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Northwestern University
Obituary Collection
These are obituaries which are from approximately 1991 through 1997 of former faculty members of Northwestern University, located in Evanston & Chicago, Illinois.

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Northwestern University Obituaries

GenealogyBuff.com - David Shemin dies at 80

Posted By: GenealogyBuff
Date: Sunday, 8 March 2009, at 1:22 p.m.

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David Shemin, of Woods Hole, Mass., professor emeritus of biochemistry and a pioneer in the use of stable and radioactive isotopes to trace the chemical pathways by which body constituents are made, died Nov. 26 [1991] in Falmouth, Mass., after a long illness. He was 80 years old.

His career spanned the entire development of the science of biochemistry, from its early days in the 1930s, to its flowering into molecular biology in the last two decades. Solidly based on decades of innovative work, his perspective, intuition, and scholarship permeated the field and were a constant source of guidance and insight to his colleagues and students.

His most famous experiment was in 1946, when he ingested, over a period of 66 hours, 2 ounces of the amino acid glycine containing the stable isotope of nitrogen 15N. Since the isotope could be examined independently of what material it became associated with, Shemin was able to follow its incorporation into his own blood constituents. To his surprise, unlike the continuous synthesis and degradation of the proteins in blood plasma, the red blood cells, once formed, had an average life span of 127 days and only then would be destroyed. This fundamental discovery set the stage for our present understanding of the many diseases that affect red blood cells.

A particularly important result of this experiment was that glycine, the simplest of amino acids, was incorporated into heme, the red oxygen-binding compound of hemoglobin in the red blood cell. It was this observation which eventually led to the unravelling of the origin of the four nitrogens and every one of the 34 carbon atoms in the heme molecule from glycine and another versatile body constituent, succinic acid. This was a major breakthrough into the realm of the biosynthesis of relatively large molecules of biological importance, which provided a much-followed example in many areas of biochemistry. Typical of Shemin's work, it also required a tour de force of chemistry by which each atom in the molecule could be isolated separately from all the others. Shemin and his colleagues proceeded to work out the complete enzyme pathway from smaller precursors to heme, the active chemical group of hemoglobin, myoglobin, cytochromes and other respiratory proteins. Similar pathways accounted for chlorophyll, the light-harvesting pigment of plants, and for vitamin B12.

Shemin majored in chemistry and biology at the City College of New York, graduating in 1932. He was awarded a master's degree in chemistry from Columbia University in 1933, and a doctoral degree in biochemistry from Columbia in 1938. Shemin was a member of the faculty at Columbia University from 1944 to 1968, when he moved to Northwestern University. He became chairman of the newly created department of biochemistry and molecular biology at Northwestern in 1974, a position he held for five years. In 1975, he became deputy director for basic sciences of the Cancer Center of Northwestern University. As a result of Shemin's efforts, Cancer Center activities became truly interdisciplinary, representing collaboration and intellectual exchange among scientists and clinicians. He became professor emeritus in 1981.

"His vision of new scientific frontiers and his ability to recruit and nurture the careers of talented young faculty formed the basis for much of our success in the field of biochemistry and molecular biology over the past twenty years," said Lawrence B. Dumas, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University.

Shemin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1958 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1961. He also was an honorary member of both the Swiss Biochemistry Society and the Japanese Biochemical Society, a recipient of both the Pasteur Medal and the Stevens Award of Columbia University, and a Harvey Society Lecturer. He lectured at universities throughout the world and was a visiting professor at the Karolinska Institute, the Pasteur Institute and the Weizmann Institute.

David Shemin was born in 1911. He married Mildred B. Sumpter in 1937. They had two daughters, Louise Homburger of Glencoe, Ill., and Elizabeth Shemin-Garneau of Roxbury, Mass. Mildred died in 1962.

In 1963 he married Charlotte Norton and they made their home in Evanston, Ill., while Shemin was at Northwestern University. After his retirement in 1981, they moved to Woods Hole, Mass.

Survivors include his wife, two daughters, five grandchildren and a brother, Jacob Shemin of Baldwin, Long Island, New York.

A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. on Friday (Nov. 29) at the Falmouth Jewish Congregation. A donation in lieu of flowers can be made to the David Shemin Memorial Lectureship at Northwestern.

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