Arnold L. Demain (April 26, 1927 – April 3, 2020) was an American microbiologist. During his 60-year career, he gained a reputation in the field of industrial microbiology. He was the Professor of Industrial Microbiology in the Biology Department at MIT and Founder and Head of Department of Fermentation Microbiology at Merck & Co. The August 2010 edition of The Journal of Antibiotics celebrated his scientific career. Demain was described as "one of the world's leading industrial microbiologists" and as "a scientist constantly in the forefront of industrial microbiology and biotechnology." He was "a pioneer in research on the elucidation and regulation of the biosynthetic pathways leading to the penicillins and cephalosporins" and "instrumental in the development of the beta-lactam industry". One feature of Demain's work, according to Microbiology Australia, was his "ability to undertake fundamental research on systems with clear industrial applications, recognising that biodiscovery is the start of the road that includes strain improvement to achieve levels of product synthesis that warrant further investment to take products into the marketplace."
Demain published over 500 papers, co-edited or co-authored fourteen books, and took out 21 U.S. patents.
Early life and education
Demain was born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 26, 1927. His grandparents were all immigrants from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. As a boy he worked delivering groceries and was also a stock boy at Lord & Taylor's department store in Manhattan. Demain's father, Henry, was in the pickle manufacturing business, managing a canning and pickling plant for Vita Foods Corp. in Chestertown, Maryland. Demain's uncles Ben and Seymour operated another pickling factory, Demain Foods Co., in Ayden, North Carolina. According to one source, "Henry was a leader in the pickle business, working for Fields and then Bloch and Guggenheimer in New York before setting up the pickle plant in Chestertown." Demain himself said that his grandfather, Joseph Demain, "had sold pickles for years in one of New York's major market areas." Demain attended five different public elementary schools and three different public high schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and graduated high school at age 16.
Demain attended Michigan State briefly, then joined the U.S. Navy in 1945 and spent two years in Philadelphia caring for amputees who were members of the armed forces who had been injured in the war. Demain returned to Michigan State in 1947, earning B.S. and M.S. degrees in bacteriology from the Department of Microbiology and Public Health in 1949 and 1950 respectively. His master's research topic was the spoilage and softening of pickles during fermentation, a phenomenon that, he concluded, was probably caused by pectic enzymes. At MSC Demain met and married a fellow student, Joanna ("Jody") Kaye from Youngstown, Ohio.
From MSC, Demain went to the University of California's Department of Food Science, which was first at the Berkeley campus and then at Davis working with Herman Phaff. He began work on his Ph.D. project on polygalacturonase of Saccharomyces fragilis. The project resulted in four papers on pectic enzymes, one of which published in Nature. At Berkeley, he was in charge of the cultures in UC's yeast collection. Demain said that he and Phaff "apparently were the first in the world to carry out affinity chromatography, using a pectic acid gel to selectively adsorb YPG from culture filtrates." Demain received his Ph.D. in 1954.
Career
In early 1954, Demain moved to Danville, Pennsylvania, where he worked as a research microbiologist for Merck Sharp & Dohme, studying the synthesis of penicillin. His work helped identify the amino acids that form the nucleus of penicillin, established the mechanisms that enable primary metabolites and carbon sources to regulate secondary metabolite synthesis, and demonstrated that penicillin was the product of synthesis and inactivation during fermentation. In late 1955, Demain moved on to Merck's penicillin research laboratories in Rahway, New Jersey, where he worked on fermentation microbiology, â-lactam antibiotics, flavor nucleotides, and microbial nutrition.