BIOGRAPHICAL MEMORANDA 



death of Sohngen, in 1934, he was sounded out about occupying the 

 chair for microbiology in Wageningen. The biologist in him must have 

 carefully balanced the attraction of being able to live in the most beau- 

 tiful part of his native country against what the vicinity of Delft had 

 to offer; Beijerinck had characterized the environs of Delft as a 'botan- 

 ical desert'. But once more loyalty to the Delft chair triumphed, prob- 

 ably augmented by the recognition of the ties with the past that Van 

 Leeuwenhoek and Beijerinck had woven between Delft and micro- 

 biology. This supposition is therefore the more tempting because this 

 past must have appeared to him more clearly than ever before, as a 

 result of the active part he had taken in the publication of Beijerinck's 

 Collected Works, completed in 1940 with the appearance of the final, 

 biographical volume; and in the planning of a complete critical edi- 

 tion by the Royal Netherlands' Academy of Sciences of all the letters 

 of Van Leeuwenhoek, begun in 1932 on the occasion of the tricenten- 

 nial of Leeuwenhoek's birth. Kluyver witnessed the publication of the 

 first four volumes of this work. 



A final opportunity to change his scientific domicile came after the 

 second world war, from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, U.S.A. 

 Kluyver toyed with the idea of joining in the general trend to migrate 

 to America; but nobody in his immediate environment really believed 

 that it would ever develop into more than an idle contemplation. He 

 had become too thoroughly entrenched in the affairs of his laboratory, 

 of Delft, and of its Technological University. As could have been anti- 

 cipated, the final decision was again a rejection. 



The work in the laboratory, conducted under the banner of the 'unity', 

 progressed steadily. Sometimes, as in the case of redox potential meas- 

 urements which, it was hoped, would clarify biochemical processes, 

 the important results that were initially expected did not materialize. 

 At other times the work assumed a significance that could not possibly 

 have been foreseen at the time. A striking example is the development, 

 by Kluyver and Perquin, of a method for the submerged cultivation 

 of moulds. This was intended to provide physiologically uniform cell 

 material for the study of the oxidative metabolism of these organisms. 

 Kluyver was very pleased with this elegant procedure, which opened 

 up the possibility of carefully controlled experimentation in an entirely 

 new field. But he was far from suspecting that less than twenty years 



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