Herbert Tabor, 1918–2020: Polyamines, NIH, and the JBC

On August 20, 2020, at the age of 101, Herbert Tabor died peacefully at his home on the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland. Herb was best known for his elucidation of the biochemical pathways for polyamines, including characterization of the biosynthetic enzymes, their genes and regulation, and the functions of the polyamines, chiefly using Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. He was Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) for nearly 40 years, overseeing its dramatic expansion and modernization, leading conversion from the traditional means of distribution of scientific information to the present web-based system. Herbert Tabor was born November 28, 1918, in New York City, and was graduated from Townsend Harris High School in 1933 at the age of 14. At Harvard College he entered the Biochemical Sciences program headed by John Edsall. Graduating in 1937, Herb attended Harvard Medical School, where his work with A. Baird Hastings on the ionization constant of MgHPO4 was the subject of his first paper, fittingly in the JBC (1). As an intern at Yale-New Haven Hospital in 1942, Herb gave a patient with streptococcal septicemia an injection of penicillin, the first dose in the first major clinical trial of the drug in the United States (it worked!). Unbeknownst to Herb at the time (until 25 years later), that dose was prepared at Merck by Gilbert Ashwell, later to be a distinguished colleague and close friend of Herb at the NIH. In January 1943, Herb joined the US Public Health Service and was assigned as the Medical Officer to the Coast Guard cutter USCGC Duane, escorting convoys between the United States and Britain. The events challenged his limited surgical training [recounted in the article, “It all started on a streetcar in Boston” (2)], but he managed without untoward sequellae.