth Loomis, influenced his father's return to the biological sciences after the war. Both excelled in discriminating between excellent and good research, in recognizing pioneering breakthroughs. Before visiting leading or upcoming biologists, Alfred and Farnie would have read most of these scientists' publications. At the end of some visits, Alfred wrote a check, giving his surprised host significant, unrestricted funds for research. Among the recipients of Alfred's generosity were Nobel laureate Fritz Lipmann and pioneer microbiologist C.B. van Niel. Farnie was a risk-taker and innovator in science and in life. While a Harvard undergraduate, he participated in the scaling of the Himalayan's Nanda Devi (25,645 ft.), achieving the record for highest mountain climbed, held by his team, for 14 years. As a physician during WWII, he worked with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and parachuted into China behind Japanese lines. After the war, Farnie, along with David Green, demonstrated that particulate systems carry out biological oxidations. A year later, with Fritz Lipmann, he showed that mitochondrial oxidations could be uncoupled from phosphorylation by dinitrophenol. After teaching embryology at MIT for a year, and then serving on-site visits to many of the world's research laboratories for the Rockefeller Foundation, Farnie decided to use small invertebrates as model systems to investigate cellular and developmental processes. In 1953, he built a laboratory at his home in Greenwich, Conn., where he developed methods for growing freshwater hydra by the thousands under controlled laboratory conditions, thereby making hydra available as a laboratory animal. In that lab I came to know Farnie and Alfred, who, before extensive government research funding came to be, used their minds and wealth to promote and conduct pure and applied scientific research. Both believed that more scientists should receive extramural funding to allow them to pursue their dreams. I benefited from such funding during my stays in Greenwich and at the Carnegie Institution's Terrestrial Magnetism unit and the fledgling Howard Hughes Medical Institute. At Hughes in 1961, I organized with Farnie a Loomis Institute-supported symposium, which set the stage for much current research involving hydra. Shortly afterward, Farnie closed his laboratory and joined Brandeis University's graduate biochemistry department. His last project, elaborating a connection between the evolution of lightly pigmented skin in humans and the synthesis of vitamin D, is causing a stir even today.1 For Farnie, isolation enhanced his pursuit of unorthodox ideas. He discouraged me from reading much of the old literature on hydra, encouraging me instead to "play around" and follow my observations. "If you repeat what is already known, that is okay. But in most cases, I bet you will find something new." Such proved to be the case, for example, in my laboratory's investigations of somatic mutants, the biochemistry of endosymbiosis, invertebrate collagens and toxins, and peptide receptors. The Loomis legacy, like Alfred and Farnie, is complex. I admired both men greatly; not only did they recognize, seek out, and garner support for others who were at the forefront of science, but they were ingenious and pioneering scientists themselves. Howard M. Lenhoff, Professor Emeritus, University of California, currently at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, where he is investigating music cognition in individuals with Williams syndrome. 1. N.J. Jablonski, G. Chaplin, "Skin deep," Scientific American, 287:75-81, 2002.

Tuxedo Park to Greenwich -- The Loomis Legacy

Alfred Lee Loomis played major roles in the development of both radar and the atomic bomb.

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