Nate at UCSD MORRISFRIEDKINANDWILLIAM S. ALLISON
After having developed a world-class Department of Biochemistry at Brandeis, Nate was drawn back to the West Coast, to the University of California where he had begun his career. It wasn't easy to leave Brandeis where, together with Martin Kamen, he had been instrumental in helping a young school get its feet on the ground. In leaving Brandeis he would be giving up the day-by-day personal interactions of a small institution for the milieu of a large university.
In the mid-1960s Nate vacillated between going to the San Francisco Medical Center or to La Jolla where a new campus and medical school were being developed. In 1968, Nate opted to join Martin Kamen in the Department of Chemistry at UCSD where an innovative relationship between the basic departments of chemistry and biology and the medical school was envisaged. At UCSD, there would be no Department of Biochemistry. Colleagues with the same scientific interest would be scattered through many buildings.
It wasn't surprising that when Nate wrestled with the complexities of the academic structure of UCSD, nostalgia for the good old days at Brandeis would well up. This explained Nate's great joy when he returned to Brandeis in 1982 to receive an Honorary Degree. At UCSD, Nate continued his studies on why various lactate dehydrogenases have different physical and catalytic properties. He sought for greater.insight into the structure and properties of the pyridine nucleotides (Nate was never comfortable calling DPN by its newfangled name, NAD). With students and colleagues he utilized NMR with great ingenuity. These are but a few examples of the many directions in which Nate's fertile and lively imagination carried him.
Nate was attracted to a medical school environment because of his interest in chemotherapy, dating back to the 1950s. Because of his findings with nicotinamide derivatives, he thought an analog of NAD might interfere with the cellular metabolism of cancer cells. Although such compounds that were effective against experimental mouse tumors were found, they proved to be too toxic. However, Nate's objective to develop practical chemotherapeutic agents did not wane. Together with Gordon Sato, Nate established a very successful athymic mouse colony. A small building was designed not only to house the athymic mouse colony, but also to provide facilities for tissue culture work with many human cancer cell lines.
Nate departed from the basic arena of enzyme mechanisms to enter a new field in which a variety of techniques associated with the disciplines of immunology, virology, electron microscopy, and cellular biology were utilized. Nevertheless, he had an abiding love for biochemistry, believing strongly that biochemistry had become the language of biology. He wrote, "students should not lose sight of the eloquence of the experiments of Warburg because it is the same eloquence which is inherent in the isolation, characterization, and manipulation of genes." Nate's broad experience was appreciated worldwide. Because of his unusual acu-243