[RASMB] Michael Creeth

[Steve Harding]

Dear All

 

It is with great sadness I have to report the death on Friday of one of
the great pioneers of the analytical ultracentrifuge, Dr. Michael
Creeth.  

 

Mike (born 1924) was a graduate of Nottingham and did his PhD with D.
"Doj" Jordan on one of the earliest Model E's.  He then moved to the
vibrant Wisconsin in the early 50's to do a postdoc with Lou Gosting and
then took up a post at Adelaide - his 1st PhD students were Don Winzor
and Laurie Nichol. In 1960 he moved back to England at the Lister
Institute - which was still running a Svedberg oil turbine centrifuge -
and then in 1978 to Bristol before he retired in 1984.  It was there I
had the pleasure of working with him as a postDoc on what had become
since the Lister his main field of interest, mucus glycoproteins, where
his work is still widely known.

 

Mike was a true gentlemen and absolutely meticulous towards his science:
a highly respected and distinguished practitioner.  Besides his seminal
work on diffusion in the 50's and 60's emanating from his time with
Gosting and his work on analytical isopycnic density gradient
sedimentation in the 70's and 80's his most notable contribution to
science was probably in his early days at Nottingham - with Jordan and
Gullander he discovered the hydrogen bonding between the base pairs of
DNA (2 papers published in 1949 in J. Chem. Soc., pages 1406-1409 and
1409-1413), 2 years before the Chargraff rules of base pairing was
published. The existence of the H-bonds was crucial of course to the
1953 discovery of Watson and Crick.

 

Last September he was invited to talk at the Svedberg 125th birthday
meeting at Uppsala - I was going to go with him but he couldn't go in
the end due to failing health. He gave me the great honour of presenting
his talk - if anyone wants to see a copy of this lecture it's on:

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/ncmh/lecture_notes/Svedberg_125th_anniversar
y_JMCreeth_talk_Sep09.pdf

 

Thankfully he was able to complete his article for the special Svedberg
commemorative edition of Macromolecular Bioscience.

 

So goodbye Mike, we will miss you - and we forgive you for making us
wear those silk gloves before handling Model E rotors!

 

Steve Harding

 

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