by King-Thom Chung, Department of Biology, The University of Memphis

Edward Lawrie Tatum was well-known for his pioneering work on the mutational analysis of biochemical pathways, which laid foundations for the discovery of the gene control of the biosynthesis of proteins. He was a pioneer in postulating one gene-one enzyme theory. With George Beadle (1903-1989) and Joshua Lederberg (1925-), Tatum was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1958.

Tatum was born in Boulder, Colorado, on December 14, 1909. His father was Arthur L. Tatum (1884-1955), and his mother was Mabel Webb Tatum. He had a twin brother, Edwood, but he died shortly after birth. Tatum had another brother, Howard, and a sister, Besse. His grandfather, Lawrie Tatum, was a Quaker, who had settled in the Iowa Territory, and had been an Indian agent after the Civil War (1860-1865).

When Tatum was born, his father, Arthur, was an instructor in chemistry at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The elder Tatum held a succession of teaching positions while earning a Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology from the University of Chicago, and an M.D. from Rush Medical College.

Tatum was influenced by his remarkable family background that helped nurture him to be a good scientist. He also benefited from the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago where he attended. He continued his education at the University of Wisconsin when his family moved to Madison. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1931. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation entitled, "Studies on the Biochemistry of Microorganisms," in 1934. He married June Alton the same year.

His dissertation research, a chemical compound in potatoes, later identified as asparagine, was found to be a growth factor for C. septicum. This work won him a General Education Board postdoctoral fellowship to spend a year at Utrecht, Netherlands. In the Netherlands, he worked with Fritz Kogl and met many friends such as Nils T.E. Fries (1912-), and A.J. Kluyver (1885-1956), leading investigators of bacterial chemistry and nutrition of the time.

After returning to Wisconsin, George Beadle at Stanford University, was looking for a research associate to work on "hormone-like substances that are concerned with eye pigments in Drosophila." Tatum wrote to him to accept his offer. This was a big challenge for Tatum.

Between 1937 and 1941, Tatum engaged with the arduous task of extracting pigment precursors from Drosophila larvae. In the meantime, Tatum volunteered to develop and teach a biochemistry course for biology and chemistry graduate students at Stanford University. Beadle attended these lectures. After learning to culture Neurospora in a well-defined medium, Tatum and Beadle X-rayed the Neurospora and sought for mutants with biochemical defects marked by a nutritional deficiency. This was painstaking work because they had to examine one-by-one, the single spore culture isolated from the irradiated parent strain. The examined thousands of cultures and found the number 299 proved to be the first recognizable mutant that required pyridoxine for growth. From these extensive studies with the genetic mutants of Neurospora, they suggested that a direct and simple role of genes is the control of enzymes. They hypothesized that enzymes were the primary products of genes. This later became the one gene-one enzyme theory.

From 1942-1945, Tatum was an associate professor in the Stanford University Biology Department. His laboratory rapidly engendered a library of mutants blocked in almost any anabolic pathway. They also discovered many distinct genes for controlling metabolic pathways in Neurospora.

In 1945, Tatum moved to Washington University, St. Louis, where Carl Lindegren hoped to find a niche for him. But only staying for one year, Tatum moved, later, to Yale University, New Haven. There, Tatum was disappointed in the university’s commitment to biochemically-oriented research in a department heavily dominated by morphological-systematic tradition. In 1948, he returned to Stanford as a full professor.

While at Yale, however, a young student names Joshua Lederberg, came to the laboratory of Tatum in the summer of 1946. The collaboration between Tatum and Lederberg yielded a fantastic breakthrough in molecular genetics — bacterial conjugation.

From 1948 – 1956, Tatum continued to teach at Stanford University. He nurtured many of his students to work on the biochemical genetics of E. coli, which was considered technically superior to Neurospora.

In 1956, he married his second wife, Viola Kantor, who was a staff employee at the National Foundation/March of Dimes.

He left Stanford in 1957 and moved to Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University), as a professor and remained there until his death due to heart failure complicated by progressive chronic emphysema, on November 7, 1975. He was survived by two daughters from his first marriage; his brother Howard, who worked for many years with the Population Council doing research on contraception; and his late sister, Besse, who was married to Dr. A. Frederick Rasmussen, professor of Microbiology at UCLA.

Tatum received many honors in addition to his Nobel Prize in 1958. In 1952, he was elected to Fellow of National Academy of Science (NAS). In 1953, he received the Remsen Award of the American Chemical Society and was elected to the American Philosophical Society. He was president of the Harvey Society (1964-1965) and was the recipient of at least seven honorary degrees. He also served as editor for many scientific publications, including Annual Reviews, Science, Biochemica et Biophysica Acta, Genetics, and the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Tatum said, "The general philosophy is concentration on excellence — making it possible for (the scientists) to use his capacities, both for research and for training the next generation — whether it is a particular research program in a given area, whether it may or may not be immediately practicable in its application —freedom to develop the intellectual curiosity and abilities of the individual."

He gave us an immense inheritance; an inheritance of wisdom, generosity and human compassion.