Slime mold shapes biologist's career

John Bonner has had a lifelong passion for slime mold.

It was a slime mold that led Bonner — the George M. Moffett Professor of Biology, emeritus — to become a leading biologist, highly decorated academic and captivating teacher.

In an interview with The Daily Princetonian, Bonner reflected on the most memorable moments of his nearly 60-year career and on some of the changes he's witnessed, both at Princeton and in the field of biology.

Though Bonner highlighted stories about his meetings with famous physicists like Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, his work qualifies him as a major scientist in his own right. He has won several prestigious awards, including the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, the Rockefeller Traveling Fellowship and the Guggenheim Fellowship.

He considers his Junior Fellowship at Harvard — where he received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees — to be the most memorable.

"In the first place, I was very young and it was very young and it was very exciting to have a prestigious award," he said. "And they paid me a lot of money and I wanted to get married!"

Bonner first became interested in slime mold while an undergraduate, and he continued his work with the social amoeba after he joined the Princeton faculty in 1947. Though Dictyostelium discoideum might not sound like a memorable name, Bonner's work with the organism broke new ground in understanding the evolution and development of the species and even caught Einstein's attention.

After a mutual friend told Einstein about Bonner's film about slime mold , Bonner presented his work to the Nobel prizewinning physicist.

"He wanted to know what I was going to do about this, what did I think were the important problems," Bonner said. "The only thing I regret was right afterwards I didn't write down all his questions ... He asked really good deep questions. He couldn't have been nicer."

Bonner has met other monumental figures in science. He once had coffee with Bohr, who won a Nobel prize for his model of the structure of the atom.

"It wasn't very satisfactory because he had a terrible thick Danish accent so I didn't really understand what he was saying most of the time," Bonner said. "Furthermore, he talked nonstop so you couldn't interrupt him. He would just go on talking. I can't say I had a very effective or stimulating conversation with him."

In addition to his personal memories, Bonner recalled some of the major institutional changes during the past six decades of the University's history.

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During his career, Bonner witnessed dramatic changes in the size and focus of Princeton's biology department. When he first joined the University, the EEB and molecular biology departments were a single Department of Biology, which had only 11 faculty members, including Bonner. The department split in 1990. Today, the molecular biology department has 50 faculty members, and the EEB department has 18.

He also remembers the arrival of the first female students in 1969.

"After two or three years, I had the feeling that it must have always been this way," Bonner said, though after a pause he added, "Actually, when I first had women in the intro biology course, I remember going into the men's room to make sure my fly was zipped. So it did have an effect."

Bonner has been politically active as a professor, signing petitions against the execution of the Rosenbergs and writing a telegram to President Nixon opposing the Vietnam War.

During the Second World War, Bonner attended Officer Cadet School.

"It was crazy. I don't think I learned anything," he said. "I grew up a lot there, that's about it. Intellectually, it was a total vacuum."

Whether in class, his office or the lab, Bonner exudes a pleasant openness. James Gould, who currently teaches the introductory biology course which Bonner formerly taught, complimented his predecessor.

"A more charming person I've never met in my life," Gould said.

Bonner is also captivating to his students. Lily Miao '09 remembered the impact he made during his guest visits to EEB 211 at the beginning of the year.

"He made his lectures really interesting by incorporating a lot of anecdotes," she said. "His enthusiasm for the subject showed."

Bonner retired from teaching in 1990, beginning what he described as his "permanent sabbatical."

"When I retired I decided there were two things I would never do again," he said. "Do another research paper and correct another exam."

He did, however, write a book — "Lives of a Biologist: Adventures in a Century of Extraordinary Science" — recounting his career against a background of the history of science.