Bogorad, Lawrence
BOGORAD, LAWRENCE
BOGORAD, LAWRENCE (1921–2004), U.S. biologist. Bogorad was born in Tashkent, Russia, but was taken to the United States as an infant. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1935. Bogorad studied at the University of Chicago, where he received a B.S. in botany (1942) and a Ph.D. in plant physiology (1949). From 1951 to 1953 he was a fellow at the Rockefeller Institute working in the laboratory of Prof. Sam Granick. In 1953 he returned to the University of Chicago, joining the faculty of the Department of Botany and became a professor of botany in 1961. Bogorad became professor of biology at Harvard University in 1967, and was chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences (1974–76), and director of the Maria Moors Cabot Foundation in 1976. He was named the Maria Moors Cabot Professor of Biology in 1980. He retired from Harvard in 1991 as professor emeritus in molecular and cellular biology and continued his research in Harvard's Biological Laboratories. Colleagues and former students held the Lawrence Bogorad Symposium in his honor every few years, the last in 2001 at Cambridge. Bogorad's research concentrated on chlorophyll synthesis, particularly the investigation of the effects of light in the induction of the complex greening process through which pale, etiolated leaves of plants grown in the dark become green and active in photosynthesis. Early work on the enzymes involved in chlorophyll synthesis with algae furthered our understanding of the biosynthesis of hemes and bile pigment. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Bogorad's research dealt with the biogenesis of chloroplasts, the nature of the organelle of dna, and its function in the synthesis of chloroplast proteins as well as other phytomolecular biological processes. He is best known for his work on the biosynthesis of porphyrins and for sequencing and identification of the first chloroplast genes. Bogorad was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. He was president of the Society for Developmental Biology (1983) and of the American Society of Plant Physiologists (1968-69). Bogorad was on a number of editorial boards and served on national committees as well as on the Council and Executive Committee of the American Society of Cell Biology. In 1987 he was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which has close to 300 national and regional scientific societies and academies as formal affiliates and 130,000 individual members.
bibliography:
H. Swift, in: Science 229 (1985), 353–54
[Ruth Rossing (2nd ed.)]