Scientist partners in research die days apart

Washington: David D. Perkins and Dorothy "Dot" Newmeyer Perkins, a husband-and-wife research team at Stanford University who were inseparable in the laboratory, proved inseparable in death as well, dying with days of each other in January.

David Perkins, a pioneer in the use of the orange mould Neurospora crassa for studying genetics and cellular metabolism, died on January 2 at Stanford Hospital at age 87 following a short illness, the university announced this week.

His collaborator and wife of 54 years, Dorothy Perkins, died four days later of natural causes at their home in Menlo Park, California, where she was in hospice care. She was 84.

Geneticists

David Perkins was not the first scientist to popularise N. crassa. Edward Tatum and George Wells Beadle used the organism in the 1940s for their work demonstrating that a single gene serves as the blueprint for a single protein.

But Perkins stimulated interest in the fungus, demonstrating its continued usefulness even while many researchers switched to the bacterium Escherichia coli.

Dorothy Newmeyer was a graduate student in Tatum's Yale University laboratory, accompanying him when he returned to Stanford in 1948.

Schroeder wrote on the memorial Web site that Dorothy Perkins "showed me that you could be a mother and homemaker and also be active in civil affairs, play the cello, and still be an excellent scientist".