my affection for shneior lifson

My Affection forShneior Lifson

Mark M. GreenPolytechnic University

Brooklyn, NY 11201

It was one of the lucky days of my life, about fifteenyears ago, when I met Shneior Lifson in a GrammercyPark luncheonette near the hotel where he and Hannahwere staying. Shneoir was in New York to lecture atthe Courant Institute of New York University. Myfriend and colleague Herbert Morawetz had arrangedthe meeting based on his idea that our experimentalwork might fit well with Shneoir’s theoretical inter-ests. I clearly remember Hannah going back to thehotel, a short distance away, to get some special cerealfor Shneior, and seeing immediately the love betweenthese two gentle people.

I wanted to tell Shneoir about a result we had witha peptide that I thought could be interpreted usingempirical force field calculations, but he immediatelyturned my attention to another experiment we hadcarried out in which the helical sense of a polymer hadbeen greatly influenced by a chiral structural isotopeeffect. Shneoir quizzed me about the conformationalproperties of this polymer, and told me he had theo-rized about just such a system in which a smallenergy, the isotope effect in our experiment, and alarge energy, the difficulty of the helical polymer tochange helical sense in the particular polymer wewere studying, could lead to fascinating results. Hetold me he had written a partition function to describesuch a system and wanted to apply it to our experi-mental results. This was the beginning of a scientificcornucopia for both of us, and a deep friendship thatlasted until the loss of this great man.

Only after meeting Shneior and working with himdid I learn of his reputation and the great respect inwhich he was held and his pivotal role in the creationof empirical force fields, and all of this with hismodesty and humor and wisdom. Luck had cast meinto the presence of a great teacher, a man withinfinite patience for my ignorance of the most basicknowledge of the theoretical areas in which heworked. It was a patience that never wore out as longas he knew that eventually I could learn. I miss him somuch. It is hard to believe he is gone.

Our work together led to wonderful results, and wewere able to review it in Science in 1995 and later inAngewandte Chemie in 1999. The work stimulatedmany scientists to take an increased interest in thecooperative properties of helical polymers. It contin-ues to bear fruit in my own laboratory and elsewhere.Shneior’s theory for the experimental results we gen-erated led to collaboration between our laboratory inBrooklyn, with Shneior in Rehovot, and with friendsin Osaka University. What a pleasure it was when weall meet in Japan for a conference centered around allour efforts together. Who could imagine that a break-fast meeting in a Manhattan Greek luncheonettewould lead to all this.

But now I have to say goodbye to Shneior Lifson,goodbye to my teacher, goodbye to a wonderful manwho so many of us loved.

Correspondence to: Mark M. Green; email: mgreen@duke.poly.eduBiopolymers, Vol. 68, 277 (2003)© 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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