Opp. page, left Dr. Gotthilf Hempel of West 

 Germany took this relaxed picture of Reuben 

 during a visit to his laboratory in Building T-21 

 on the Scripps campus in 1963. 



Opp. page, right Examining a 1 m CalCOR 

 plankton net in 1 965 on the deck of the 

 Bureau of Commercial Fisheries research 

 vessel, Black Douglas. 



Right Reuben receiving the U.S. Department of 



the Interior Silver Medal in 1970 as Gerald V. 



Howard. Regional Director of the Southwest 



Region and Alan R. Longhurst, Director of the 



Fishery-Oceanography Center look on. 



was fond of telling the story, he was sitting in a 

 gloomy roomette where the only object left by the 

 former occupant of the cubicle was a box of tissues 

 used in laboratory work. When he reached over and 

 pulled one out, an insect fell down to the table top, 

 skittered away, fell to the floor and disappeared into 

 a crack. The tissue was full of holes and he realized 

 that what he had seen was a silverfish who had 

 made a meal of the paper. Cellulose is difficult to 

 digest by most organisms, and the conventional 

 thought was that animals that eat cellulose, such as 

 the cow or termites, have microorganisms in their 

 stomachs to do the digesting for them. Reuben 

 reflected that since no one had ever mentioned how 

 a silverfish did its cellulose digesting, this might be 

 a suitable topic for a Ph.D. thesis. On completion, 

 the thesis was ranked "Superior" by Stanford Uni- 

 versity and established Reuben's reputation as an 

 authority on the physiology of this insect. He re- 

 ceived his Ph.D. degree in biology in 1956. 



In February 1956, Science magazine carried a 

 small announcement in its back pages that a meet- 

 ing, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, was 

 to be held at the Scripps Institution of Oceanog- 

 raphy in La Jolla, California on the future of marine 

 biology. A small amount of money had been set 

 aside for graduate students who were asked to 

 apply to Dr. Adriano Buzzati, the convenor. Reuben 

 promptly wrote to Buzzati, explaining that he was a 

 graduate student at Stanford in marine biology and 

 eminently qualified by inclination and interest to 

 attend. By return mail he received a round-trip 



ticket from Palo Alto to San Diego and a check for 

 $50 "to cover expenses." At the train station in San 

 Diego, Reuben was picked up by Leo Berner, then a 

 graduate student at Scripps and presently a pro- 

 fessor and former dean of oceanography at Texas 

 A&M University, who later became a close friend. 



Famous names in marine biology were in 

 attendance at the meeting — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, 

 Nobel Laureate for the discovery of vitamin C; the 

 English biochemist Ernest Baldwin; Eugene Odum, 

 ecologist from the University of Georgia; Roger 

 Revelle, then the Director of the Scripps Institution 

 of Oceanography and later one of the founders of 

 the University of California, San Diego; John Isaacs, 

 professor of oceanography who was destined to 

 have a profound influence on Reuben; and many 

 others who collectively represented the forefront of 

 research in marine biology, worldwide. 



Buzzati, a geneticist, was then a professor at 

 Scripps. He offered to submit a proposal for 

 Reuben to the Rockefeller Foundation to culture 

 euphausiid shrimps, a project on which Reuben 

 had been working. On his return to Stanford, 

 Reuben wrote the proposal and by return mail 

 received notice that he had been awarded a post- 

 doctoral appointment for $5,000 a year (tax-free). 

 By the following September, Reuben and Caroline 

 arrived in La Jolla in a car packed with all their 

 possessions. 



The project Reuben chose for himself was to 

 attempt to maintain euphausiids in reasonable 

 health in the laboratory and to find out how effi- 



377 



