Biophysical Society Bulletin | June 2018

Obituary

George Oster George Oster , professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, died on April 15, 2018. His death is a true loss for the scientific community. George was one of the pioneers of interdisciplinary science. His tor- tuous career path is a testament to his refusal to allow his curiosity

Said George in 2006: “Most of the time, there is some puzzle to kick around. That’s what is fun about doing science. There is this endless supply of intriguing puzzles.” With Garrett Odell , James Murray , and others, George pioneered mechanical models of morphogenesis, revealing how forces on and deformations of the cellular cytoskeleton integrate with chemical and genetic signals to give shape to tissues during development. With Alan Perelson , George proposed that the swelling of the cytoskeletal gel can drive protrusions at the cell front, laying the foundation for quantitative studies of cell motility. With Charlie Peskin , Hongyun Wang , Tim Elston , and others, George worked to understand how molecular motors can operate in a realm dominated by thermal fluc- tuations, culminating in the discovery and application of the Brownian ratchet to these biological machines. “It would not be an exaggeration to say that George, more than any other physicist or mathematician, inspired our current knowledge of molecular motors,” writes colleague Alex Mogilner. Beyond these great technical contributions, George’s unique approach to science is what his many colleagues and collabo- rators will keep as his legacy. George was an early champion of the now common approach to solving biological puzzles through iterative cycles of modeling and experimentation, and will be remembered as one of the first biophysicists who “married” experiments and theory. George received international recognition as one of the most profound and original scientific leaders. He was a Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow; he was awarded the Weldon Memorial Prize by the University of Oxford, the Winfree Prize by the So- ciety for Mathematical Biology, and the Sackler International Prize in Biophysics. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. George published many of his seminal papers in the Biophys- ical Journal and served on its editorial board. His scientific legacy lives on not only in the number of people trained by him who have gone on to establish successful scientific ca- reers, but in the joy and passion he instilled in those fortunate enough to have worked with him. In a profile by the National Academy of Sciences shortly after his election, he was quoted as saying, “[Science] is so much fun that I would pay them to do it.” No doubt that his former students, trainees, and colleagues would echo this sentiment about their time spent sipping coffee and thinking through the great puzzles in biolo- gy with George. — Jasmine Nirody and Padmini Rangamani

George Oster

to be constrained by departmental boundaries. After finish- ing high school on Long Island, New York, in 1957, George decided to attend the nearby US Merchant Marine Academy. After graduating in 1961, he shifted course and continued his education at Columbia University’s new Department of Nuclear Engineering, from which he graduated. During his time at Columbia, he found himself drawn both to biophysics and the Bay Area (where he had spent a summer interning at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and joined the graduate program in biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, shortly after graduating with his first PhD in 1967. There he worked with Aharon Katchalsky , a world-renowned Israeli scientist, on the thermodynamics of biological net- works. After spending some time as a postdoctoral fellow in Rehovot with Katchalsky, George returned to Berkeley in 1972, where he would stay on as a faculty member for the rest of his life. At Berkeley, George spent two years in the Department of Mechanical Engineering before moving to the Department of Entomology, his social and environmental conscience stirred by Berkeley’s electric political climate. “Berkeley was very ex- citing. I was into saving the whales and saving the world,” said George in a 2006 profile in PNAS. During this time, he wrote seminal work on caste and evolution in social insects (with Edward Wilson) and theories of bifurcations to a hierarchy of periodic oscillations and chaos in simple ecological models (with Robert May). While most scholars are fortunate to uncover just one “great discovery” during their careers, George was a self-proclaimed “dabbler,” seamlessly transitioning between fields, bring- ing to each his unique point of view and insight into some previously hidden natural order. Students and fellows would emerge from all corners of Berkeley’s campus for his lively “lab meetings,” held usually in some crowded and noisy North Berkeley café, to discuss their ideas — the wilder the better.

June 2018

15

T H E N E W S L E T T E R O F T H E B I O P H Y S I C A L S O C I E T Y