Two Memories in Parallel

by George and Tamara Mitchell

In 1964 I was doing bioluminescence research in the labs of William McElroy (Mr. Firefly) during my senior year at Johns Hopkins. Toward the close of the year McElroy suggested that I should talk about my future education with Woody Hastings at the University of Illinois. I took McElroy literally, hitched a ride to Urbana and, without introduction, knocked on Woody's door. A spot in the lab eventually opened up and I moved in.

Gregorio had been at the U of I for several years and was in the thick of upgrading his instruments with the help of an electronics expert, Barkev Bablouzian. I was developing an interest in instrumentation so I would frequently visit Barkev's room to see what he was up to. I recall Gregorio's area as being quite mysterious and exotic to me, full of electronics racks and usually kept dark as a protection against light leaks. Gregorio himself did nothing to dispel my impressions; he wore dark glasses for his eye problems and spoke with a Spanish accent. All of this seemed quite grand to a boy from rural tidewater Virginia.

Within the year, Woody had accepted a position at Harvard. Those in his lab were given the choice of finishing up at the University of Illinois or moving with him to Harvard. I chose Harvard.

When George and I met, he was a graduate student in Woody Hasting's lab in Urbana, and I was a medical student at the University of Chicago. The following summer George and I both were at the Marine Biology Laboratory (The MBL) at Wood's Hole, Massachusetts, where we spent a lot of time together but never had a formal date. George helped me use Woody's old Aminco-Bowman spectrofluormeter for a serotonin assay and we spent a lot of time on the beach. At the end of the summer, we were in love, and faced with a decision...he was going to stay in Massachusetts to do his PhD with Woody, and I was headed back to Chicago. We corresponded daily over the next winter, and by spring I had transferred into the third year of medical school in Boston, where we married. George worked on bioluminescence in Woody's lab and I continued in medical school. George finished his degree promptly, and we both graduated in 1969. Then, the decision common to professional couples ...where to go?

We decided that my prospects for a good internship and residency were best in Boston, and that a year of being a postdoc in Woody's lab was fine for George. But as the year came to an end the same question came up again...and I believe that Woody (and certainly I) thought that George was really bright, and that there was only one person in the world from whom he could learn more about what interested him... Gregorio Weber.

At Harvard my appetite for designing and making instruments grew. I just couldn't keep my hands off of a soldering iron or a milling machine. I haunted the machine shop in the basement of the Bio Labs. Woody got me a combination lathe and I was in business. Most notably for this narrative, I modified an Aminco-Bowman spectrofluorometer for ratiometric operation and for recording fluorescence polarization spectra. Gregorio toured this machine during one of his visits to Woody's lab and we discussed a then-unexplained artifact in my polarization spectra, the "red-edge" effect.

About the time I was finishing my degree at Harvard one of Gregorio's students, Dick Spencer, was completing his in Urbana. Gregorio was a proponent of doing fluorescence time resolving in the frequency domain and he and Dick had developed a cross-correlation phase/modulation fluorometer as the subject of Dick's thesis. The proposal was that Dick and I would swap places. Both labs needed instrumentalists but we students also needed to move on. In the end, I moved to Urbana and Dick stayed put. We shared a room in Gregorio's complex.

I decided to put my plans for a pediatric oncology career on hold, and take what I could find in Urbana while George spent a year in Gregorio's lab. This was no sacrifice, as George was clearly a kind of specialist and I was better suited to be a generalist. So I flew out and found a job at Carle Clinic, as an Emergency Physician (in the days when Emergency Medicine was full of all kinds of odd docs and misfits...but that's another story). We planned to stay only 1 to 3 years, then on to an academic career for George and a fellowship for me. That was 38 years ago and we're still here in Urbana. A lot changed, and all of it came out of Gregorio's lab.

At first I didn't know Gregorio at all, but I was kindly disposed to him because George was happy and was always buzzing with ideas that had come out of their conversations about science, and full of projects. And we gradually began to make social friends...with Gregorio and Shirley, Dave Laker (he was an instrument maker at Roger Adams lab, and George knew from the first that they needed to be friends) and with other people in the lab: Dick Spencer, Bill Mantulin, Enrico Gratton; and at the University: Lowell Hager and of course Gunny. In the Emergency Department I also ran into some of these folks or their families or acquaintances at times of stress and I think it helped that I was not unknown.

