- Email: [email protected]
In memory of Professor Howard A. Bern
General and Comparative Endocrinology 176 (2012) 121–123
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
General and Comparative Endocrinology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ygcen
In Memoriam
In memory of Professor Howard A. Bern
Howard A. Bern, a professor emeritus of Integrative Biology and a research endocrinologist of the Cancer Research Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, died at the age of 91 on January 3, 2012 at his home. Howard Bern will be remembered as a gentleman and a scholar, and as a mentor and friend. He was brilliant and captivating; he enlightened and inspired. Few have been so loved and admired by so many or for such good reasons. His memory is cherished; his magnificent impact on science and on people’s lives continues. Professor Bern’s accomplishments as a scientist and the honor it brought him is well documented. His importance to his students, postdoctoral associates, colleagues, and many friends transcends quantification. Professor Bern was born in Montreal, Canada, on January 30, 1920, and lived with his family in Los Angeles from 1933. At 13, during the Great Depression, he became a primary breadwinner for his family. He received his BA in 1941 and his PhD in 1948 from the University of California, Los Angeles. He served in the military in the Medical Department in the Pacific during WWII (1942-6). He began as an instructor in the Zoology Department of the University of California, Berkeley in 1948, and spent the rest of his career there. With his late colleague and friend Aubrey Gorbman, former Professor of Zoology at the University of Washington, Professor Bern co-authored the definitive volume, A Textbook of Comparative Endocrinology, in 1962. It ‘‘contained concepts that were key to the development of the emerging field of comparative endocrinology and guided the thinking and careers of a vast number of scientists around the world,’’ according to a colleague and friend.
doi:10.1016/j.ygcen.2012.02.004
Professor Bern was honored by UC Berkeley with the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1972 and the Berkeley Citation in 1990. He was elected on merit as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and of the California Academy of Sciences. In 1988, the American Society of Zoologists held a special symposium, ‘‘Evolving Concepts in Chemical Mediation,’’ in honor of Professor Bern, and in 1990 the California Legislature cited him in the Assembly. In 2001, the Howard A. Bern Distinguished Lecture in Comparative Endocrinology was inaugurated by the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. Professor Bern received honorary doctorates around the world, including from the University of Rouen in France, and from Hokkaido University, Toho University, and Yokohama City University in Japan. Professor Bern was also a member of the Indian National Science Academy, the National Society of Science, Arts and Letters of Naples, Italy, and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy), in addition to numerous other American and foreign associations and institutions. Underlying the foreign honors and academy memberships was an international reputation and collegial network built by Bern through decades of scholarly travel and research hosting at his Berkeley laboratory. Remarkably notable, too, was Bern’s multigenerational reach to young scientists on an intercontinental scale. Professor Bern was the author or co-author of around 600 scientific papers, and he was co-editor of seven books, from A Textbook of Comparative Endocrinology (with A. Gorbman), Progress in Comparative Endocrinology (with W.S. Hoar, Academic Press), Applications of Endocrinology to Pacific Rim Aquaculture (with E. Chang and T. Hirano, Elsevier), to Neurosecretion and the Biology of Neuropeptides (with H. Kobayashi and A. Urano, Japan Scientific Societies Press). One example of Professor Bern’s research was his seminal work in the 1960s on diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic hormone given to women to prevent spontaneous miscarriage (Developmental effects of diethylstilbestrol (DES) in pregnancy with Arthur L. Herbst, Thieme-Stratton). He helped scientists understand its role in causing cancer in the daughters of the DES recipients. This presaged the emerging and now established field of endocrine disruption, the study of chemicals that affect hormonal systems. Socalled endocrine disruptors, these man-made substances are a major concern because of their prevalence in the environment. One developmental endocrinologist recently stated that ‘‘By mimicking and/or affecting hormone synthesis or degradation, many chemicals can have drastic yet non-lethal effects on wildlife and humans . . . in processes ranging from reproductive failure to cancer. Professor Bern’s groundbreaking work on DES, which affected millions of
