Per Fredrik Scholander, Marine Biology: San Diego

	1905-1980
	Professor Emeritus

Per Fredrik Scholander was born in Orebro, Sweden on November 29, 1905, and died in his home in La Jolla, California on June 13, 1980. Dr. Scholander received a medical degree and the doctor of philosophy degree (in botany) from the University of Oslo, Norway. He came to Swarthmore College in 1939 and became a United States citizen in 1945. He was made captain in the Air Corps of the United States Army in 1943 and made major contributions to pilot safety at high altitude and to survival in arctic seas. He and Susan Irving were married in 1951, and together they enriched all who knew them. He accepted a professorship at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1958. He established the Physiological Research Laboratory at Scripps in 1965, and this facility for conducting biochemical and physiological research was extended to far-ranging places by its research vessel, RV Alpha Helix, a national facility. Scholander was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1961, the American Philosophical Society in 1962 and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1974. He received the Nansen Award for Polar Research in 1979.

Pete Scholander was an esthete, enjoying music, fine food, conversation and nature. His greatest joy was to call into question the orthodox account of a natural phenomenon. All his abundant gifts were recruited as he searched for an enlightened view of a biological or physical process. He possessed ingenuity, enthusiasm and motivation befitting a genius, and he could inspire his associates to share his pursuits. All his ideas he subjected to experimentation, and he was the consummate experimentalist. A list of his achievements in animal and plant physiology is long. He anticipated and discovered that hemoglobin could facilitate the diffusion of oxygen and suggested that myoglobin may function in a similar capacity in muscles. He largely explained how the counter flow of arterial and venous blood in the rete mirabile of the swim bladder of some deep sea fishes could maintain a large difference in oxygen and nitrogen with respect to their partial pressures in sea water. He also found one of the clues to attaining

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the high oxygen pressure in the swim bladder. By direct measurement, he confirmed the cohesion theory of transpiration in tall trees, mangroves and desert shrubs. He came to understand the turgor pressure in plant cells must be attributed to pressure exerted by the solutes in the cytosol rather than to intracellular water, the orthodox view. This led to further challenge of the orthodox view of osmosis and osmotic pressure. He enlightened us on such varied subjects as: the role of insulation and metabolism in polar birds, mammals and man exposed to cold; freezing survival in polar insects and freezing avoidance in polar fish; paleoatmospheres preserved in gas bubbles entrapped in glacial ice; the cardiovascular adjustments during diving in marine mammals; and how porpoises ride the bow waves of ships.

Professor Scholander was a noble person, and he always treated others as if they were no less noble. Jealousy, envy and hatred were unknown in his character; he was never vindictive or imperious. He enjoyed his life, his home, his colleagues and his science to the fullest degree, and to the end he spoke no regrets.