Life with yeasts during retirement.

Abstract

In the summar of 1994 I received a wonderful letter from four of my colleagues--Sally Meyer, Arnold Demain, Don Ahearn and Clete Kurtzman. Together they initiated the idea of publishing a special issue of the Journal of Industrial Microbiology with articles by my former students and postdoctoral visitors to celebrate my fifty years of research on yeasts. Since an introductory article by me was to be part of the plan, I decided that rather than writing a research paper, it would be more interesting to update my earlier autobiography, which was written in 1985 as the prefatory chapter in the Annual Review of Microbiology [9]. This approach would enable me to tell my readers how, following mandatory retirement in 1983, I spent these years as a Professor Emeritus. Although mandatory retirement was later abolished at the University of California, departmental policy on emeriti at the time of my retirement varied considerably across campuses with respect to office space and laboratory facilities. The fact that I had an NSF research grant until 1991, justified a modest office as well as laboratory space sufficient to carry out my grant obligations. Two other factors also contributed to my need for space in a crowded department. The first one involved my associate editorship of the International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology, which I have maintained to the present, while the second dealt with the supervision of a collection of thousands of yeast strains, isolated over many years from numerous natural sources and about which I shall say more later. My formal classroom teaching, which I did in the Department of Bacteriology, was discontinued shortly after retirement. With the advent of molecular biology in microbiology, organismic microbiology began losing its appeal and my courses were phased out at UC Davis as well as at many other universities. However, because of the rapidly growing interest in the broad aspects of biodiversity, one may hope that the teaching of organismic microbiology will make a come-back at universities. A recent NSF announcement 'Special compe-