Bill Whelan was an exceptional celebrated scientist recognized equally for his work in research, education, publishing, and international scientific organizations. Bill's accomplishments, that sometimes he attributed to happenstance, have been rather the outcome of a highly determined will; Bill was a Force of Nature. At first sight, Bill's achievements may give the impression of a sequences of easy, successful stories. However, a deeper look into his career and life reveals that most of what Bill accomplished was the result of overcoming difficulties, battling the irrational, and the unjust. His character, however, remained intact, prone to a smile, and with a vital sense of humor. Undoubtedly, Bill's legacy will last long. William Joseph Whelan was born on November 14, 1924, in Salford Lancashire, England. The oldest of four children of William Joseph and Antoinette Whelan. In 1914, Bill's father and grandfather went from Waterford, in Ireland, to Manchester, in England, where they found employment and his father and mother met. Educational opportunities had been denied to Bill's parents due to family poverty, but they were offered to Bill. At age 11, he was bright enough to gain an entrance scholarship (partly paid by his father though the family means were slim) to Stockport Grammar School, in the Northwest of England, a venerable institution founded in 1487. Bill had a slow start and was even put on probation, but then he improved and decided to take the science track. In 1940, he was taught by an inspiring teacher who made him fall in love with organic chemistry. Upon graduation, Bill gained distinction and was awarded a choice of scholarships. He accepted one by the Brewers' Society at the University of Birmingham (Department of Industrial Chemistry that later became the Department of Biochemistry) and another one to study chemistry at the nearby University of Manchester. The Head of the Department of Chemistry was Walter Norman (later Sir Norman) Haworth, the 1936 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, awarded for elucidation of the structure of ascorbic acid. At that time, this was the premier carbohydrate school in Britain. Thus, fate determined that Bill would become a carbohydrate chemist. At the end of the academic year, Haworth invited Bill, among the more promising of the undergraduate chemistry students, to become an assistant (there was a shortage of technicians) to the graduate students in his research laboratory. During that time, Bill was engaged in the isolation of glucose 1-phosphate using potato phosphorylase and starch. Bill took a liking to enzymes and decided, given the opportunity, that this would be the direction to take in his Ph.D. studies. While pursuing his Ph.D. in Chemistry, Bill was assigned a classified project for the Royal Navy intended to improve an antisubmarine device that was, in fact, a carbohydrate problem related to starch. In his studies, Bill used enzymes to understand starch structure, but came to realize that he was using enzymes of unknown specificity on substrates of unknown structure. So, he decided to use a new column chromatography technique to make quantities of malto-saccharides of known structure, which then became model substrates for the actions of amylases, phosphorylase, and other enzymes. And Bill was since regarded as a biochemist to the extent that the Biochemical Journal invited him to be an editor in 1952 and was invited to the Department of Biochemistry at the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine in London in 1956. The Lister Institute at the time was one of the cradles of biochemistry and biophysics in Britain, with studies on the metabolism of carbohydrates and enzymology. In the Lister institute finally, Bill decided to get some formal training in biochemistry by taking an evening course at the Chelsea Polytechnic, taught by Rodney Porter, who was to be the 1972 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine. Despite his wandering from one institution to another, Bill received all his degrees (Bachelor of Science, Philosophy Doctor, and Doctor of Science) at the University of Birmingham, UK. Later the University of La Trobe, Australia, awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science degree. The combination of the academic education and achievements described above along with Bill's brilliant mind resulted in a pioneering series of 12 papers on the Mechanism of Carbohydrase Action, written during the period spanning from 1953 to 1965. These papers, which have netted more than 500 citations, established some of the fundamental concepts and nomenclature used in the carbohydrate field today. By careful thought regarding the products of the action of alpha-amylase, R-enzyme, D-enzyme (from potatoes), the transglycosylase from Bacillus macerans, beta-amylase, isoamylase, and pullulanase, important information was gained on the productive binding reactions with plant energy storage