Don Fawcett (1917–2009): Unlocking Nature's Closely Guarded Secrets

Cell biology owes some of its greatest discoveries to the electron microscope, and few were more passionate about its power to ‘‘wrest from nature her closely guarded secrets’’ than Don Wayne Fawcett. A pioneer of electron microscopy and one of its greatest practitioners for studying the organization of cells and tissues, Fawcett died at his home in Missoula, Montana on May 7, 2009 at the age of 92. Fawcett was born in 1917 on a farm in Iowa, where his father and grandfather had raised purebred sheep and cattle until his father’s poor health forced the family to leave the farm and move to Boston, where Fawcett’s father managed a successful wool business. Fawcett attended high school at the famous Boston Latin School. Upon graduation, he matriculated at Harvard College, followed by Harvard Medical School, where he connected with Anatomy Professor George Wislocki. ‘‘I stole as much time as I could from my course work to do independent research on projects that included studies on the vascular bundles of aquatic mammals, and the amedullary bones of the manatee,’’ he recalled. Fawcett perfected the art and technology of microscopy in the early days of cell biology, which emerged as a modern field in the 1940s after the electron microscope became more widely available. He would routinely cut thin sections at home, before venturing in the early morning hours to his lab at Harvard, where he viewed them with the microscope that would do so much to reveal the secrets of form and function. He kept a microtome at home, and it was rumored that he also had a private collection of diamond knives to help achieve his unparalleled results. Tom Pollard, a student at Harvard during Fawcett’s chairmanship, recalls how Fawcett used his skills in the darkroom to produce spectacular prints of electron micrographs to illustrate the key features of each image. He may have been most renowned as the first person to describe and depict in detail human spermatozoa, and he published extensively on the anatomy of male reproductive cellular anatomy. Fawcett published a collection of his fine-structure micrographs in The Cell, a classic cell biology text that features all the major cell structures [1], and was author of several editions of Bloom and Fawcett: A Textbook of Histology, the definitive histology textbook to generations of students [2]. Fawcett, elected as the first president of the newly formed American Society for Cell Biology in 1961, described the early days of electron microscopy as ‘‘filled with the same excitement and anticipation of discovery that attends the opening up of a new continent for geographic exploration. Every tissue and organ studied revealed beauty and order in its organization that we had not imagined’’ [3]. While in college, Fawcett illustrated a book on athletic bandaging that had been written by the football team’s physician. This may have been his only contribution as an illustrator; his later and more widely popular books were illustrated by Sylvia Collard Keen. In the summers, Fawcett worked on Bailey’s Island off the coast of Maine, where he embalmed and prepared small sharks for sale to colleges for comparative anatomy courses. This early interest in anatomy served him well when he trained in surgery at Harvard. Fawcett’s predominant memory of his clinical training was being on duty in the emergency ward the night of the infamous Cocoanut Grove Nightclub disaster of 1942, which claimed 492 lives in one of the deadliest fires in American history. ‘‘We had been having a quiet evening when, without advance notice, we received 115 seriously burned patients within an hour and a half. Mobilizing all of the offduty staff that I could reach, I continued on duty for 30 hours doing all I could to relieve the pain and dress the burns of the victims.’’ Fawcett served as a battalion surgeon and Captain in the European Theater in World War II, but, before shipping out, he married Dorothy Secrest, his wife of 68 years, who survives him. After the war, Fawcett returned to Harvard, where he served as an instructor. He sought out Keith Porter, another pioneering electron microscopist, at the Rockefeller Institute. There, with Porter and George Palade, Fawcett recalled in 2000 that he, working with his illustrious colleagues, ‘‘undertook a project on the fine structure of ciliated epithelium that revealed the 9+2 pattern of microtubules in the cilia for the first time in a metazoan.’’ In 1955 Fawcett moved to Cornell Medical School in New York City and established an electron microscope laboratory. He had become what today might be characterized as the quintessential descriptive scientist; later generations of Don W. Fawcett (Photo: Bachrach) doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000183.g001