Box 3.

Experiments at night and encounter with Yale police, sometimes in 1959, in SCM’s words

“On return from Montreal, Bruce Bonner decided to go straight for phytochrome isolation and although I was invited only in the late evening as I headed for our apartment, I decided to come back after dinner and join Bruce. Nirmala (my wife) had gone to bed early and since I did not know that Bruce was going to work non-stop, I did not wake her up. As for Bruce, he went through grinding of pea seedlings in liquid nitrogen, homogenizing live tissue, precipitating its proteins by ammonium sulphate and purifying them by dialysis and finally passing them through a vertical chromatography column. But early morning as sunrays penetrated our seminar room and where the deep freezer was kept, we could see bluish green phytochrome which had eluted in a few fractions. I am thus the second person to see isolated phytochrome, but Nirmala Maheshwari and an officer of the Yale police [see below] were the other humans to see it

As I mentioned above, I had left Nirmala home, but when she woke up at about 4 AM, she found that I was missing. Thus, she called the Yale Police to find her missing husband. The cold room at Yale had an inner supercool area and a separate entry section. Neither Nirmala nor the Yale Police had any idea that we would be in the inner cold room all night. So, they were really distraught as they had searched every lab in the building, and only then they arrived on the 6th floor seminar room, at the extreme end when a new day had broken. Bruce and I had just moved out of the cold room to move and store our precious fractions from the fraction collector to the deep freezer, kept in the seminar room! I do not think the Yale police had any idea of phytochrome! Nirmala was very upset and angry with me rather than bother about the phytochrome. But around the first week of September, phytochrome had been isolated. Bruce wisely decided not to publish his achievement and embarrass the scientists in USDA. He told me: “Satish there is no point in trying to outsmart the great people in USDA”. But the USDA team also worked hard. By December, 1959, their paper (Butler et al. 1959) had been published, as communicated by Hendricks to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA [GG added: This was possible because of the imaginative work of Warren Butler: see Butler et al. (1959); Benson (1998) has described Butler’s story and noted Lila Butler recalling Warren Butler’s elation that evening, when he said to her, “Lila, I think we’ve hit on something big.”]

Bruce Bonner later published the first paper on the existence of the pigment in Mesotaenium sp., a green alga, [GG added: “and in a liverwort Sphaerocarpus (Taylor and Bonner 1967)]. He retired later as Chairman of the Plant Biology Department of the University of California, Davis. Many years later the experience at Yale led me to initiate the first studies in India on the isolation of this pigment and also the mechanism of its action. Our research group at Delhi University as well as that of Sudhir Sopory found effects of the phytochrome conversion on the influx and efflux of calcium ions. There is now growing evidence that phytochrome may have more than one mode of action. (GG refers the readers to the continued interest of SCM in the phytochromes: see e.g., Malik et al. (1992), Mehta et al. (1993), Grover et al.(1999a); cf.: Campbell and Bonner (1986)]”