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National Library of Medicine

Gest, Howard

  • 1830390
  • Person
  • 1921-2012

Howard Gest received his B.A. in Bacteriology from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1942. During his undergraduate studies, he worked with Salvador E. Luria and Max Delbruck (who along with Alfred D. Hershey won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969 for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses) doing research on bacterial viruses at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Gest began graduate work with Delbruck at Vanderbilt University, but World War II interrupted his studies. At that point he accepted a position to work on the Manhattan Project with the eminent physical chemist Charles Coryell at the University of Chicago, and later at Oak Ridge, TN.

In 1946, Gest became Martin Kamen’s first graduate student at Washington University. Martin Kamen was a professor in Biochemistry at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine. During Gest’s graduate work with Kamen, he became associated with Alfred Hershey in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at the School of Medicine. Gest received his Ph.D. in Microbiology from Washington University in 1949.

Gest was a faculty member at Western Reserve University School of Medicine from 1949 to 1959. Gest returned to Washington University as a faculty member in 1959. He was also a member of the Interdepartmental Committee on Molecular Biology. He remained a professor until 1966 when he joined the faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington. As of 2006, he served as Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Microbiology and Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science.

Professor, and Professor Emeritus of Microbiology, Indiana University; studied bacterial photosynthesis; died April 24, 2012, Bloomington, Indiana)
Howard Gest Papers (WUA00074), 1936-2011 WUA/04/wua00074 URL: http://archon.wulib.wustl.edu/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=370

Becker, Bernard

  • n82097637
  • Person
  • 1920-2013

Bernard Becker was born in New York City in 1920. He graduated from Princeton University in 1941 and from Harvard Medical School in 1944. After an internship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, he served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps before completing his training in ophthalmology at the Wilmer Institute at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He then briefly served on the faculty at Johns Hopkins before coming to Washington University, where he served as Head of the Ophthalmology Department from 1953 until 1988.

Dr. Becker dedicated his research and clinical practice to glaucoma, and he was instrumental in establishing the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO), the world's leading organization for ophthalmology research. He served as president of that group and also as director of the American Board of Ophthalmology. In addition, he was a founding member of the Association of University Professors of Ophthalmology, and played a vital role in establishing the National Eye Institute, where he served in many leadership positions.

Dr. Becker chaired the committee that oversaw design and construction of the Washington University Medical Library, which was completed in 1989. The building was renamed the Bernard Becker Medical Library in his honor in 1995. Dr. Becker was also an avid book collector who accumulated over 600 volumes of rare medical books on the sciences of the eye and light. He generously gave his collection to the medical school, where they are housed in the Archives and Rare Books Department of the Becker Library. The Bernard Becker Collection in Ophthalmology and Optics span some five hundred years and include works such as Georg Bartisch's 16th century monograph Opthalmodouleia, which was the first comprehensive work on eye diseases and their treatments; two incunabula (books printed prior to 1500), and works by key scientific figures such as Antonio Scarpa and Francesco Redi.