Thirty years is a long time in Professor Years.
When Ron McClard joined the Reed faculty in 1984 chemistry was being taught in the old chemistry building, a leaky, cold structure with broken plumbing, inadequate office space, and poorly equipped labs.* But Ron seized the opportunity he was given and began doing and publishing research with his students. Before long he had attracted a cohort of younger faculty united by the same vision: that Reed students were capable of rising to the challenge of doing publication-worthy research.
Ron is retiring from teaching at the end of this school year and we celebrated his contributions to the college at today’s end-of-the-school-year faculty luncheon. Among them: obtaining NSF funding for major instruments including two FT-NMR spectrophotometers, publishing 50 papers (at least 15 with Reed student co-authors), teaching in every departmental specialty (biochem, of course, but also analytical, organic, and physical) except for inorganic chemistry, and supervising 50 senior theses spread over five different majors, including what might be the only Reed thesis for interdisciplinary work “in biochemistry and mathematics.”**
As I retraced Ron’s teaching and research for the attendees I pointed to three 1987 papers of his that might have been a possible favorite:
- “On a Common Graphical Flaw in the Carboxylic Acid-Alcohol Relative Acidity Argument,” McClard, R.W., J. Chem. Ed., 1987, 64(5), 416-7 (DOI 10.1021/ed064p416)
- “Does the bifunctional uridylate synthase channel orotidine 5′-phosphate? Kinetics of orotate phosphoribosyltransferase and orotidylate decarboxylase activities fit a noninteracting sites model,” McClard, R.W. and Shokat, K.M., Biochemistry, 1987, 26(12), 3378–84 (DOI 10.1021/bi00386a020) (note: this was Prof. Kevan Shokat’s (Reed ’86) first peer-reviewed scientific publication)
- “Novel phosphonylphosphinyl (P-C-P-C-) analogs of biochemically interesting diphosphates. Syntheses and properties of P-C-P-C-, analogs of isopentenyl diphosphate and dimethylallyl diphosphate,” McClard, R.W. et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc., 1987, 109(18), 5544–5 (DOI 10.1021/ja00252a051) (a rare bird: a JACS paper with a Reed chemist as the principal author)
Turns out I went 0 for 3. A strikeout. While Ron acknowledged that he was rather fond of each of the papers I had selected, and that it was hard to pick a favorite, he also said that he was partial to a much more recent publication (no surprise – don’t all scientists love their most recent work best?): “Half-of-Sites Binding of Orotidine 5‘-Phosphate and α-d-5-Phosphorylribose 1-Diphosphate to Orotate Phosphoribosyltransferase from Saccharomyces cerevisiae Supports a Novel Variant of the Theorell−Chance Mechanism with Alternating Site Catalysis,” McClard, R.W. et al., Biochemistry, 2006, 45(16), 5330–42 (DOI 10.1021/bi051650o) (all four authors on this paper were affiliated with Reed, Ned Holets ’05 and Andy MacKinnon ’04 were thesis students of Ron’s)
On August 15 Ron will ‘sail away’ to new adventures. Bon voyage, mon ami.
*The ‘old’ chemistry building is the current psychology building. The building and its infrastructure were completely renovated before the psychologists moved into their current home.
** Lindsay Nicole Deis ’09, “Application of numerical simulation to the determination of half-of-sites reactivity : a case study in biotin carboxylase” (adv. McClard & Shurman)