OSTERHOUT, WINTHROP JOHN VANLEUVEN

(b. Brooklyn, New York, 2 August 1871; d. New York City, 9 April 1964)

botany, general physiology.

Osterhout was the only surviving child of John Vanleuven Osterhout, an idealistic, financially unsuccessful Baptist minister of old New York Dutch ancestry, and Annie Loranthe Beman, a daughter of English immigrants, who died when her son was two. Osterhout studied at Brown University, the University of Bonn, and the University of California. A dedicated academic, with few interests outside science, he held positions at Berkeley, Harvard, and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (elected in 1919) and cofounder of the Journal of General Physiology (with Jacques Loeb in 1918). Osterhout married Anna Maria Landstrom in 1899; they had two daughters and were divorced in 1932. The following year he married his research associate, Marian Irwin. Blinded soon afterward as the result of glaucoma, he grew dependent on her both personally and scientifically. Nevertheless, he continued research until he was over eighty.

Osterhout was a significant participant (and one of the few botanists) in the network of American academic biologists who oriented their science at the beginning of the twentieth century around laboratory research and methods drawn from the physical sciences. A solitary and bookish child raised in Baltimore and in Providence, Rhode Island, Osterhout was first drawn to the life sciences in 1891 as an advanced undergraduate by the young Brown University professor H. C. Bumpus. The next summer he studied at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where W. A. Setchell guided him toward the study of algae. After receiving his undergraduate degree in 1893, Osterhout taught botany at Brown for two years and summered as an instructor at the Marine Biological Laboratory. He obtained an M.A. from Brown in 1894. In the academic year 1895–1896 he studied at Bonn with the plant cytologist Eduard Strasburger, working on the reproduction of the alga Batrachospermum. He then followed Setchell to the University of California at Berkeley as an instructor, obtaining a Ph.D. from that institution in 1899.

At Berkeley, Osterhout sought to relate academic botany to agricultural advancement, both by developing an elementary course and textbook in plant physiology and by acting as a liaison between the university and the horticultural “wizard” Luther Burbank. His interests took a more specific direction in 1903, when the innovative general physiologist Jacques Loeb arrived from the University of Chicago. Loeb had shown that slight changes in the ionic composition of protoplasm could have major physiological consequences; Osterhout recognized that such “salt effects” were important both for marine algae and for flowering plants, and he began to investigate the influences of both simple and complex salt solutions on plant growth. He was encouraged in this work by Hugo de Vries and Svante Arrhenius, for whom he was a host on their visits to Berkeley in the summer of 1904.

Osterhout’s involvement with the application of the new physical chemistry to biology, as well as his teaching ability, resulted in a call to Harvard in 1909 to become assistant professor of botany, in spite of a lack of enthusiasm for his research on the part of leading American botanists. In the next years he improved his command of both mathematics and electrochemistry and began an extensive project on the permeability of cells to ions. Working primarily at Woods Hole, Osterhout applied to plants the standard techniques for measuring the conductivity of electrolytes, devising an apparatus in which a current passed through a large number of disks of the brown kelp Laminaria. By measuring changes in permeability of plant tissues bathed in different ionic media, he was able to interpret injury and death as quantifiable electrochemical processes and, more speculatively, as problems in reaction kinetics.

As a mild-mannered Harvard scholar (he became a full professor in 1913) Osterhout took the lead in promoting general physiology as an academic discipline in America, a role for which his mentor Loeb, who left Berkeley for the Rockefeller Institute in 1910, was temperamentally unsuited. He maintained his ties with Arrhenius and established good relations with leading Harvard chemists, including T. W. Richards, A. B. Lamb, and G. P. Baxter. In addition to teaching elementary botany, Osterhout worked closely with the zoologist G. H. Parker to promote graduate work in physicochemically oriented biology at Harvard; his students included L. R. Blinks and W. O. Fenn, and he supported the work of such younger zoologists as Selig Hecht and W. J. Crozier. Osterhout joined Loeb in establishing the Journal of General Physiology in 1918, and he collaborated with Loeb and T. H. Morgan in editing the influential series Monographs on Experimental Biology. In 1920 he became a member of the Rockefeller Institute’s Board of Scientific Directors.

A year after Loeb’s death in 1924, Osterhout became the Rockefeller Institute’s chief general physiologist. Until his retirement in 1939 he led a research group that investigated the electrical properties of giant algal cells. As early as 1923 he measured directly the electrical potential across an algal cell membrane, and by the end of the decade he was arguing that the selective permeability of the membrane for different cations was the basis for the membrane potential. As an advocate of general physiology at a medical research center, Osterhout hoped that these projects would provide the foundations for work on more complex and delicate animal tissues. This hope was justified with regard to problems and methods; Osterhout provided a model and guide for the early work of Kenneth Cole and Detlev Bronk. But the properties of algae were sufficiently complex to keep Osterhout’s small research group from making the fundamental discoveries they sought. With the recognition in the mid 1930’s that the squid axon could be studied in the same way as the giant algae, the center of research on bioelectricity shifted to the direct investigation of nerve.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Osterhout was the author or coauthor of five books and over 260 scientific papers; a bibliography is in L.R. Blinks. “Winthrop John Vanleuven Osterhout”, in Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences, 44 (1974), 213–249. His books include Experiments with Plants (New York, 1905), an elementary text; Injury, recovery an Death in Relation to Conductivity and Permeability (Philadelphia, 1923), a synthesis of the work on Laminaria ; and The Nature of Life (New York, 1923), a short presentation of his general views. Osterhout provided a brief résumé of his research in “The Use of Aquatic Plants in the Study of Some Fundamental Problems”, in Annual Review of Plant Physiology, 8 (1957), 1–10. A collection of his correspondence and manuscripts (approximately 2,500 items) is in the American Philosophical Society Library, philadelphia.

II. Secondary Literature.The major source on Osterhout’s life, with photograph and bibliography, is Blinks (see above). See also George W. Corner. A. History of the Rockefeller Institute, 1901–1953: Origins and Growth (New York, 1964).

Philip J. Pauly