Frederick E. Samson, Jr.

Frederick E. Samson, Jr., a charter member of the American Society for Neurochemistry, died at his home on Lake Quivira, Kansas, on April 15, 2004, at the age of 85. He is survived by his wife, Camila, and by two daughters, 5 grandchildren, and 12 great grandchildren.

Born and raised in Medford, Massachusetts, he had two professional careers - one in osteopathy, the other in show business as an acrobat - before being drafted into the Army in 1941. He served as a medic in the South Pacific, including the bloody battle for Guadalcanal. While on that island, he enrolled in a correspondence course with the University of Chicago in English Literature, and his teacher encouraged him to come to Chicago after the war for graduate study. There he heard lectures by Ralph Gerard and Julian Tobias, but worked on fatty acid metabolism in yeast with a cell physiologist, Dan Harris.

In the summer of 1953, following his first year as an Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas, he met Nancy Dahl as an undergraduate, initiating a long and productive research collaboration with her and her husband, Dennis, both of whom obtained their doctoral degrees under his direction. Together, their first major discovery was the narcoleptic effect of fatty acids. From that they moved to a long series of studies on energy metabolism in the brain, being the first to quantify the anaerobic capacity of new-born rodents. Richard Lolley, a pharmacy student turned neurochemist, conducted early experiments on GTP and UTP metabolism in the brain. Robert Grabske worked on the role of mitochondria. And William Balfour, M.D., joined the lab as a valued senior member.

As the age of enzymology flourished and neurochemistry as a field matured, Samson turned his attention to ATPase. Students recruited to this effort included Don Quinn, Jim Standefer, and Terry Hexum. By the mid-Sixties, no lab had contributed more to an understanding of the role of ATPase in brain energy metabolism than that of Fred Samson. As this work crested, Samson left Kansas for a two year sabbatical at the Neurosciences Research Program, where a workshop on axoplasmic transport turned his attention to tubulin. By the end of the decade, a new generation of students, including Bob Hinckley, Stan Twoomey, Hugo Fernandez, and Dianna Redburn Johnson, were pursuing a variety of projects on the function and biochemistry of tubulin, often in collaboration with Samson's faculty colleagues, Paul Burton and Richard Himes. Another student, Louis Irwin, continued the lab's focus on lipids by studying the role of gangliosides in brain function. At the inaugural meeting of the ASN in 1970 in Albuquerque, Samson with his students and colleagues presented more papers than any other lab.

In 1973, Samson moved to Kansas City to become Director of the Ralph Smith Mental Retardation Research Center at the University of Kansas Medical Center. By now a senior empressario of science, he turned the Center into a highly productive institution through his philosophy of shared resources, extensive collaboration, and intensive intellectual interaction. His own work continued on tubulin, with Alejandro Denoso and Danny Watson, and returned to the subject of energy metabolism through the new technique of 2-deoxyglucose (2-DG) uptake, with Stan Nelson, Lynn Churchill, and Tom Pazdernik. Samson was the first neurochemist to use color coding of 2-DG uptake, a technique that rapidly became a hallmark of functional neuroanatomy.

Samson retired as Director in 1989, but continued to work daily for over a decade on new areas of interest such as the osmotic effects of taurine, mechanisms of free radical toxicity, and applications of microdialysis perfusion. In explaining why he continued to work as a scientist into his '80s, he once said, "If I wanted to play golf, I'd have to pay a green fee. But science is the best game in town, and nobody is charging me to play." Significant and varied though his contributions to neurochemistry were, it was his model of a passion for and enjoyment in the pursuit of research that his students and colleagues consider his greatest contribution and legacy.

Louis Irwin
Department of Biological Science
University of Texas at El Paso

Dr. Fred Samson and his students, at his retirement dinner in Kansas in 1989