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Harold Theodore (Ted) Hammel
May 8, 1921 - February 24, 2005
World physiology, especially Environmental and Thermal Physiology, just
lost one of its most important and prominent practitioners. Harold T. (Ted)
Hammel, Ph.D., died on February 24, 2005, at age 83, in Bloomington, IN. At
the time, he was still an active and very engaged researcher and educator,
having converted the basement of his house into a physiological laboratory
and serving as Adjunct Professor of Physiology and Biophysics as well as of
Biology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Indeed, his obvious joy in
talking and doing science was very contagious, and he stimulated many a
young physiologist over the years to “go further”. He had come to
Bloomington, near his hometown of Huntington, in 1988, after 21 years with
Per (Pete) F. Scholander at the Physiological Research Laboratory of the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla and as Professor of
Physiology at the University of California, San Diego. Before this, he had
been Research Fellow at Yale University’s John B. Pierce Foundation
Laboratory, arriving there in 1961with James (Jim) D. Hardy in whose
department at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine he had
served for the preceding 8 years. That had been his first position after
earning his Ph.D. in Zoology in 1953 at
Cornell University. It was his preceptor there,
Dr. Donald Griffin, who awakened Ted’s interest in biology, particularly
biophysics (physics had been his undergraduate major at Cornell) and,
subsequently, discussions with Jim Hardy, whom he met while conducting
fieldwork as a graduate student in Alaska, that excited his lifelong
research in temperature regulation. Similarly, it was his later fieldwork
with Pete Scholander that stimulated his other life-long interests, osmotic
pressure and sap pressure in trees.
Dr. Hammel’s contributions to thermoregulation
were multiple, significant and heuristic. Among them, three series of
studies stand out especially, the first because its results have framed our
current concept of temperature regulation as a
multiple-input/multiple-output feedback system (see essay by Mack, JAP,
97:1593-4, 2004), and the second because it fully and meticulously described
the strategies developed by humans living in diverse, extreme climates
around the world to cope with their environment (reviewed by Hammel, Hdbk
Environ Physiol, p. , 1964). It was during one of these field studies that
he also undertook work, in collaboration with Dr. Eckhart Simon, on the
third series of his major contributions, the thermo- and osmoregulation of
the Adelie penguin. This grew into a 3-6 months/year, 12-year long, formal
association as an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for
Physiological and Clinical Research in Bad Nauheim, Germany.
Dr. Hammel published over 200 papers over his
career, his last one a review in 2004, in Cryobiology (48:309-21).
His extensive work in the area of osmosis and capillary fluid exchange was
summarized in FASEB J. 13:213-31, 1999.
It may not be generally known that, remarkably, before becoming a
physiologist and while he was a graduate student in nuclear physics at
Cornell, during WWII, Ted worked with the Los Alamos Omega Group under
Enrico Fermi and Otto Frisch in the assembly of the uranium and plutonium
bombs.
Dr. Hammel was a member of the American
Physiological Society, American Physical Society, American Society of
Mammalogy, American Society of Plant Physiologists, the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, and the Norwegian Academy of Science
and Letters (honorary).
Dr. Hammel leaves his wife, Dorothy, and two
daughters. We will all greatly miss him and his enthusiasm and always
remember him fondly and gratefully.
Clark M. Blatteis, Ph.D.
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