Recollections of Gregorio

by Maurice Kaye

Gregorio Weber was always very calm and collected, and a most helpful colleague in every way. He came from Buenos Aires via Cambridge and was appointed to the Biochemistry Department of Sheffield University by Sir Hans Krebs, shortly before all the members of the Medical Research Council Unit for Research in Cell Metabolism moved to the Biochemistry Department at Oxford in 1954.

His time at Sheffield was extremely productive and many of his papers from those days have become citation classics in the areas of aromatic amino acid, nicotinamide nucleotide, flavin and protein fluorescence. John Teale was one of his young co-workers on these projects. He also worked on Photosynthetic energy transfer with George Porter, the Nobel Prize-winning Head of our Sheffield Chemistry Department. Gregorio lectured on these topics to our undergraduate biochemistry class from 1955 to 1962, when he left for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

It’s hard to think of many stories about Gregorio: he was extremely clever and hard working and spent so much of his time at the Department in his dark-room. His poor vision was a big problem, but he never complained at all.

People said that it stemmed from his using visual observation methods for the alignment of optical instruments that employed powerful ultraviolet lamps. When I asked him once, “ How are your eyes today, Gregorio”, his reply was “ Just as awful as anything”.