Koshland was born to a
Jewish family, the son of
Daniel E. Koshland Sr. and Eleanor (née Haas), daughter of the Haas family patriarch
Abraham Haas.[4] His great-grandfather was wool merchant
Simon Koshland. He had two siblings: Frances "Sissy" Koshland Geballe and Phyllis Koshland Friedman.[4] His father served as
C.E.O. of
Levi Strauss & Co. from 1955 to 1958[4] and is widely credited with saving the company during the
Great Depression.[5]
In 1997, Koshland's private fortune, derived from
Levi Strauss, put him at 64th on the list of America's wealthiest people.[6] Rather than relying on his fortune, Koshland chose to pursue a career in science.[7] Koshland wrote in an autobiographical article that he decided to become a scientist in the eighth grade after reading two popular books about science, Microbe Hunters by
Paul de Kruif and Arrowsmith by
Sinclair Lewis.[8]
Research career
Attending
Phillips Exeter Academy[9] for high school Koshland then became the third generation of his family to matriculate to the
University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in chemistry.
The next five years, 1941–46, were spent working with
Glenn T. Seaborg at the University of Chicago on the top-secret
Manhattan project, where his team purified the plutonium that was used to make the atomic bomb at Los Alamos.[10]
Later Koshland turned to studying how
bacteria control their movements in
chemotaxis.[17]
His laboratory made three major discoveries concerning
protein phosphorylation in bacteria:
It was demonstrated that substituting an aspartate residue for the serine residue that was phosphorylated causes the protein to behave as if it were phosphorylated.[19]
He spearheaded the reorganization of the biological sciences at Berkeley, merging eleven departments into three.[22] In 1992, Koshland Hall was named after him.[7] The building is located next to (and on some floors connected to) Barker Hall. Koshland Hall houses a number of laboratories in both molecular and cell biology as well as plant and microbial biology.[23]
In 1998, Koshland was awarded the
Albert Lasker Special Achievement Award given by the Lasker Foundation for medical research in the United States.[27] In 2008, the award was renamed the Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science in honor of Koshland.[28]
Personal life
He was married to
Marian Koshland (née Elliot), a fellow Berkeley professor, from 1946 until her death in 1997. Marian was not Jewish, the daughter of a teacher who had immigrated from
Denmark and a hardware salesman father of Southern Baptist background.[29] Daniel and Marian had five children: Ellen Koshland, Phyllis "Phylp" Koshland, James Koshland, Gail Koshland, and
Douglas Koshland.[7] Koshland's son Douglas is a professor of
genetics at the University of California, Berkeley.[30] Daniel Koshland supported the creation of the
Marian Koshland Science Museum by giving a major gift to the National Academy of Sciences in Marian's honor.[7]
After his wife's death in 1997 he reconnected with onetime Berkeley classmate Yvonne Cyr San Jule and they were married in
Lafayette on August 17, 2000.[31] San Jule had four children from previous marriages: conductor
Christopher Keene, Philip Keene,
Elodie Keene, and Tamsen (née San Jule) Calhoon.[22]
^Thoma, John A.; Koshland, D. E. (1960). "Competitive Inhibition by Substrate during Enzyme Action. Evidence for the Induced-fit Theory". Journal of the American Chemical Society. 82 (13): 3329–3333.
doi:
10.1021/ja01498a025.
^Polgar, Laszlo; Bender, Myron L. (1967). "The Reactivity of Thiol-subtilisin, an Enzyme Containing a Synthetic Functional Group". Biochemistry. 6 (2): 610–620.
doi:
10.1021/bi00854a032.
PMID6047645.
^Monod, Jacques; Wyman, Jeffries; Changeux, Jean-Pierre (1965). "On the nature of allosteric transitions: A plausible model". Journal of Molecular Biology. 12: 88–118.
doi:
10.1016/S0022-2836(65)80285-6.
PMID14343300.
^Koshland, D. E.; Némethy, G.; Filmer, D. (1966). "Comparison of Experimental Binding Data and Theoretical Models in Proteins Containing Subunits". Biochemistry. 5 (1): 365–385.
doi:
10.1021/bi00865a047.
PMID5938952.
^Wang JY, Koshland DE (October 1, 1982). "The reversible phosphorylation of isocitrate dehydrogenase of Salmonella typhimurium". Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics. 218 (1): 59–67.
doi:
10.1016/0003-9861(82)90321-6.
PMID6756316.
^"ASCB Profile: Douglas Koshland"(PDF). Ascb Newsletter. American Society for Cell Biology: 12–13. 2005.
Archived(PDF) from the original on January 14, 2017. Retrieved April 1, 2016.