Roger Stanier

Roger Yate Stanier was born to British immigrant parents on 22 October 1916 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. His father studied medicine at the University of Toronto and later established a private practice in diagnostic radiology. His mother, a teacher, studied English literature at the University of Cambridge. His early education was at private boarding schools. Beginning at age 7 he attended St. Christopher's School in Victoria, British Columbia for two years, followed by what Stanier described as "five long and hellish years" at Shawnigan Lake School. His father removed him from Shawnigan after he contracted pneumonia, upon his recovery he attended Oak Bay High School until his graduation in 1931 at the age of 15. He then enrolled at the local junior college, Victoria College, where he studied biology, literature, and history. He subsequently transferred to the University of British Columbia (UBC) with the intention to study literature and history. His parents demurred, however, so he settled on bacteriology in order to placate his physician father, ultimately graduating with first-class Honours in bacteriology in 1936. Because he felt he had had insufficient exposure to the physical sciences at UBC, he then went to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München to study chemistry. The rise of Nazism had poisoned the environment at the university, so he cut short his studies there and decided to attend graduate school in the United States. ==Graduate work (1937–1947)==

On account of the presence of his friend, Mike Lerner, he chose to enroll in the Department of Bacteriology of the University of California, Berkeley, but he found himself uninterested by the phage research done under A.P. Krueger, and he subsequently accepted a teaching assistantship at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) for the 1938–1939 term, his first paid employment. During his time at UCLA, he attended the a course taught by C. B. van Niel at the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California. His experience there encouraged him to pursue general microbiology. After receiving his M.A. from UCLA in 1939 he returned to Pacific Grove as van Niel's student. After his graduation he worked with Marjory Stephenson at the University of Cambridge as a Guggenheim fellow beginning in 1945. == University of California, Berkeley (1947–1971) ==

Upon his return to the United States he served a short appointment at the University of Indiana. In 1946-1947 we had at Indiana Roger Stanier, a marvelous teacher of bacterial biochemistry, a superb lecturer, and an arrogant uncompromising intellectual. Roger was from British Columbia, but English in spirit, an though vocally anti-puritan, emotionally a knot of puritan revolts and inhibitions — a delightfully neurotic man. As in Dante’s Inferno Farinata was contemptuous of Hell, so did Roger hold all of Indiana in contempt. From him I began to learn that biochemistry was not just chemistry, but biology. I learned about the power of an integrated view of metabolism and of the subtle interplay between organisms and their environment. Most important, I learned that bacteriology could be as much fun as genetics, if of a different kind of fun. In 1947 he accepted an invitation to join the Department of Bacteriology of the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained for most of his career. == Institut Pasteur ==

In 1971 he left Berkeley and moved to Paris, where he worked at the Institut Pasteur for the last decade of his life. ==Scientific legacy==

Stanier's research career included a diverse variety of research problems bound by a desire to synthesize the general and specific patterns observed in bacteria into a more unified understanding of biology as a whole. Stanier's work on Cyanobacteria focused on obligate autotrophy, fatty acid composition, structure of phycobiliproteins and phycobilisomes, chromatic adaptation, nitrogen fixation, and their nutrition and taxonomy. Stanier also authored an influential textbook, The Microbial World. The Microbial World played an important role in the promulgation of the concepts of "prokaryote" and "eukaryote" as negative definitions of Bacteria and Archea. ==Bibliography==