carbohydrates. The first of the two main parts of Bill's contributions to the carbohydrate field concerns his study of polysaccharide structures, principally amylopectin, and glycogen, with the use of enzymes to split their branch linkages. This required first the characterization of the action of the enzymes, which Bill did with model substrates of known structure that he had previously isolated. The debranched polysaccharides were then fractionated by molecular sieving. This revealed that the chains of glycogen released by the debranching enzyme were isolated as a single peak, where from amylopectin emerged two peaks. These important findings were invaluable in determining the structures and, as a consequence, this isolation method is still in use. Importantly, Bill went on to establish the accepted structure of glycogen. The second key achievement by Bill was to establish the origin of the glycogen molecule. This was accomplished by employing a combination of chemistry and enzymology methods. The chemical feat was to establish that the glycogen molecule is linked to a protein via glycosidic bond to a tyrosine residue in the protein. The second was to establish that the protein, which Bill named glycogenin, was the initiator of glycogen synthesis, and was a self-glycosylating enzyme. Unfortunately, financial support from the NIH was constantly denied, mainly because one of the reviewers stubbornly stated: “I am troubled by the repeated inferences that glycogenin is the primer for glycogen synthesis.” This opposition continued relentlessly for 7 years during which NIH systematically rejected all Bills grant applications. In 1984, he managed to answer another challenging question that was posed to him, which was asking what the bond that links glycogen to glycogenin is. Bill answered that it was a novel glycosyl-tyrosine bond. This time, the NIH reviewers’ objection was that “this type of bond has never been found in nature before”. So, at the time, given its continuous actions of rejection of avant-garde science, gave the impression that for the NIH, a new discovery should not be believed because nobody had reported it before. When Philip Cohen made the same discovery independently, NIH started to fund him, having become clear, from the independent work of Cohen that Bill was right (Figure 1). This discovery led to the election of Bill as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1992. Previously, Bill had received many awards including the Alsberg Medal, USA (1967), the CIBA Medal of the Biochemical Society (1968), the Medal of the Japanese Society of Starch Science (1975), the Saare Medal, Germany (1979); the Hon. Membership of the Royal Society College of Physicians, London (1986); and Fellow of the American Society for the Advancement of Science (1989). After becoming Fellow of the Royal Society of London (1992), he was elected as Hon. Member of the British Biochemical Society (1993) and received the FEBS-IUBMB Millennium Medal (2000). In 2006, Bill received the University of Miami's Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award for lifetime achievement in research and in 2003 Bill was elected as IUBMB LifeTime Special Member in recognition of his generous contributions to the IUBMB. In September 1967, Bill moved from the University of London to take up the Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Miami. In Europe, he had helped found the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) and had been its first Secretary General, and looked around for similar opportunities in the Americas, specifically to see whether an equivalent of FEBS might be formed. A long-time colleague, Bernie Horecker, was about to become the President of the American Society for Biological Chemists (ASBC, now ASBMB). A Canadian colleague, Donald Whittaker, was about to preside over the Canadian Biochemical Society, while Bill had formed a close acquaintance, because of common research interests, with the most prominent biochemist in South America, Luis F. Leloir, who was to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1970. Contacting them, and through them other biochemists around the hemisphere brought to light a wide expression of interest in forming a Pan-American version of FEBS. By mid-1969, with Karl Gaede of Venezuela as the acting President, it was decided to form the Pan-American Association of Biochemical Societies (PAABS). It came into official existence on January 1, 1970, with Luis F. Leloir as the first official President. Bill was the Secretary General and another enthusiast, Raul Ondarza, from Mexico City, was the Treasurer. Soon later, PAABS included the Biochemical Societies of Canada, the ASBC and the Division of Biological Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, and Societies from Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. PAABS enthusiastically mimicking FEBS was sponsoring an annual meeting, symposia, issuing a news bulletin, all of which