| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803
Henry Carl Aldrich (FIG. 1
) was born in Beaumont, Texas, 17 Feb 1941. His parents were landowners and rice farmers in southeastern Texas, but in his lifetime the land and the sale of rice allotments became more profitable than planting rice. He died 11 Aug 2005 in Gainesville, Florida, of a heart attack that occurred while he was in the hospital being treated for kidney disease.
|
As a mycologist Henry took off quickly and soon was known for his basic research on developmental ultrastructure of slime mold life cycle stages. Trained in the 1960s, when transmission electron microscopy was a discipline rather than a technique, Henry went to annual MSA meetings with a stack of micrographs; the rest of us learned about networking only years later. At meetings when everyone stayed in dorms, evenings were spent in lobbies with like-minded microscopists for show-and-tell sessions that were even more intense than discussions of phylogenetic trees are today. Henry knew the latest literature and his micrographs were of the highest quality, produced in a lab where he always tinkered to obtain amazing results. He adapted new techniques he read about with Rube Goldberg-engineered equipment. Toward this end I remember the day we wrestled with a second-hand electron microscope bought at a bargain-basement price and moved from Tallahassee to Gainesville in a moving van. The fact that the microscope did not fit into the freight elevator did not faze Henry, and he found a group of students and postdocs to move the bulky instrument up two flights of stairs on a weekend when no one was around to question his actions. Henry liked immediate action, and rather than fill out a work order he went in on a Sunday to cut a length out of legs of the mistakenly installed tall benches in his new lab, so they could be used more comfortably for light microscopy. In my three years as a postdoc at Florida Henry modified several microscopes, photographic enlargers, film holders and freeze-etch machines. Sometimes these were minor modifications involving cardboard, but in other cases wrenches, saws and soldering tools were used. An article that appeared only 6 mo before his death in Microscopy Today (March 2005), "Inexpensive Digitization of an SEM" by Henry and Donna S. Williams, is typical of his inventive cost-cutting methods. His innovations extended to histochemistry, and he tweaked many protocols to enhance his papers and the publications of others. He often was acknowledged for his help, e.g. in freeze-fracture-etch methods in papers on "DNA liquid crystal phases at high concentrations," more generally for "invaluable assistance with the electron microscopy studies" and for the use of his micrographs.
Henry was the first biologist I knew to use a personal computer routinely, and he praised the abilities of his Radio Shack computer incessantly. Several upgrades later, however, he reluctantly gave up the Radio Shack brand because once computers caught on no one else had one that was compatible with his. Eventually, he came to lament some applications of computers to microscopy, and he was particularly annoyed by the use of computer programs to enhance contrast in light micrographs, "clean-up" electron micrographs from unwanted artifacts such as stain precipitates, or to "colorize" scanning or transmission electron micrographs. Such applications of technology were considered outside the purity of his art.
Henry was a hands-on person in the lab, doing everything from using Coca Cola each month to remove Gainesville’s hard-water residue from the still (more effective and cheaper than commercial acids) to changing filaments and making small microscope repairs. All of the short cuts and do-it-yourself projects kept the EM lab functioning well. The lab also served as a gathering place for students from many different labs, all of whom used microscopic techniques in their research and relied heavily on Henry’s expertise.
Research contributions: Henry’s big coup.—
Henry’s early work centered on the myxomycetes or true plasmodial slime molds. One of the early memories I have of him as a graduate student involved a container of used coffee grounds at his work place. As a child he had observed that, what he later learned was Fuligo septica sporulated at his mother’s back door, exactly where she routinely dumped used coffee grounds. The results from Henry’s experimentation on the use of coffee grounds to induce myxomycete fruiting were, however, ambiguous.
Henry’s research usually required more sophisticated supplies and equipment than cans of coffee grounds. He was the first to use transmission electron microscopy to study the transition from amoeba to flagellated swarm cell and to point out the dramatic differences between the mitotic divisions of myxamoebae and plasmodia in different stages of the life cycle of myxomycetes. Henry also discovered (or perhaps more appropriately, rediscovered, see Aldrich 1967) the position of meiosis in the life cycle of myxomycetes, important missing information to those comparing life cycles of fungi and the organisms that came to be regarded as protists. Most of the slime molds that could be cultured easily had thick dark-walled spores, and even if one could see through the spores current methods did not readily reveal the chromosomes. Therrien (1965, 1966) had placed the site of meiosis in the precleavage sporangium by use of relatively new microspectophotometric methods to compare DNA levels at different stages in the life cycle. Therrien’s work was confirmed seemingly by what began as a project in one of Dr Alexopoulos’s advanced mycology classes. Carroll and Dykstra (1966) reported synaptonemal complexes, newly recognized microscopic indicators of meiosis present in prophase I nuclei, from precleavage sporangia. Henry had looked for synaptonemal complexes in Physarum flavicomum as part of his dissertation research, and he appeared to have been scooped. On one occasion Henry stayed up more than 48 h to sample the vegetative plasmodium of Physarum flavicomum as it advanced toward sporulation. Although he sampled every 15 min, the elusive synaptonemal complexes were not found in the precleavage sporangia, even after the long hours spent he had spend fixing, embedding, sectioning and observing a great many precleavage samples. However, they were unmistakable in the nuclei of postcleavage sporangia that were part of the same experiement. Dr Alexopoulos urged Henry to try to reconcile his results with those reporting precleavage meiosis. Henry eventually repeated his observations with two more species of slime molds to obtain similar results. At that point he published a paper with the comment, "No explanation is offered for the contradiction between my results and those of Therrien (1965)" (Aldrich 1967).
