Nate Kaplan and I have been friends and colleagues since 1950. The nature of our meeting was very unusual. In 1947, Mr. John Lee Pratt had donated a sum of money to start a center for the study of trace metals in biological systems at The Johns Hopkins University. I was an Assistant Professor in Biology at the time, but for some reason, Dr. E. V. McCollum convinced President I. Bowman that I should be given the charge to describe what this new center should do scientifically. At the time very little dynamic biochemistry was being taught either in the graduate or medical schools in the United States. In other words, there was a large gap between European-English biochemistry and that of the United States. Only in 1941 when Lipmann and Kalckar published their famous reviews was ATP introduced widely in the U.S. biochemical literature. Phosphorus was a macronutrient! I was convinced that a new approach looking at the dynamic functions of metals in enzyme systems was the way to go, so I wrote up a four-or five-page outline of the program and gave it to Dr. McCollum.
Six outstanding nutritional scientists from England, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, and two enzymologists were invited to Hopkins to discuss this proposal. Interestingly enough, they agreed with the plan and, subsequently, I was asked to propose names for the Directorship. I submitted the names of a number of outstanding enzymologists, including Dr. Sidney Colowick. Unfortunately, most were not interested in the function of trace elements in enzyme function and metabolic processes in general and, unfortunately, right after the war there were not many enzymologists looking for jobs, so we had no takers. After a year things appeared to be desperate, and Dr. McCollum, without consulting me, convinced President Bowman that I should be named the Director of the Center, which we subsequently named the McCollum-Pratt Institute. Within a few weeks after I assumed the Directorship, I had a call from Dr. Stanley Carson at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories indicating that Dr. Colowick might be available. I immediately called Sid and made him an offer. The next day he returned my call and said he was interested if he could bring a young associate named N. 0. Kaplan. I invited both of them to visit Hopkins, and they arrived within two days. That was the first time I met Nate Kaplan. Within two weeks I had all the paperwork finished, and approved by the Academic Senate, the Dean, and the President. To this day it is the fastest appointment that I have ever made, and they readily accepted. It is interesting that there are no letters on file concerning the qualifications of Nate, only a phone call from Fritz Lipmann and Mike Doudoroff. What a wonderful way to make an appointment; they were two of the best I ever made.
The original members of the McCollum-Pratt in addition to myself were Kaplan, Colowick, the late Alvin Nason, Henry Little, and Robert Ballentine. We were housed in a greenhouse on the Homewood campus. There were two large laboratories on the first floor. Nate and Sid shared one, and the other three shared the second. My labs were in the Biology Department about two minutes from the Greenhouse.