122
In Memoriam / General and Comparative Endocrinology 176 (2012) 121–123
people exposed in utero, was critical in the development of studies in this area.’’ Professor Bern’s greatest commitment was to his students and their development. He mentored more than 46 PhD students, 36 MA students, thousands of undergraduates, and more than 90 postdoctoral fellows and visiting professors. His leadership was characterized by the highest standard of intellectual rigor and integrity. Nevertheless, every one of his students and associates developed a special kinship that sprang from Professor Bern’s genuine caring and support. He was ‘‘Howard’’ to all. In fact, if one addressed him as Professor Bern, he would reply that if you did not call him Howard, people would think that you didn’t like him. A former postdoctoral associate who himself had a distinguished career recently expressed the universally held thought, ‘‘From the first moment we saw him, we were deeply attracted by his warm personality and his charming smile.’’ ‘‘Howard’’ also provided a fertile field for growing friendships that continue to support collaboration and advance scientific paths that he initiated decades ago. Hardly a day went by without a hug from Howard and it was an infectious habit. One leader in endocrinology observed that it is easy to tell at a conference who has been in Howard Bern’s lab because they are the ones who are always hugging and kissing one another. Professor Bern’s laboratories embraced diversity in all respects beginning in the late 1940s, long before our current view of diversity was formed. Diversity was never an area of controversy for Professor Bern, as it was a fundamental premise of the inquiring environment. It extended to his supporting students arrested for their political actions during the Free Speech Movement, which he supported strongly. He directly supervised more Ph.D. students of color than virtually any other faculty member at Berkeley in any field. Graduate students of all ethnicities far from his lab also benefitted from his moral support and wisdom. Howard’s faith in his students’ ability to master their research while providing rigorous intellectual guidance only when needed, transformed a large number of lives from self-doubters to successful scientists. As one of his earlier Indian students expressed it, ‘‘Howard was his guru.’’ Students from all parts of the world worked and prospered in his laboratory. This approach to people is a hallmark of all of his scholarly descendants. Scientific diversity was also embraced by Professor Bern. It is remarkable to consider that different groups of scientists worked simultaneously in his lab on cancer biology, fish osmoregulation, mammary gland development and aquaculture, seemingly unrelated scientific fields that Howard realized in fact shared common biological regulation by the endocrine system, particularly by the hormone prolactin. To say that prolactin held a special place in Professor Bern’s scholarly life would be an understatement. Life in the Bern Laboratory was energetic, creative, and collaborative. Along with experiments and lab meetings, the week was filled with seminars that informed and stimulated. Notably, ‘‘Prolactin Lunch’’ seminars, so named because it seemed to many that a week could not pass without considering one or many of the 300 actions that the hormone had been shown to possess. Prolactin Lunch was hosted by Howard along with Professors Paul Licht and Karl Nicoll, and was a Friday tradition that stimulated new ideas and discussion, and prepared participants to speak to larger audiences. These are remembered with nostalgia by all who were lucky enough to participate and they were not to be missed. Howard was once heard to say to contrite students who had thought that a talk had been canceled on account of illness, ‘‘Even when they’re canceled, they’re not canceled!’’. As Professor Bern wrote about creative teaching: ‘‘I consider creative teaching to lie primarily in the area of individual contact. . . A one-to-one relationship is indeed of value to the less motivated students, encouraging those of diverse backgrounds to
