Abraham Eisenstark

As a child, Eisenstark immigrated to the United States from Poland. After education (including junior college) in Kansas City public schools, he graduated with A.B. and M.A. from the University of Illinois. His study for a Ph.D. in microbiology was interrupted by WW II. He became a technical sergeant in the 8th Medical Laboratory of the U.S. Army Medical Service from 1942 to 1945. His service in the Pacific involved diagnostic procedures for malaria. He returned to graduate study at the University of Illinois and became a research assistant in charge of electron microscopy.[2]

As part of his Ph.D. dissertation, which he completed in 1948, he showed that penicillin worked to stop infection by interfering with the cell wall during bacterial division. The results of his work were published in Science magazine in 1947.[3]

Eisenstark was a faculty member from 1948 to 1951 at Oklahoma State University and from 1951 to 1971 at Kansas State University.[3] For the academic year 1958–1959 he was on sabbatical as a Guggenheim Fellow at Ole Maaløe's laboratory in Copenhagen. From 1968 to 1969 he spent 15 months on sabbatical at the National Science Foundation as a program director for molecular biology. In 1971 he resigned from Oklahoma State University to become a professor at the University of Missouri, where he was the head of the Division of Biological Sciences from 1971 to 1980.[2]

Some of his contributions were highlighted in the Division’s Fall 1991 Alumni Newsletter. They include defining the nature of Newcastle virus and the observation of “incomplete” viral particles usable for use in vaccines; development of “recombinationless” strains of Salmonella typhimurium; the discovery that bacteriophage can transfer plasmid genes as well as chromosomal genes; and the establishment of the antigenic and morphological properties of the mutator phage, mu-1, a bacterial virus that has been important for understanding gene transposition and the development of molecular genetics[3]

At the University of Missouri, in 1990 he went into mandatory retirement as professor emeritus. In 1990 he became the director of Cancer Research Center (near Ellis Fischel Cancer Center) in Columbia, Missouri.[2] There he continued doing research for the next twenty years.[3]

Eisenstark supervised 20 doctoral students.[3] His first wife died in 1984. They had a daughter and two sons.[4] His second wife, Joan Ragsdell Eisenstark, was born in 1937 and died at age 83.

• "Abe Eisenstark".