Bill did. In 1972, Bill resigned as Secretary General of PAABS (succeeded by Ronald Estabrook of Dallas), to become the General Secretary of the International Union of Biochemistry (IUB, now IUBMB) in 1973. Bill worked, in his new capacity, to have the Union provide funds to PAABS and to the new Asian-Oceanian Federation (FAOB) starting in 1979. In 1982, an official membership category of the Associated Organization was created in the IUB so that PAABS and FAOB gained recognition under the IUB umbrella. Since 1999, all four Regional Organizations, the others being FEBS and the African Federation (FASBMB), are Associated Organizations of the IUBMB. However, Bill expressed his disappointment over the years that PAABS (now PABMB) has never flourished as one had hoped. Central America and the Caribbean, with the only recent exceptions of Panama and Cuba, have never been in membership, while the Societies from Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador seem to have gone out of existence. All along during his tenure at the organizations, Bill brought to IUB (as General Secretary) and to IUBMB (as President) his legendary and creative dynamism, for promoting medical and biochemical education (Figure 2). A provision in the revised Statutes adopted by the IUB 6th General Assembly in Tokyo in 1967 made an important step toward resolving the problem of China's representation in the IUB, by redefining an Adhering Body as representative of a scientific community, described as applicable to the biochemists of a country or an otherwise defined geographical area that has an independent budget for scientific purposes. However, it was not until 1979 that, as the result of an agreement brokered by Bill then General Secretary and Bill Slater, at that time Treasurer, that two Adhering bodies from China (Beijing and Taipei), representing the biochemists from the two scientific communities, became members of IUB. The IUB agreement was adopted by other scientific Unions, and a little later, by ICSU itself. In 1985, funds provided by an appeal among the world's biochemists were used to establish the Wood-Whelan Research Fellowship Fund, named to honor Harland G. Wood and W. J. Whelan for their distinguished services to IUB. The purpose of the Fund was to grant short-term fellowships to enable biochemists to visit a laboratory in order to carry out an experiment or learn a technique. Additional donations to the Fund were made by the ASBMB and by Bill himself. The program has also been supported by grants from the International Council of Scientific Unions, ICSU (now ISC). As the first Secretary-General of FEBS, Bill had proposed to move into the publication arena and specifically produce a rapid communication journal modelled along the lines of the then relatively new Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (BBRC). There were however three principal arguments against such a journal. The first was that it would not be possible to recruit an editorial board. The second was that there was not a market for such a journal. The third came from people who felt that short communications are ephemeral and simply overburden the literature, later being replaced by full reports. Bill could provide sufficient counterarguments, found a publisher North-Holland for the new journal FEBS Letters and a new managing editor, Prakash Datta, who had thrown all his weight behind the proposal. The first issue of FEBS Letters appeared in July 1968. In the 1970s as a result of Bill's efforts, together with Bill Slater, as Treasurer, to obtain an additional substantial source of income for the IUB an approach was made to the publisher to link the Elsevier journal Biochimica et Biophysica Acta to IUB, with payment of royalties to IUB, along the lines of the arrangements, FEBS had with the publishers of its journals. The attempt was unsuccessful. However, Elsevier made a counter proposal of offering IUB sponsorship of a review journal Trends in Biochemical Sciences (TIBS) that they had in mind. This was accepted by IUB and Bill became editor of the journal and with characteristic energy and skill made the journal a success, both scientifically and financially, for the IUB(MB). TIBS, published first in 1976, was the first of a series of “Trends” journals published by Elsevier. Applied Biochemistry (now Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry) was also started by Bill as well as Biochemistry International (later Biochemistry and Molecular Biology International), specializing in rapid publication of short reports, started by A. W. Linnane. When Bill was IUBMB president, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology International was moved from Academic Press, Australia to Taylor & Francis, and its name changed to IUBMB Life, published first in 2000 with K. J. A. Davies (USA) as editor, Bill became together with Angelo Azzi co-editor-in-chief. Bill also became editor of BioFactors, after founding editor Thressa