identify with the idea of independent study and to enter domains (academic, professional) that they may have originally considered not open to them. These students often become indistinguishable from those who are initially certain of the paths they wish to follow. In both instances, professor and student learn from each other; it is a two-way interaction. An association becomes a friendship, often lasting far beyond the student’s tenure in the professor’s laboratory. The differences between professor and student that derive from age, gender, economic status, ethnicity, experience, philosophy, etc., assure that both will be exposed to new ideas and attitudes’’. Professor Bern was mentor to dozens of students and for this was nominated for the National Science Foundation Presidential Mentoring award in 2005. Many of his former students wrote letters supporting his candidacy. He did NOT receive the award; however, his son, Alan, stated that this nomination was as meaningful to him as any award or honor he received. One of his mentees wrote: ‘‘He taught me that one’s legacy to science is not the work that you do, but the people you leave behind’’. E. Gordon Grau * University of Hawaii, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, PO Box 1346, Coconut Island, Kaneohe, HI 96744, United States * Fax: +1 808 956 3014 E-mail address: [email protected] Richard S. Nishioka 1 University of California, Berkeley, United States Alan Bern Children’s Librarian, Berkeley Public Library, United States Tetsuya Hirano 1 University of Tokyo, Japan Russell Borski North Carolina State University, United States Craig Clarke 1 Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Canada Kevin Foskett Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, United States Louis J. Guillette Jr. Medical University of South Carolina, United States Taisen Iguchi Okazaki National Research Institutes, Japan Lovell A. Jones University of Houston/University of Texas, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, United States Christopher Loretz University of Buffalo, United States Stephen McCormick USGS, Conte Anadromous Fish Research Center, and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, United States Anne MacLachlan University of California, Berkeley, United States Carol A. Mason Columbia University, United States Karen T. Mills Biopharmaceutical Consultant, United States Yoshitaka Nagahama South Ehime Fisheries Research Center Institution for Collaborative 1
Retired
In Memoriam / General and Comparative Endocrinology 176 (2012) 121–123
Relations and Ehime University, Japan Charles S. Nicoll 1 University of California, Berkeley, United States N. Harold Richman Information Technology Specialist, University of Hawaii, United States Mark Sheridan North Dakota State University, United States Jennifer L. Specker University of Rhode Island, United States
123
James J. Sullivan 1 University of California Sea Grant College Program, United States Timothy Turner Tuskegee University, United States Graham Young University of Washington, United States Available online 28 February 2012
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
General and Comparative Endocrinology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ygcen
In Memoriam
In memory of Professor Howard A. Bern
Howard A. Bern, a professor emeritus of Integrative Biology and a research endocrinologist of the Cancer Research Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, died at the age of 91 on January 3, 2012 at his home. Howard Bern will be remembered as a gentleman and a scholar, and as a mentor and friend. He was brilliant and captivating; he enlightened and inspired. Few have been so loved and admired by so many or for such good reasons. His memory is cherished; his magnificent impact on science and on people’s lives continues. Professor Bern’s accomplishments as a scientist and the honor it brought him is well documented. His importance to his students, postdoctoral associates, colleagues, and many friends transcends quantification. Professor Bern was born in Montreal, Canada, on January 30, 1920, and lived with his family in Los Angeles from 1933. At 13, during the Great Depression, he became a primary breadwinner for his family. He received his BA in 1941 and his PhD in 1948 from the University of California, Los Angeles. He served in the military in the Medical Department in the Pacific during WWII (1942-6). He began as an instructor in the Zoology Department of the University of California, Berkeley in 1948, and spent the rest of his career there. With his late colleague and friend Aubrey Gorbman, former Professor of Zoology at the University of Washington, Professor Bern co-authored the definitive volume, A Textbook of Comparative Endocrinology, in 1962. It ‘‘contained concepts that were key to the development of the emerging field of comparative endocrinology and guided the thinking and careers of a vast number of scientists around the world,’’ according to a colleague and friend.
