On the 28th of January, Professor Emeritus George Glushanok Laties passed away, and thus UCLA lost a long-time friend and highly respected plant biologist. He was 82 years old.
George was born on January 17, 1920 in Sevastopol, Russia, from where his family fled the White Revolution to wind up as immigrants, with so many others, in New York City. There he grew up and later graduated from Townsend Harris High School. George earned a B.S. from Cornell University in 1941 and the M.S. in plant physiology and biochemistry (1942) at the University of Minnesota. At UC Berkeley his doctoral program was interrupted by a stint in the U.S. Navy as a radar technician aboard a minesweeper in the China Sea. After World War II, George completed the Ph.D. at Berkeley under the direction of Professor Dennis R. Hoagland.
Dr. Laties became a postdoctoral fellow with Professor James Bonner at Cal Tech, one of the leading figures in plant physiology and biochemistry at that time, and it was in a Pasadena lab where George began his fantastic studies on respiratory mechanisms of higher plants. During the 1950s he also pursued research interests at a USDA lab at the University of Michigan and received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study in England. Research begun at Cal Tech led to the important discovery of the cyanide-resistant respiration pathway, which is expressed in wounded plant tissues. George pursued his passion for this topic to unravel biochemical processes in plant mitochondria, more than a decade before the first electron photomicrographs of that organelle were published. His "go-to" organism was the Irish potato, which became the subject of much probing, slicing, and dicing and spanned his published career, but George utilized sweet potatoes, avocado, carrots, beets, chicory, and bananas to investigate respiration and salt absorption in plant storage organ tissues. He even coauthored two research papers written in French on la pomme de terre (potato).
George Laties joined the UCLA faculty in 1959. As an assistant professor he became a key addition in the programs of horticultural sciences and plant physiology, especially in postharvest physiology. Thereafter, his laboratory at UCLA attracted a stream of graduate students, postdocs, and visitors from around the globe, and from that he helped to train leaders of a younger generation of plant biologists. George was receptive to using new approaches to precisely understand any aspect of physiological importance, and his students and collaborators respected his openness to imaginative methods and his logic in defining and approaching each subject. He was advanced rapidly to the academic rank of professor in 1963. Indeed, in the 1960s Professor Laties received many honors and much worldwide recognition. He was the 1965 vice president of the American Society of Plant Physiology and was to become president for 1966, had he not received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work in Australia in 1966-67, working in the biochemical section of the CSIRO in Canberra. Among his coworkers on salt absorption across the cell membrane and the vacuolar membrane were C. Barry Osmond and U. Luttge, who since then have had brilliant careers in plant physiology.
Professor Laties accepted mandatory retirement in 1990 but continued to be active as professor emeritus. It was always a pleasure to see him in the Botany Building and talk. George had a rich vocabulary and always found interesting ways to articulate his ideas, in classrooms, at meetings, in his reviews and research papers, and speaking one on one.
A memorial service will be held March 30 at the Faculty Center on the UCLA campus to honor and fondly remember George Laties, eminent scientist, stimulating teacher, and long-time friend of the botanical garden.