It became clear to me that in the lab Gregorio was wonderful at dreaming things up that cried out for experimentation, but that none of the experiments had been done because there was no instrumentation on which to do it. Enter the postdoctoral fellows and the machine shop, and pretty soon Gregorio's ideas were translated into experimental data. And his was the only lab that could do it.

Gradually and then at an increasing pace, Dick Spencer and I started upgrading and enhancing Gregorio's existing instruments as well as creating entirely new ones. Notable examples from this period would be an ultra-sensitive photon counting spectrofluorometer, a fully differential t-format phase fluorometer capable of measuring dynamic rotational rates and a deep UV microscope. Included in these designs was a completely new optical platform executed by David Laker. Its enclosed, monolithic construction lives on with new electronics; I have no idea how many of them are still making useful measurements these decades later. Gregorio's lab became the place where sophisticated fluorescence measurements could be made and we attracted collaborators. Inevitably one of the collaborators and then another asked if we could build them an instrument.

Eventually the Mitchells, Spencers and Lakers were faced with a decision, this time a bigger one, involving not only us, but two other couples, the Lakers and the Spencers. We and the Spencers had both planned on lives in academia, and Laker had an excellent position at the University of Illinois and three young children. We had another talk. We all decided to stay in Champaign-Urbana, leave academia and cast our lot with a nascent corporation. We incorporated as "SLM Instruments", offered stock shares locally and went to work. Initially the optics was done in Laker’s home shop, the electronics in my basement and the business portion in the Spencer's house. We could boast that we had three locations.

To me Gregorio seemed either encouraging or neutral to this enterprise. He bought some of our stock and was among our first customers. It seems likely that he may have assured early SLM customers that we could get the job done but that was invisible to me. In later years he would boast of SLM's success and was proud that it began in his lab.

When SLM was sold some decades later, Gregorio used his stock earnings to buy into a condo in Hawaii where he would rest in the winter, play chess and hone his interest in Sumo wrestling matches.

By now Gregorio and I were friends. To me, Gregorio always had a special cachet. Rumors of his long-term love in the Argentine (bolstered, I think, because of his visits there to a sister who eventually died of pancreatic cancer after a remarkable six-year spontaneous remission), the obvious affection for him of a lab technician at the University with whom he was in constant contact, and so on. And his marriage to Shirley dissolved, although they remained friends. She was cured of a colon cancer, and their three girls were growing up. They all remained in each others' lives to the end. I think that a lot of feminine speculation about Gregorio's personal life fell out naturally about him because Gregorio had many friends. Among them were many male scientists, but also many women of different backgrounds. He was a very thoughtful friend, and often would bring back just the right little present from one of his travels. I sit writing under a chandelier from which hangs a little hand-knit and beaded turtle from Gregorio, and in the back room is an Argentinian rawhide colt-starting hackamore he brought me.

Monserrat Mantulin (a beautiful Spanish linguist married to Bill Mantulin) was also a dear friend of his...they shared a love of books and languages . Gregorio found and brought her a coveted book after a trip. There were others. We felt we were special to him, and we knew he was special to us. He and Maria Pia Gratton were very fond of each other. Neither we nor Gregorio expected to see each other at Maria Pia's funeral after her terrible murder.

Medical affairs were always part of our relationship. Gregorio had a lot of eye trouble, both anterior and posterior chamber. At that time, there were two competing Clinics in town...Carle and Christie, and Carle had the specialists who did most of the posterior chamber work (retina and vitreous) and the best anterior chamber (cornea) specialist, was across town at Christie. We shared, and Gregorio crossed town. Fortunately for Gregorio, after a period of near-blindness during which he could not drive, this right-hand/left-hand business worked out, and he regained functional vision after a corneal transplant, before his final illness. During his non-driving period, his friends would go pick him up to bring him to dinner or a party. On one occasion when I picked him up to bring him to our country place for dinner Gregorio said something like "You know, Tamara, I have observed that at a certain point in their lives, Englishwomen retire to the countryside and begin to keep honeybees." Ever since, "going to the bees" (which we have) has been a part of our lexicon.

At one of our dinners, Gregorio told us that we must rent the video of "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" his favourite movie. If you haven't seen it you should.

I've gone a bit astray. Basically, we all remained good friends after SLM grew out of, and separated from, his lab. Gregorio bought stock in SLM, and lived to see somewhat of a proliferation of research in fluorescence as the instruments which had grown out of his brain and laboratory, and made some money. I moved about in the Carle system, and ended up practicing family medicine in Urbana, where Gregorio became my patient. When he developed an untreatable leukemia, with a dismal prognosis, he remained astoundingly stoic about his symptoms, and brave but realistic. He was always the scientist. Each time he came to see me, he had added to a comprehensive graph he kept of his illness: timeline, counts of blood components and syptoms. Dave Jameson adored "The Professor" and he and Gregorio had spent a lot of time together here and in Hawaii (where Gregorio was a great fan of Sumo wrestling).

