A First Love

A first Gordon Conference is like a first love–something you do not forget. The first Gordon Conference I attended was the Lipid Metabolism Conference in 1958, when I was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Konrad Bloch at Harvard University. Up until that time my experience with scientific meetings had been the spring gatherings of the experimental biologists in Atlantic City, a tawdry venue where thousands of scientists descended to listen to a week of ten-minute presentations by graduate students. It was a fine place to meet old colleagues strolling on the boardwalk, but students had little contact with the titans of their fields.

The Gordon Conference opened a new world for me. It marked a time when the study of lipids was emerging from Schmierchemie into an exciting scientific discipline. Realization had finally set in that biosynthesis was not simply a massive reversal of degradation, and such topics as fatty acids, sterols, and phospholipids had become hot areas of research. Most of the leading workers in these areas were present at the Lipid Metabolism Conference. We of the Bloch laboratory were excited about our recent discovery of branched alcohol pyrophosphates as intermediates in cholesterol synthesis, but we did not want to disclose this in the presence of our chief rival, Feodor Lynen. While hiking with Lynen in the afternoon, I made a comment about “interesting phosphate esters.” Someone in the group said, “I heard that they were pyrophosphates. I visited Tchen in Boston and he told me that.” Our colleague T.T. Tchen, who was not at the conference, had already spilled the beans. Lynen smiled enigmatically, and I have no doubt that he was already neck and neck with us, or perhaps ahead. Sixteen years later Bloch and Lynen shared a Nobel Prize for their contributions to sterol and fatty acid synthesis.

Fatty acid synthesis was an important topic at this meeting. David Green reported on progress in his laboratory made by Salih Wakil, then a postdoctoral fellow. Acetyl coenzyme A (CoA) could be converted to longer fatty acids by liver extracts, but only if bicarbonate was present in the reaction mixture. At this meeting the idea arose that acetyl CoA might be converted to malonyl CoA by adding carbon dioxide, thus providing a better substrate for acylation with an additional molecule of acetyl CoA. Progress rapidly followed from this idea, and several laboratories soon established the important role of malonyl CoA in fatty acid synthesis.

Many lively Lipid Metabolism Gordon Conferences followed. The 1958 conference, however, represented a turning point in the field, and since it was my first GRC, it made an indelible mark on me.