George Hess: A scientific appreciation.

The recent passing of George Hess (1926–2015) has left a deep void in Cornell University’s Biochemistry department, and in the hearts of his many friends and admirers. He is sorely missed by his scientific friends and by his loving family. George Hess was born in Vienna, Austria, where he lived in an apartment on the Ringstrasse with his parents, Heinrich and Edith Mueller Hess, and maternal grandparents. Other relatives and members of his grandfather’s architectural studio (which was in the same building) would join the family for lunch each day. On weekends, George walked with his grandfather, SigmundMueller, and attended concerts and the opera, and in the summer the family spent time in the Austrian Lake District, Salzkammergut. Even as a young child, George conducted imaginative scientific experiments, although the results were not always appreciated by the adults. Initially, George enjoyed his education at a gymnasium and the friends he made there. But the atmosphere changed and eventually he and other non-Aryan children were forced to move to a school with a much weaker academic program. At age 16, George escaped from a round-up by the Austrian police, in danger for not wearing the yellow Jewish Star of David. George was lucky and managed to elude the police with the help of a teenage couple, but he was unable to return to his home. The next day, with the assistance of an Austrian guide that his family knew, George and his father escaped to Turin, Italy, where they were further helped by an uncle by marriage, Hugo Rossi. Later, as an adult, George commemorated this experience by a lifelong habit of drinking a Martini & Rossi vermouth each evening. George and his father spent nine months in Italy, leaving him with great affection for the country and a language he spoke with little accent, unlike his English. Eventually, a sympathetic American consul in Naples provided father and son with visas so that they could be admitted to the United States. Many relatives and friends did not survive, but George’s mother and paternal grandparents also managed to reach the United States. In 1939, the family settled in California, where George entered school and joined the US army in 1944. In the army, George worked first in a tuberculosis/ meningitis pathology laboratory (where he was expected to mouth pipet samples) and then interviewed German scientists who were prisoners of war. As a result of his army service, George became aUnited States citizen in 1945. Army service provided a wealth of stories which, with later experiences, were modified and recounted in bringing up his children and in mentoring students. It also provided a link with his first graduate student, John Wootton. John became a close friend without whom, George claimed, he would not have achieved tenure. George, John, and Michael Kazarinoff—joined at times by others—had lunch together on Fridays until the last week of George’s life. George went to the University of California, Berkeley, and received a bachelor’s in 1949 and a doctorate with Choh Hao Li in 1952. For some of the time he lived in the International House, which he always visited when he returned to Berkeley. This was a period when biochemists like Fred Sanger were trying to sequence proteins. Li worked on adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), which he believed was a protein, and determined its amino acid sequence. Determining the amino acid sequence of a protein was not a mean feat at that time, but George showed that ACTH was a peptide hormone, not a protein. However, his mentor, Li, accepted George’s results for his doctoral thesis. George obtained his doctorate within two years, a fact that his own students sometimes heard about in later years. Because he had not done a great deal of bench work, George’s committee arranged for him to do his postdoctoral training in an organic chemistry group. R E T R O S P E C T IV E