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Arnold L. Demain (born April 26, 1927) is an American microbiologist. During his 60-year career, he has gained a renowned reputation in the field of industrial microbiology. He was formerly the Professor of Industrial Microbiology in the Biology Department at MIT and Founder and Head of Department of Fermentation Microbiology at Merck & Co. The August 2010 edition of ''The Journal of Antibiotics'' celebrated his scientific career.〔http://www.nature.com/ja/focus/dr_arnold_demain/index.html〕 He has been described as “one of the world’s leading industrial microbiologists” and as “a scientist constantly in the forefront of industrial microbiology and biotechnology.” He has been “a pioneer in research on the elucidation and regulation of the biosynthetic pathways leading to the penicillins and cephalosporins” and “has been instrumental in the development of the beta-lactam industry. ” One feature of Demain's work, according to ''Microbiology Australia'', has been his “ability to undertake fundamental research on systems with clear industrial applications, recognising that biodiscovery is the start of the road that includes strain improvement to achieve levels of product synthesis that warrant further investment to take products into the marketplace.”〔(【引用サイトリンク】 work =Microbiology Australia )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】 work =SemGen )〕 Demain has published over 500 papers, has co-edited or co-authored fourteen books, and has taken out 21 U.S. patents.〔〔 ==Early life and education== Demain was born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 26, 1927. His grandparents were all immigrants from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. As a boy he worked delivering groceries and was also a stock boy at Lord & Taylor’s department store in Manhattan.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 work =Biotech History )〕 Demain's father, Henry, was in the pickle manufacturing business, managing a canning and pickling plant for Vita Foods Corp. in Chestertown, Maryland. Demain's uncles Ben and Seymour operated another pickling factory, Demain Foods Co., in Ayden, North Carolina. According to one source, “Henry was a leader in the pickle business, working for Fields and then Bloch and Guggenheimer in New York before setting up the pickle plant in Chestertown.” Demain himself said that his grandfather, Joseph Demain, “had sold pickles for years in one of New York’s major market areas.”〔 Demain attended five different public elementary schools and three different public high schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and graduated high school at age 16.〔〔〔(【引用サイトリンク】 work =Drew.edu )〕 “My father convinced me that I should become a food fermentation expert,” Demain later said. “He knew only one professor, Frederick W. Fabian, who conducted annual one-week summer courses at Michigan State titled The Pickle and Kraut Packers’ School.” After his high-school graduation, then, Demain's parents “took him by train to Michigan State College (MSC) (now Michigan State University) in East Lansing,” because Fabian, “the leading investigator of cucumber fermentations in the U.S.,” taught there.〔〔 Demain attended Michigan State briefly, then joined the U.S. Navy in 1945 and spent two years in Philadelphia caring for amputees who were members of the armed forces who had been injured in the war. Demain returned to Michigan State in 1947, earning B.S. and M.S. degrees in bacteriology from the Department of Microbiology and Public Health in 1949 and 1950 respectively. His master's research topic was the spoilage and softening of pickles during fermentation, a phenomenon that, he concluded, was probably caused by pectic enzymes.〔〔 Demain's choice of this topic “was definitely influenced by his father’s profession,” says one source.〔 “During my stay at Michigan State,” Demain later said, “I worked in Fred Fabian’s lab on spoilage (softening) of pickles. In the summers, I worked for my father and my uncles. My summer responsibilities from 1947 to 1950 were to start in South Carolina, buying cucumbers from farmers and shipping them by truck to my father’s pickle factory. I followed the cucumber crop virtually state by state from South Carolina to Wisconsin. During this trip north, I also worked at my uncle’s pickle plant in North Carolina, my father’s plant in Maryland, and ran a pickling plant in Brodhead, Wisconsin. During my periods of work at my uncle’s plant, I met Professor John ('Jack') Lincoln Etchells of the US Department of Agriculture and North Carolina State University. When my uncle’s fermentations went awry, they often called on Jack to come to Ayden and recommend measures to correct the problems. Jack became my first mentor.” At MSC Demain met and married a fellow student, Joanna (“Jody”) Kaye from Youngstown, Ohio.〔 From MSC, Demain went to the University of California's Department of Food Science, which was first at the Berkeley campus and then at Davis. It was there that he began work on his Ph.D. project on polygalacturonase of Saccharomyces fragilis. The project resulted in four papers on pectic enzymes, one of which published in Nature.〔 At Berkeley, he was in charge of the cultures in UC's yeast collection. Spending “four years under the tutelage of the prominent yeast scholar, Herman J. Phaff,” who became his second mentor, Demain “elucidated the mechanism of pectic acid degradation by the extracellular polygalacturonase (YPG) of the yeast Klyveromyces fragilis,” later recalling that the two men “worked from early morning until evening, went home for dinner with our spouses, and returned to the lab for research and discussions that lasted until the wee hours.” Demain said that he and Phaff “apparently were the first in the world to carry out affinity chromatography, using a pectic acid gel to selectively adsorb YPG from culture filtrates. We proved that the entire hydrolysis of polymer to dimer was accomplished by a single enzyme in contrast to current thought that multiple enzymes were necessary. The work was published in four publications, one appearing in Nature. I didn’t realize how significant that was, but I learned later in life (after receiving many rejection notices form Nature) that for a graduate student to publish one of his/her first papers in Nature was an unusual feat.”〔 Demain received his Ph.D. in 1954.〔 During his first years in Rahway, Demain “innovated methods to enhance the production of secondary metabolites using starved resting cells. He was the first to detect feedback inhibition of penicillin production by the amino acid lysine...and originated the study on the effects of primary metabolites on the secondary metabolism of microorganisms.” Demain has said that his work in Rahway “showed that over 99% of the penicillin formed appeared in the liquid portion of the broth and that penicillin was partially degraded during its production. Thus, I showed that the apparent rate of penicillin production was the net result of synthesis and inactivation during fermentation. I also confirmed a controversial claim by Koichi Kato of Japan in 1953 that he had isolated the 'penicillin nucleus' from fermentations conducted without the addition of the side chain precursor, phenylacetate.” 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Arnold Demain」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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