IN MEMORIAM: GARY W. GRIMES (1946–1999)

In August 1999, Gary Grimes, Professor of Biology at Hofstra University, died unexpectedly in his home on Long Island. The protozoological world mourns his demise and the loss of his continued valuable contributions. Dr. Grimes was born on October 28, 1946, in northern Kentucky. His family moved to southern Indiana when he was very young. While still a teenager, he escaped an unstable home environment and began independent life. He had the good fortune to attend Indiana University in Bloomington and to join the group of scientists assembled there by Tracy Sonneborn. As a high school student, an undergraduate, and a graduate student, he was trained by, and worked as an electron microscopist for Ruth Dippell. He completed his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees at Indiana University under the mentorship of Sonneborn, Dippell, and John Preer, earning the Ph.D. in 1972. After postdoctoral training in the Sonneborn group, in 1973 he joined the faculty of Hofstra University in New York. He rose quickly through the academic ranks and was promoted to Professor of Biology at Hofstra in 1983, where he remained until his death. Although he was trained as a member of the “Sonneborn clone,” Dr. Grimes made an early decision not to focus his studies upon paramecia. Instead, he chose to work on the morphogenetic activities of the hypotrichs because he was impressed by the larger menu of developmental options expressed by the members of that group, including the option of forming resting cysts. His microscopic skills allowed him to participate in many different studies, but his major scientific contribution was his work on the patterning of hypotrich ciliates. In general, his studies directed attention to maintenance of the cortical, cytoskeletal patterns associated with the ciliature of the hypotrich cell and the nature of the information necessary to organize the pattern. By disruptions of the cell division cycle, one can generate homopolar doublet cells (basically two cells fused back-toback, with twice the number of normal surface structures). The doublet state is stable and is inherited through vegetative proliferation, but doublets are not generated under conditions known to be mutagenic. Doublets thus represent a classical demonstration of cytotaxis, or directed assembly, a form of structural inheritance independent of the information encoded in nuclear genes (Frankel 1989; Grimes and Aufderheide 1991; Kirschner, Gerhart, and Mitchison 2000). In a heroic feat of transmission electron microscopic serial sectioning, Grimes was able to confirm previous reports that the hypotrich cyst contains no discernible microtubules, cortical membranes, or other surface-related organization (Grimes 1973b, c). He demonstrated that homopolar doublet cells produced cysts that were structurally indistinguishable from the cysts produced by normal singlet cells. Nevertheless, doublets consistently emerged from the cyst as doublets, and singlet cysts produced singlets (Grimes 1973a). Although the average doublet cyst was larger than the average singlet cyst, there was considerable overlap in distributions of the two types, so the patterning difference was not simply due to a difference in size. Grimes interpreted these observations to mean that the heritable patterning information in the cyst did not reside in the organization of microtubular or membranous components in the cyst, but rather appeared to be present in some form not discernible using standard transmission electron microscopic techniques. A preliminary report by Grimes and Gavin supported the notion that, although certain cortical structures in the vegetative cell are stable through many cell cycles (i.e. no turnover or ex.