Gregorio came to see me when his disease was far advanced...lots of skin infiltration, systemic symptoms, lousy blood counts and great danger of spontaneous bleeding and overwhelming infection, and he wanted to make a final trip south, visiting various old friends and colleagues, ending in Argentina. David Jameson wanted to accompany him, and to me (and to Gregorio) this seemed the only way he could make it: with a lot of help, and ready for catastrophe. His planned trip coincided with Woody's 70th birthday party at Woods Hole, and it didn't seem Gregorio could do both.

So he decided to go to Argentina with David, and and neither he nor I expected him to return. We embraced outside my office; I was in tears. Right after he left with David, George and I left for Woody's party, but I needed to get information down to the Argentine right away to his doctor friends. This was early days for the Internet and computer technology, but The Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole was well-equipped, and as soon as we arrived George helped me get in contact with Gregorio's friends along the way, and we sent them detailed information about his condition, and possible need for platelets, red cells, antibiotics and the like. Gregorio had a wonderful trip and returned. Shortly afterwards he died at home, in Hospice care, in the company of friends, Shirley and his daughters.

Just after Gregorio's death, while we were sitting at the kitchen table discussing him, George let out one great sob. George doesn't cry. We miss Gregorio to this day.

LITTLE SNIPPETS

Dick Spencer and I moved Gregorio into an apartment when he and Shirley separated. He brought only one personal item, a little Scottish blanket he cherished. Enrico Gratton visited Gregorio at this apartment. He telephoned back to Italy astonished to have found such an intellect living alone like a monk.

Our love of Italy began by attending a NATO conference with Gregorio in Catania, Sicily. We made a side trip to Syracusa and Gregorio was quite anxious to visit the archeological zone there and to see the tomb of Archimedes. We arrived just as the zone was closing and Gregorio was moved to tears for having missed the opportunity. (In fact, that part of the zone had been closed off for years and the tomb was thought to be that of a Roman big-shot, not Archimedes. I figured, however, it was good enough for Gregorio so it's good enough for me). In 2005 Tamara and I took a train down to Catania and Syracuse. We spent a week remembering and enjoying things we'd seen on our earlier visit with Gregorio. No one was exempt from Gregorio's inspection. At one point he decided that Sir Robert Boyle had made an error in his formulations and had started a manuscript to point it out. When I would visit, Gregorio would open a cabinet door where the paper was taped and in a hushed, conspiratorial voice point out where he felt Boyle had gone wrong. He relished finding old, obscure references for his papers. One mathematical paper from the 1700's was a particular delight to him. It probably reflects his appreciation for the continuity of science.

For years Gregorio worked on a manuscript for what was to be his book on fluorescence. Whenever we would ask "is it ready?" he would say "not just yet". I don't know what happened to the manuscript. Hopefully it has been published in its raw form.

After Gregorio's death, Shirley and his daughters stayed in town to settle his affairs. Alicia and I put what little there was of his clothes into my car and drove them to the Goodwill and that was that. I don't know if his Scottish blanket survived.

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A deferred gift of about $5 million from George and Tamara Mitchell of Sidney, Ill., to create two endowed chairs in the College of LAS’s Department of Biochemistry and a fellowship in the College of Fine and Applied Arts.

The Gregorio Weber Endowed Chair in Biochemistry honors the late U of I professor and researcher who specialized in florescence, spectroscopy and protein chemistry.

The J. Woodland Hastings Endowed Chair in Biochemistry honors the former U of I and Harvard educator whose research focused on bioluminescence and circadian rhythms. George Mitchell studied under Hastings at Illinois and Harvard and did post-doctoral work with Weber.

The Gregg and Jeff Helgesen Fellowship in Jazz Studies honors two accomplished jazz musicians, Gregg Helgesen and his son, Jeff.

George Mitchell, who holds a master’s degree in chemistry from Illinois and a Ph.D. from Harvard, co-founded SLM Instruments, a scientific instruments company.

Tamara Mitchell, who graduated from the University of Chicago and earned an M.D. at Harvard, was senior medical director at Carle Clinic, Urbana, and is a clinical associate professor at the U of I College of Medicine.