An explanation for the discrepancy between Henry’s findings and those of Carroll and Dykstra (1966) came later when Charles Mims looked at the original plastic embedded samples of the Carroll and Dykstra (1966) material in which synaptonemal complexes had been reported in plasmodia and discovered that these samples consisted of aberrant giant multinucleate spores rather than plasmodia. In addition Aldrich and Mims (1970) found synaptonemal complexes in postcleavage spores from naturally sporulating material of five species and laboratory fruitings of three other species. The microscopic evidence therefore was explained, but the microspectrophotometric studies have not been rationalized fully.
Henry was a highly collaborative biologist, and he published with many colleagues, including his graduate students D.E. Lusk, T. Raub and U.-P. Roos, and postdoctoral associates G.T. Cole and H.W. Keller, as well as a number of others including W.E. Barstow, G.L. Benny, G.C. Carroll, M.J. Dykstra, J.W. Kimbrough, L.O. Ingram, C.W. Mims, J.C. Penland, J.B. Reiskind, D. TeStrake and W.J. Todd. Although Henry concentrated on slime molds for many years, he worked in many areas of research to answer questions about interesting material brought to him.
About the time he was president of MSA, Henry still was publishing a few papers on slime molds, but the majority were on other topics including "Acid phosphatase studies of corn root using the cerium capture technique" (Williams et al 1986), "Role of the cell-surface of Methanosarcina mazei in cell aggregation" (Robinson et al 1985), "Ultrastructure of two associations involving marine fungi and green algae" (Testrake and Aldrich 1984) and "Light and electron microscopic examinations of methane-producing biofilms from anaerobic fixed-bed reactors" (Robinson et al 1984). At the time of his death most of his more recent publications dealt with bacterial physiology, including studies of biofilms, microbial corrosion of steel pipes, and use of bacteria in fuel alcohol production, research with obvious applications.
Two of Henry’s early slime mold papers on mitosis in myxamoebae and plasmodia (Aldrich 1969) and the original paper reporting meiosis in postcleavage sporangia (Aldrich 1967), however, remain his most highly cited works out of about 120 papers that he published. In the summer of 2005 I was surprised to see a lizard on the cover of Mycologia, even more surprised to discover that the small round structures on the lizard’s body were sporangia of a slime mold (Townsend et al 2005). What an unprecedented tribute: a final slime mold paper in the current Mycologia posted on the MSA Website at the time of his death.
Service to the Mycological Society of America and other scientific groups.—
Henry was an active young member of MSA and was appointed to a number of committees at an early age. He served MSA as eastern councilor (1971–1973), vice president (1982–1983), and assumed the position of president (1984–1985). His most important mycological role was as one of the organizers of IMC 2 held at Tampa (1977). Henry was a member of the Executive Committee of which Emory Simmons was chairman. A subset of four members of the Executive Committee, including Henry, formed the corporation IMC2 Inc. "for legal and fiscal reasons," but his most time-consuming involvement for the meeting was as program chairman.
In addition to MSA Henry was active in several microscopy and microbiology groups, serving as president, Southeastern Branch, American Society for Microbiology (1986–1987); secretary-treasurer, Southeastern Branch, American Society for Microbiology (1995–1996); and chairman, Ultrastructure Division, American Society for Microbiology (1988). The Henry Aldrich Student Research Grant Awards, established in his name, are administered by the Southeastern Branch, American Society for Microbiology, and the inaugural awards were given in Oct 2005, only months after his death.
The personal side of Henry A.—
Henry had a rich life, finding an outlet for his many talents and excelling in several major interests, notably music and photography. He was a member of the United Church of Gainesville, and he was their organist for more than 30 y. He played piano and violin and hosted Sunday afternoon musicales at his home much of his life. His involvement in music was so great that he once traveled behind the Iron Curtain to purchase a violin made by a mentor of Stradivarius that had been owned by the mother of a biologist friend. Although he routinely used photography in his research, he also pursued photography as a serious hobby.
