Gerald Brierley

Ph.D. - University of Maryland

Post Doctoral Fellow - University of Wisconsin

Gerald Phillip Brierley – Professor, Chair and Friend

Our friend died peacefully at home on October 22 after a long and truly heroic experience with prostate cancer. He was preceded in death by his parents Myrtle and Phillip and brother Ron.  He is survived by his wife of 35 years Miriam, a gifted teacher and school administrator so important in his life, three sons and a daughter who he often said grew into interesting people; eight grandchildren and a younger brother Hal who he admired and greatly respected.

Gerry was born in Ogallala, Nebraska where his mother who was a descendent of a pioneer family had returned for the event. He grew up in University Park, Maryland and graduated as the valedictorian of his class at McKinley High School in Washington, D.C. His father Phillip was a distinguished plant pathologist who worked for many years at the USDA Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland. Interestingly, Gerry first worked in areas where his father had worked and published while Gerry was in his teenage years. His father was his scoutmaster and Gerry became an Eagle Scout with a life-long love of nature, bird watching, hiking and camping along the Appalachian Trail.

Gerry was an American Scholar, equally involved in teaching and research. He graduated from the University of Maryland, served two years as an officer in the United States Air Force, returned to complete his graduate degree, and in 1960 moved to the Enzyme Institute at the University of Wisconsin where he worked with David Green. When you access his many publications in chronological order on SciFinder Scholar, you find a biochemist whose career is traced by a keen interest in what we now call systems biology – the ensemble of multiple elements in a system that allows the identification of emergent properties and the mechanistic understanding of the overall dynamics of a system. His career began with a PNAS paper on the active transport of inorganic phosphate and magnesium and much of his early work was on energy transduction in mitochondria summarized in a 1965 paper on the “Association of Integrated Metabolic Pathways with Membrane”. Other scientists and the Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Mitchell himself recognized that his early work furnished experimental data that validated Mitchell’s theory of energy transduction in mitochondria.

Gerry joined the Department of Medical Biochemistry, later called Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, at The Ohio State University in 1964 with a Career Development Award from the American Heart Association. He published a distinguished series of papers in mitochondriology on cation and anion transport, swelling and contraction, respiratory control of cyclic pH transitions, the energized-twisted mitochondria transition, structural requirements in the uncoupling of oxidative phosphorylation, passive permeability and energy linked ion movements. He published important work on osmotic swelling and showed for the first time that oxidative stress was not necessarily linked to the generation of reactive oxidant species.

In 1980, Gerry began a series of elegant studies that justified his early support from the American Heart Association when he studied the calcium tolerance of isolated rat-heart cells – hypoxia, re-oxidation and acidosis. This work was followed with ion compartmentalization in heart cells, anaerobic and aerobic transitions, the potassium/proton antiport, ion movement and irreversible anoxic damage, sulfyhdryl requirements, hypercontractivity, cellular response to ischemia, all studies basic to the use of isolated myocytes in oxidative stress.

Gerry believed that classroom teaching was no burden. It was a necessary component in creativity. He was well aware that creative scientists such as Richard Feynman demanded that they should have the freedom to spend at least 50% of their time in classroom teaching. Gerry thought continually and deeply on ways to teach systems biology when the biochemist/molecular biologist was buried under an avalanche of data, over 150,000 pages of new data from just a few journals each year. He finally solved this problem to his satisfaction by beginning with metabolomics, the 2,500 small molecules crucial in biology. He then followed systems biology into proteomics carefully choosing from the 1,000,000 specific proteins, then selecting from transcriptomics with its 100,000 mRNA’s and finally arriving at genomics with its 25,000 genes. Gerry built this program around the study of one disease, diabetes. He created a truly beautiful thirty page summary of this subject of which Manuel Tzagournis, the endocrinologist who was his Vice President, Dean and friend for many years wrote, “In  November 2004 he sent me a version of his notes that were in the computer on the chapter he was writing on diabetes (my interest). I enjoyed reading it tremendously. It was one of the best written pieces on the basic science and chemistry of diabetes as well as being filled with accurate and meaningful clinical information. I found myself about one month ago looking up the paper and reading sections of it. I intend to keep it in my priority file on diabetes mellitus.”

Manuel wrote to Miriam after Gerry died, “He was a voice of reason in a medical school that always had something happening. He was a scholar, a wonderful teacher, an extraordinary investigator and an exemplary human being.” We who were his friends join Manuel in these words.

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