In Memoriam: Emeritus Professor Marvin Gold
Emeritus Professor Marvin Gold passed away in October, 2020. Marv received his Ph.D. in Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto and then began a phenomenally productive Fellowship during the early 1960s in the lab of Jerry Hurwitz at New York University and later at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. There he made his first of several groundbreaking discoveries, namely he discovered DNA methylases. He correctly predicted their importance in restriction-modification, gene regulation and DNA repair. In 1967 he returned to Toronto where Lou Siminovitch was forming the Department of Medical Cell Biology (later to become Molecular Genetics). Marvin was the last of the original members of that department, headquartered at the Medical Sciences Building, to retire.
Marvin's research after moving to the University of Toronto centred on the mechanisms of packaging of the DNA of bacteriophage lambda into the head. He and Andy Becker spent a good part of their lives in the cold room purifying the terminase enzyme that catalyzed the cleavage and packaging reactions. Not only did this yield important fundamental insights into how viruses are made but it also led to the extremely useful system by which large pieces of DNA could be cloned. Indeed, many of the important disease genes were cloned using the lambda packaging system.
As a scientist, Marv loved enzymes; purifying, assaying, and figuring out how they worked. He was always happy when he had 10 kg of E. coli cells that needed to be “blasted” into a lysate and then fractionated. Marv was an enthusiastic supervisor who enjoyed walking around the lab looking at gels and plates full of phage plaques. He and Andy Becker were close collaborators and friends who could often be seen in deep conversation in front of the big windows in the West Wing of the MSB.
Besides science, Marv was a reknowned authority on contemporary classical music and avidly collected albums in this genre. One could often hear him negotiating album trades on the phone in his office. Marv was also a life-long baseball fan and listened to all the afternoon Blue Jays games on the very old AM transistor radio in his office. When baseball wasn’t on, the CBC could always be heard quietly in the background. Finally, Marv was a scholar of Judaism and could provide a fascinating explanation and discussion of even the most arcane points of observance. Whether it was science, baseball, or religion, Marv pursued all of his interests with the same scholarly rigour and passion for truth. Marv was an academic through and through, and it was this quality that inspired his students and colleagues most of all.
[contributed by Alan Davidson]
