Short Snippets
IC Gunsalus
With others I participated in recruiting Gregorio Weber from Sheffield to Illinois, where I worked with him for three decades.
Gunny 1912-2008
Jim Longworth
As we all know, Gregorio was trained as a physician, though he never worked as one. When his youngest daughter was late in arrival, he ransacked the chemical stores in the corridor, which were left over from the days of the conscientious objectors undergoing starvation, followed by exploration of restoration of nutrition to have a base for the liberation of the Japanese concentration camps. After much effort, he tracked down castor oil and next morning was a proud dad.
Rod Bennett
I had very limited contacts with Gregorio, and the only clear memory I have of him was his humour at tea-time in the Scala.
His opinion of the Americans sending up a manned space rocket (John Glen): “Astronaut grilee a la Americana”.
His comment on the fixation with glass-distilled water: “All slaves to the purifying flame”.
I dare say there are other humerous comments that others may recall. Sorry mine are so limited, but his good temper and good humour were characteristics which don’t appear in many of the articles.
John Peel
I had lost touch with Gregorio but your letter pointed to the websites and I was able to catch up on the latter part of his career. I first met him in Cambridge while I was a research student before we both ended up in Sheffield. Our research interests were quite different but he was a very helpful colleague.
Britton Chance
Gregorio was aphakic, and we have a PNAS paper on UV vision, I think, of NADH fluorescence.
Britton Chance and his "magic machine" for studying stop-flow kinetics, 1947
My Debt of Gratitude to Gregorio: Stephen Mayhew
Unfortunately, I really only knew Gregorio Weber as an undergraduate in Sheffield, and the Biochemistry Department was decimated soon after I moved to John Peel's group in Microbiology in 1962. But I do owe Dr Weber an enormous debt of gratitude. He provided the first explanation of oxidation-reduction potentials that I understood, and fortunately I kept the notes that I had made at his lectures so that in later years I could refer to them for my own teaching.
When I joined Vince Massey’s group as a postdoc in 1966 and required a fluorimeter to measure the kinetics of the interaction of protein and flavin, the only properly thermostatted instrument available was one that was quite advanced for its time because it gave partially corrected spectra. It had been built in-house by a predecessor (Phil Brumby I think) to a design described by Weber and Lorna Young (Weber G, and Young, L.B. JBC 239, 1424-1431, 1964).
The instrument was located in a tiny room that also housed a photographic enlarger used to analyse data from a Durrum-Gibson stopped-flow spectrophotometer, and therefore, in best Weber tradition, most of those fluorescence measurements were done in almost total darkness.
I heard him speak on a couple of occasions in the USA, once at a FASEB meeting I think (Chicago, Atlantic City, San Francisco?), and the last time at a colloquium held in Ann Arbor in 1996 to mark Vince's 70th birthday. His talk was excellent of course, beginning as always from the basics of thermodynamics. I was astonished that he still remembered me as an undergraduate in Sheffield. He was still the Gregorio Weber that I remembered, but much thinner (he must already have been quite ill). Theo Hoffman was there too, as were many of Vince's associates of old including Graham Palmer and Woody Hastings.
Gregorio was quite shy: Mark Dickinson
I remember when I was a Postgraduate working with Vince Massey, we all went to a restaurant in Barker's Pool after Gregorio's first eye operation (see contribution from Quentin Gibson) . Of course we were all so pleased to see him back in the Department. Gregorio was quite shy and he didn't socialise very much with the research students. We were always a little in awe and shy of him, but he was shy of us too, I think.