G. Stadtman resigned. It must be underlined that Bill efforts in creating and supporting IUBMB publications resulted in great visibility for the Union, important scientific promotion, and great financial values that permitted the development of a number of scientific and educational activities. In 1984, as the chair of the ICSU Press, Bill thought of a magazine with a generic title and one that could move with the rapidly changing landscape, shifting with or ahead of the times. That happened when Bill founded BioEssays, whose first volume appeared in December 1984, published by ICSU Press and The Company of Biologists, with an editorial of John Kendrew. In 1986, Barry R. Bloom, from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, president of FASEB, was fundamental in the selection of Bill to become the first editor-in-chief of the FASEB Journal. Bill undertook the transformation of the Federation Proceedings, a quarterly compendium of meeting reports and reviews, founded in 1942, into a new monthly journal of interdisciplinary science whose first issue appeared in July 1987. The major achievement of the Whelan era (1987–1996) was to enlist the best and the brightest authors for invited reviews that remain a veritable textbook of classic biology. At the first FEBS Meeting in London in 1964, Bill met Feodor Lynen (the 1964 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine) who recommended him to the attention of the University of Miami administration as a candidate for the vacant chair of their Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. In 1967, he emigrated to the United States and accepted the appointment as the Department of Biochemistry Molecular Biology Chair at the University of Miami (UM). Bill's importance in putting the University of Miami Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology on the map really cannot be understated. When he arrived there, no one could have imagined that it would have turned into the research center of excellence that it is today. The high standards that he set, along with his love for science and encouraging the next generation of researchers, played a fundamental role in making the department what it is today. Bill's natural ability at public speaking made him popular with biochemistry students, who always gave high ratings to his lectures. Further, Bill was instrumental in establishing highly innovative educational programs at the University of Miami at the undergraduate, medical, and graduate levels. Some of the programs are still in practice. Bill also was very active in a series of Medical School and University-wide committees, as well as at the faculty senate, He was recognized with many awards at the University of Miami, and received the University of Miami medal when he retired in 2019 at the record age of 95 years old. It is remarkable that until his retirement, Bill continued to be an active member of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology participating in committees and faculty meetings, offering advice to faculty, and delivering seminars on personal career perspectives and historical biochemical events. In 1968, as the new Chair of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Miami School of Medicine, Bill founded the annual Miami Winter Symposium (Figure 3). Since it seemed to Bill that this South Florida watering place was not frequented by other biochemists, he conceived the idea of the symposia to bring distinguished scientists in contact with students and faculty of his department. That the event was held each year in January was an incentive to the visitors to share the plight of living in Miami in the winter. The experiment succeeded in its initial quest, and beyond. Faculty and students across the School attended. Visitors came from around the world. Nobel Laureates or Laureates-to-be were speakers (Figures 4 and 5). The Symposia started with metabolism, then concentrated on gene technology and became an international event in this area. The Symposia now specialize in molecular medicine and its applications, bringing together investigators from academia and industry to participate in a program that combines basic and applied aspects of the same research focus. Nature Publishing began a 25-year partnership in 1988 and later the Symposia were managed by Elsevier. Successive later and continuing partners of the Biochemistry Foundation have been the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Institute, Scripps Florida, and the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the latter having committed a substantial annual donation in support of travel fellowships for young scientists from developing areas. In the Miami Winter Symposia, great science was presented: the choice of speakers and topics Bill made had been extremely prophetic considering the number of scientists that received a Nobel Prize after having lectured at a Miami Winter Symposium. Miami Winter Symposia created connections