doi:10.1016/j.ygcen.2012.02.004
Professor Bern was honored by UC Berkeley with the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1972 and the Berkeley Citation in 1990. He was elected on merit as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and of the California Academy of Sciences. In 1988, the American Society of Zoologists held a special symposium, ‘‘Evolving Concepts in Chemical Mediation,’’ in honor of Professor Bern, and in 1990 the California Legislature cited him in the Assembly. In 2001, the Howard A. Bern Distinguished Lecture in Comparative Endocrinology was inaugurated by the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. Professor Bern received honorary doctorates around the world, including from the University of Rouen in France, and from Hokkaido University, Toho University, and Yokohama City University in Japan. Professor Bern was also a member of the Indian National Science Academy, the National Society of Science, Arts and Letters of Naples, Italy, and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy), in addition to numerous other American and foreign associations and institutions. Underlying the foreign honors and academy memberships was an international reputation and collegial network built by Bern through decades of scholarly travel and research hosting at his Berkeley laboratory. Remarkably notable, too, was Bern’s multigenerational reach to young scientists on an intercontinental scale. Professor Bern was the author or co-author of around 600 scientific papers, and he was co-editor of seven books, from A Textbook of Comparative Endocrinology (with A. Gorbman), Progress in Comparative Endocrinology (with W.S. Hoar, Academic Press), Applications of Endocrinology to Pacific Rim Aquaculture (with E. Chang and T. Hirano, Elsevier), to Neurosecretion and the Biology of Neuropeptides (with H. Kobayashi and A. Urano, Japan Scientific Societies Press). One example of Professor Bern’s research was his seminal work in the 1960s on diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic hormone given to women to prevent spontaneous miscarriage (Developmental effects of diethylstilbestrol (DES) in pregnancy with Arthur L. Herbst, Thieme-Stratton). He helped scientists understand its role in causing cancer in the daughters of the DES recipients. This presaged the emerging and now established field of endocrine disruption, the study of chemicals that affect hormonal systems. Socalled endocrine disruptors, these man-made substances are a major concern because of their prevalence in the environment. One developmental endocrinologist recently stated that ‘‘By mimicking and/or affecting hormone synthesis or degradation, many chemicals can have drastic yet non-lethal effects on wildlife and humans . . . in processes ranging from reproductive failure to cancer. Professor Bern’s groundbreaking work on DES, which affected millions of
122
In Memoriam / General and Comparative Endocrinology 176 (2012) 121–123
people exposed in utero, was critical in the development of studies in this area.’’ Professor Bern’s greatest commitment was to his students and their development. He mentored more than 46 PhD students, 36 MA students, thousands of undergraduates, and more than 90 postdoctoral fellows and visiting professors. His leadership was characterized by the highest standard of intellectual rigor and integrity. Nevertheless, every one of his students and associates developed a special kinship that sprang from Professor Bern’s genuine caring and support. He was ‘‘Howard’’ to all. In fact, if one addressed him as Professor Bern, he would reply that if you did not call him Howard, people would think that you didn’t like him. A former postdoctoral associate who himself had a distinguished career recently expressed the universally held thought, ‘‘From the first moment we saw him, we were deeply attracted by his warm personality and his charming smile.’’ ‘‘Howard’’ also provided a fertile field for growing friendships that continue to support collaboration and advance scientific paths that he initiated decades ago. Hardly a day went by without a hug from Howard and it was an infectious habit. One leader in endocrinology observed that it is easy to tell at a conference who has been in Howard Bern’s lab because they are the ones who are always hugging and kissing one another. Professor Bern’s laboratories embraced diversity in all respects beginning in the late 1940s, long before our current view of diversity was formed. Diversity was never an area of controversy for Professor Bern, as it was a fundamental premise of the inquiring environment. It extended to his supporting students arrested for their political actions during the Free Speech Movement, which he supported strongly. He directly supervised more Ph.D. students of color than virtually any other faculty member at Berkeley in any field. Graduate students of all ethnicities far from his lab also benefitted from his moral support and wisdom. Howard’s faith in his students’ ability to master their research while providing rigorous intellectual guidance only when needed, transformed a large number of lives from self-doubters to successful scientists. As one of his earlier Indian students expressed it, ‘‘Howard was his guru.’’ Students from all parts of the world worked and prospered in his laboratory. This approach to people is a hallmark of all of his scholarly descendants. Scientific diversity was also embraced by Professor Bern. It is remarkable to consider that different groups of scientists worked simultaneously in his lab on cancer biology, fish osmoregulation, mammary gland development and aquaculture, seemingly unrelated scientific fields that Howard realized in fact shared common biological regulation by the endocrine system, particularly by the hormone prolactin. To say that prolactin held a special place in Professor Bern’s scholarly life would be an understatement. Life in the Bern Laboratory was energetic, creative, and collaborative. Along with experiments and lab meetings, the week was filled with seminars that informed and stimulated. Notably, ‘‘Prolactin Lunch’’ seminars, so named because it seemed to many that a week could not pass without considering one or many of the 300 actions that the hormone had been shown to possess. Prolactin Lunch was hosted by Howard along with Professors Paul Licht and Karl Nicoll, and was a Friday tradition that stimulated new ideas and discussion, and prepared participants to speak to larger audiences. These are remembered with nostalgia by all who were lucky enough to participate and they were not to be missed. Howard was once heard to say to contrite students who had thought that a talk had been canceled on account of illness, ‘‘Even when they’re canceled, they’re not canceled!’’. As Professor Bern wrote about creative teaching: ‘‘I consider creative teaching to lie primarily in the area of individual contact. . . A one-to-one relationship is indeed of value to the less motivated students, encouraging those of diverse backgrounds to
identify with the idea of independent study and to enter domains (academic, professional) that they may have originally considered not open to them. These students often become indistinguishable from those who are initially certain of the paths they wish to follow. In both instances, professor and student learn from each other; it is a two-way interaction. An association becomes a friendship, often lasting far beyond the student’s tenure in the professor’s laboratory. The differences between professor and student that derive from age, gender, economic status, ethnicity, experience, philosophy, etc., assure that both will be exposed to new ideas and attitudes’’. Professor Bern was mentor to dozens of students and for this was nominated for the National Science Foundation Presidential Mentoring award in 2005. Many of his former students wrote letters supporting his candidacy. He did NOT receive the award; however, his son, Alan, stated that this nomination was as meaningful to him as any award or honor he received. One of his mentees wrote: ‘‘He taught me that one’s legacy to science is not the work that you do, but the people you leave behind’’. E. Gordon Grau * University of Hawaii, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, PO Box 1346, Coconut Island, Kaneohe, HI 96744, United States * Fax: +1 808 956 3014 E-mail address: [email protected] Richard S. Nishioka 1 University of California, Berkeley, United States Alan Bern Children’s Librarian, Berkeley Public Library, United States Tetsuya Hirano 1 University of Tokyo, Japan Russell Borski North Carolina State University, United States Craig Clarke 1 Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Canada Kevin Foskett Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, United States Louis J. Guillette Jr. Medical University of South Carolina, United States Taisen Iguchi Okazaki National Research Institutes, Japan Lovell A. Jones University of Houston/University of Texas, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, United States Christopher Loretz University of Buffalo, United States Stephen McCormick USGS, Conte Anadromous Fish Research Center, and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, United States Anne MacLachlan University of California, Berkeley, United States Carol A. Mason Columbia University, United States Karen T. Mills Biopharmaceutical Consultant, United States Yoshitaka Nagahama South Ehime Fisheries Research Center Institution for Collaborative 1
Retired
In Memoriam / General and Comparative Endocrinology 176 (2012) 121–123
Relations and Ehime University, Japan Charles S. Nicoll 1 University of California, Berkeley, United States N. Harold Richman Information Technology Specialist, University of Hawaii, United States Mark Sheridan North Dakota State University, United States Jennifer L. Specker University of Rhode Island, United States
123
James J. Sullivan 1 University of California Sea Grant College Program, United States Timothy Turner Tuskegee University, United States Graham Young University of Washington, United States Available online 28 February 2012