At times Henry’s temper could flare, but more often he was kind and helpful, and many around him reaped benefits. He was eager to teach students new techniques and in some cases gave them much more support that did their major professors. He changed oil and did minor repairs on the cars of students and postdocs. Once he found a position for a prominent microscopist who was temporarily out of a job. Henry was especially good to Dr Alexopoulos as he grew older. Not only did Henry make long trips to Austin to help to clear out the office in the botany building and to make his home safer for a near invalid, he also kept Dr Alexopoulos supplied with one of his favorite sweets, Stuckey’s tangerine marmalade. In these years Henry also typed and addressed the Christmas letters dictated by Dr Alexopoulos. On 12 Dec 1983 Dr Alexopoulos wrote, "Dear Henry, All the student letters have been signed and mailed. Just in case we do a 1984 letter or for your own information when the time comes to notify my students of my demise, I want to make a few corrections in your list as follows ...."
Henry was plagued by health problems most of his adult life. His only sibling, an older sister, died at 16 of polycystic kidney disease, a condition Henry developed at a later age. From being a major player at IMC 2 in Tampa (1977) he went to being a minor participant at IMC 5 in Vancouver in 1994 because of greatly diminished kidney function. His condition was improved dramatically the year after the Vancouver congress when someone he knew only causally donated a kidney to extend Henry’s life for 11 more years. He was fortunate to be in Gainesville, a center for research and treatment of kidney disease. At one time his physician was Dr Robert Cade, better known for his contribution to the invention of Gatorade, but one whom Henry knew as a collector of antique stringed instruments.
Henry’s survivors include his wife, microbiologist Sylvia Coleman of Gainesville; sons Clay Chapman Aldrich of Oak Park, California, and John Clark Aldrich of Vienna, Virginia; their mother Valerie, whom many remember from earlier years; and three grandsons. Although his father died young, Henry’s mother, Bernice, lived into her 90s in Gainesville, where she had moved to be near Henry. She was an accomplished china painter, and many of Henry’s friends and visitors of that period have lovely hand-painted objects by which to remember them both.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank George C. Carroll, J.W. Kimbrough, Charles W. Mims, Donald H. Pfister and William J. Todd, all friends and collaborators of Henry’s, who commented on the manuscript to improve it.
 |
FOOTNOTES |
|---|
1 From the title of Henry Aldrich’s presidential address to the Mycological Society of America (Aldrich 1986). 
2 Corresponding author. E-mail: mblackwell{at}lsu.edu
LITERATURE CITED
Aldrich HC. 1967. Ultrastructure of meiosis in three species of Physarum. Mycologia 59:127–148.[CrossRef][Medline]
———. 1969. Ultrastructure of mitosis in myxamoebae and plasmodia of Physarum flavicomum. Am J Bot 56:290–299.[CrossRef][Medline]
———. 1986. From taxonomy to biochemistry—odyssey of a myxomycetologist. Mycologia 78:1–10.[CrossRef]
———, Mims CW. 1970. Synaptonemal complexes and meiosis in myxomycetes. Am J Bot 57:935–941.[CrossRef][Medline]
Carroll GC, Dykstra R. 1966. Synaptinemal complexes in Didymium iridis. Mycologia 58:166–169.[CrossRef]
Robinson RW, Aldrich HC, Hurst SF, Bleiweis AS. 1985. Role of the cell surface of Methanosarcina mazei in cell aggregation. Appl Environ Microb 49:321–327.
———, Akin DE, Nordstedt RA, Thomas MV, Aldrich HC. 1984. Light and electron microscope examinations of methane-producing biofilms from anaerobic fixed bed reactors. Appl Environ Microb 48:127–136.
Testrake D, Aldrich HC. 1984. Ultrastructure of two associations involving marine fungi and green algae. Bot Mar 27:515–519.
Therrien CD. 1965. Microspectrophotometric analysis of nuclear DNA in some Myxomycetes [Doctoral dissertation]. Austin: University of Texas. 92 p.
———. 1966. Microspectrophotometric analysis of nuclear deoxyribonucleic acid content in two myxomycetes. Can J Bot 44:1667–1675.
Townsend JH, Aldrich HC, Wilson LD, McCranie JR. 2005. First report of sporangia of a myxomycete (Physarum pusillum) on the body of a living animal, the lizard Corytophanes cristatus. Mycologia 97:346–348.
Williams DS, Aldrich HC, Ferl RJ. 1986. Acid phosphatase studies of corn root using the cerium capture technique. J Histochem Cytochem 34:124–124.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
