1. Irwin C "Gunny" Gunsalus was an American biochemist who discovered lipoic acid, a vitamin-like substance that has been used as a treatment for chronic liver disease, and pyridoxal phosphate, one of the active forms of vitamin B6.
15 Facts About Irwin Gunsalus
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Irwin Gunsalus's father was killed in a threshing machine accident before Gunsalus started college.
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Irwin Gunsalus attended South Dakota State University before transferring to Cornell University, where he studied bacteriology, earning a bachelor's degree in 1933, a master's in 1937 and was awarded a doctoral degree in the field in 1940.
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Irwin Gunsalus taught bacteriology from 1940 to 1947 at Cornell University.
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Irwin Gunsalus was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949 for his work on intermediary metabolism of microorganisms.
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Irwin Gunsalus's studies led to an understanding of how the family of P-450 proteins and their role in metabolizing natural and man-made compounds.
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Irwin Gunsalus researched the way that soil microbes exchange plasmids, giving the organisms the ability to adapt to differing nutritional substances available in their environment.
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Irwin Gunsalus was a postdoctoral advisor to Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, who later used genetic engineering techniques for plasmid transfer to create microbes that could digest petroleum.
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In February 1967, Gunsalus was one of four scientists who delivered to President Lyndon B Johnson a petition that had been signed by more than 5,000 scientists demanding an end to the use of biological and chemical weapons in Vietnam.
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Irwin Gunsalus oversaw the establishment of research centers in Trieste, Italy and in New Delhi, India.
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Irwin Gunsalus was later chosen to conduct ecological studies of the Gulf of Mexico for the United States Environmental Protection Agency from 1993 to 2003, where he studied methods for microbiological bioremediation of coastal ecosystems.
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Irwin Gunsalus was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology.
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Irwin Gunsalus was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, where he served as the chairman of the biochemistry section from 1978 to 1981.
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Irwin Gunsalus was the founding editor of the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications.
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Irwin Gunsalus died at age 96 on October 25,2008, at his home in Andalusia, Alabama, of congestive heart failure.