© 2004 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
IN MEMORIAM
1 Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-3140
 |
INTRODUCTION |
|---|
TOP
 INTRODUCTION A TRIBUTE TO AUBREY... |
|---|
We publish here the text of Howard Bern's moving tribute to Aubrey Gorbman, one of the society's eminences, delivered at the 2004 meeting of the Society.
|
A TRIBUTE TO AUBREY GORBMAN |
|---|
|
TOP
INTRODUCTIONA TRIBUTE TO AUBREY... |
|---|
I have mixed feelings about offering this tribute to my beloved friend and recently departed colleague Aubrey Gorbman. Professor Stacia Sower urged me to do this, and while hesitant, I nevertheless agreed. It will not be surprising to anyone to learn that I am among Aubrey's oldest extant colleagues in the field of comparative endocrinology. Professor Maurice Fontaine is a few years older, a mere 99, and Aubrey worked in his lab as a young man in Paris and Monte Carlo. I have the disadvantage of never having been Aubrey's colleague in research and the advantage of never having been his colleague in research. I always considered his primary love for the thyroid gland to be misplaced and found the pituitary and even the crustacean androgenic gland and certainly the fish urophysis considerably more interesting. But chacun a son gout. Aubrey's death was not only a blow to the comparative endocrinology of thyroid function but also to the field of general animal evolutionary endocrinology.
I first met Professor Gorbman when I was a lowly instructor (there was nothing lower, believe me) in the Berkeley Zoology Department in 1949 or 1950. He was committed to teach our summer course in vertebrate zoology, but could not arrive on time because of some to-this-day-unspecified commitment in Paris. So I filled in for him for the first week or so. He felt sufficiently in debt to me that he shortly began a campaign to add excitement to my otherwise dull life as a reproductive endocrinologist by converting me to comparative endocrinology, a conversion which I have never regretted and which, in any case, was never complete. Aubrey, however, later consistently refused to take credit for my conversion, which I think protected him from accusations of poor judgment or at least poor taste.
Aubrey Gorbman was indeed a real father of the field of comparative endocrinology. Sometimes he needed to be reminded that the field also included invertebrate organisms, a hesitancy in recognition for which he more than compensated by his brilliant analyses, initially thyroid-oriented, of protochordate endocrinology and his recent insistence on the general reproductive role of gondadotropin-releasing hormone in invertebrates as well as in vertebrates.
Gorbman participated in the first international symposium on comparative endocrinology organized by Ian Chester-Jones, then at Liverpool, and undertook the organization of the second such symposium at Cold Spring Harbor in 1958. He appointed an organizing committee of five or so eminences grises and me. None of us did much organizing except Aubrey. My role was very clear: I projected slides and emptied ashtrays (the bad old days) and learned a lot of real comparative endocrinology. Gorbman truly enjoyed the effort involved in seeing the symposium emerge as a highly successful exposition of all kinds of biological endocrinology, including debates on richly controversial topics of the time, such as brain control of pituitary function.
He especially enjoyed some of the planning correspondence which appealed to his not-always-obvious sense of humor. For example, in corresponding with Professor Solly Zuckerman (not yet Sir Solly or Lord Zuckerman), his secretary inadvertently addressed the latter as Professor Sally Zuckerman. This led to an immediate reply, itself unusual, addressed to Professor Audrey Gorbman. This amused Aubrey greatly, and I think that I recall seeing Aubrey and Solly Zuckerman smiling winningly at one another at the symposium. Aubrey told this story often, to his own genuine amusement.
In fathering a field, it is not enough for one to be an initiator but one must also be a nourisher. And Aubrey joined Chester-Jones, his nominal predecessor, in truly cultivating the field in its first years and in its continuing development. He really founded the Division of Comparative Endocrinology of the American Society of Zoologists (which we used to be called), he coauthored the first textbook of comparative endocrinology, and he founded and served as longtime co-Editor-in-Chief of General and Comparative Endocrinology, the hallmark journal in the field. He edited the manuscripts that he received with thoughtfulness; he was particularly gentle with authors who were young and struggling to gain some recognition. He had great patience in improving the English of those needing this kind of help, and this included some of our distinguished forbears who occasionally wrote in a fashion that one can only describe as execrable. For endocrinologists who were not anglophone, he was not only tolerant but also instructive and remedial. His sense of collegiality made him an encouraging rather than a condemnatory editor. He often referred to himself as thick-skinned, with the hide of an elephant. In fact, he used his supposed elephantine hide to conceal a gentleness and a forbearance that allowed corrigible error and a toughness that demanded quality at all times from the scientists he corrected.
As a leader in research, Aubrey took pride in having a highly interactive laboratory, a laboratory that truly taught the graduate students and post-doctorals that were fortunate enough to be a part of his large group. He had a real sensitivity to the needs of women in our profession. He loved being a professor and later chair at Barnard College, then the distinguished women's college of Columbia University. His efforts on behalf of emerging woman scientists were marvelously recognized when President Clinton bestowed upon him in a White House ceremony an award for his pioneering mentorship of women biologists, among others.
Another major aspect of Professor Gorbman's career was his unflagging internationalism, nowhere more evident than in his early encouragement of Japanese comparative endocrinologists to be original and creative in their experimentation and conceptualization. His mentorship of Professor Hideshi Kobayashi of the University of Tokyo, for example, was a major influence in the development of this fine scientist, to whom the compliment of being the Aubrey Gorbman of Japan might well be applied in recognition of his subsequent leadership. Gorbman's associations that began in his laboratory and/or in his many stays abroad generally persisted in a lifelong fashion.
Aubrey was recognized for his investigative talent and for his fidelity to good science and to good people who did the good science. It is wonderfully fitting that his own Department of Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle has established the Aubrey Gorbman lectureship in comparative physiology to memorialize his contributions not only scientific but also general-educational to the department he helped build as a forward-looking chair during its major growth phase in the sixties and seventies.
In every respect, Aubrey Gorbman was a giant of a human being. He was not without an occasional weak point; he was, after all, a human being, but he was universally respected. We shall truly not see his like again, and the Society he helped build (he was our President in 1976) pays him honor while deploring his loss. The women and men that he trained are his monument, and this is the kind of monument that is self-replicating. He lived a rich life full of meaning for himself and for many, many others, the present speaker among them.
|
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||