with great scientists, the emphasis on helping younger researchers, resulting in a great experience for both speakers and attendees. The relaxed ambience created by Bill always prevalent at the symposia (along with long lunch hours, and evening wine tastings) also attracted speakers, only too happy to meet and exchange ideas with attending delegates in a unique atmosphere. The Miami Winter Symposium continues to date to be an excellent venue for the gathering of worldwide top-notch scientists in the biomedical field (Figure 6). Having been associated with Bill for 25 years as a member of the IUBMB Executive committee and co-Editor-in-Chief of IUBMB Life has given me an opportunity to closely know a unique person and scientist. Bill was an English gentleman, extremely polite, still speaking with his native distinguished English accent, despite living in the United States for over 54 years. One of Bill's aspects that highly impressed me has been his memory for names, dates, persons, and locations. He has been an incredible source of information, with an unparalleled institutional memory for the IUBMB. He impressed me also for his knowledge of and friendship with a vast number of scientists, including Nobel laureates, and others whose names are the staples of biochemistry textbooks. All this, memories, and important friends were never used to impress, but rather they were just ingrained in his being. He was particularly proud however of his friendship with a few extraordinary scientists, such as Edmond (Eddy) Fischer (Figure 7), with whom he exchanged, until the very end, frequent weekly phone calls. Sir Hans Kornberg was also one of his friends frequently mentioned in our conversations. Of Sir Hans, Bill especially liked his sense of humor, and sharing his favorite quotes of Mark Twain. Bill always expressed great respect and affection for Frank Vella, IUBMB General Secretary during Bill's presidency. Also, the “other Bill,” Bill Slater was highly regarded by Bill Whelan and I recall that we were often anxious about his whereabouts when he was sailing alone, without radio contact and no communication for weeks. Within the IUBMB family, Kunio Yagi, a past-president of the IUBMB was also one of his most regarded friends, and above all, Harland Goff Wood, whom Bill considered one of the most influential and innovative officers of the IUB. Bill had also a great esteem for Andy Sutherland from whom he asked frequently advice and enjoyed spending time with. Bill had a great admiration and respect for Phillip Frost, a friend and a sponsor (Figure 8). I will not mention here of course all those that Bill did not like, very clearly, without nuances. Business traveling with Bill was spartan, using public transportation and economic travel lodges. On the other hand, he also knew how to appreciate the upscale annual invitations to London and Hoboken sponsored by our publishers (Figure 9). In addition, once a year, the week after the Miami Winter Symposium, Bill enjoyed to relax and used to organize post-symposium trips for speakers, Nobel Prize Laureates, and staff. A popular destination was the Everglades, where on several occasions Bill hired houseboats to show the area at is best (Figure 10). The boats were pretty basic, but offered sleeping births and cooking facilities, although the water it carried was sometimes not enough for everybody to shower! After throwing an anchor overboard in a sheltered deserted bay, evenings were spent with a barbecue and a glass of wine, surrounded by wildlife. In later years, he loved to travel and enjoyed sitting over dinner sharing memories with friends and family. When traveling became physically challenging, he liked to sit in his armchair in his home, in front of the balcony overlooking the Miami Biscayne Bay, while working on his iPad and sharing a bottle of chilled white wine with his lovely wife Alina and his friends. Bill was a widower prior to marrying Alina. Margaret (Figure 11) his first wife had died of cancer long ago; Bill often mentioned that Margaret had been a role model for him. It is important to mention that Bill always found time for his family members, friends, and students, and that he was very generous with them. Penning editorials for IUBMB Life in partnership with Bill was always a very enjoyable experience until our last joined contribution a paper on the History of IUBMB Life. Aside from writing, I was always on-call to provide help when Bill's iPad was “misbehaving” by refusing to connect with WIFI or erasing files or denying downloading an attachment. Even remotely, we always were able to solve the iPad problems. In the last note that I received from Bill a week before the end, he asked me to use bigger fonts in my messages. At that moment, I clearly understood that, sadly, the issue was not a matter of the iPad “misbehaving” anymore.
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Aug 10, 2023
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