For he was our own! …… Fruitful both in counsel and deed; this we experienced and appreciated."
With the death of Murray Goodman on June 1 in Munich (Germany) after a short but severe illness during a scientific visit to Europe, we lost one of the grand pioneers of peptide chemistry. He was a generous and extremely gifted man, whose strength was to tackle essential biological problems at a molecular level with simple model systems and to draw insightful conclusions from them.
Murray Goodman was born on July 6, 1928 in Brooklyn into an immigrant family from Krivoizera (Ukraine). He completed a Bachelor of Science at Brooklyn College in 1950 and his doctorate three years later at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked with Melvin Calvin (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1961) on the use of isotopes as tracers to probe the mechanisms of photosynthesis. Drawn by the challenges of peptide chemistry, Goodman undertook postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with John C. Sheehan, and at Cambridge University (UK) with Lord Alexander Todd on the synthesis of natural nucleotides and peptides. In 1956, he joined the faculty of the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn and became director of its Polymer Research Institute. In 1970, he moved to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) as a professor of organic chemistry. He was Chair of the Department of Chemistry there for six years and was recently honored with the establishment of an endowed professorship in his name: the Goodman Chair in Chemistry.
Goodmans exceptional scientific achievements in the field of peptide science are reflected in over 500 original