LETTER

Dear Editor:

Chris Somerville must surely have been into his third bottle of Silicon Valley Cabernet Carnegie when he penned his recent account "An Early Arabidopsis Demonstration Resolving a Few Issues Concerning Photorespiration" (Somerville, 2001). In a more sober moment he might not have written: "About a year after the oxygenase paper was published, George Lorimer, a student of Ed Tolbert's at the time, reportedly burst into Ogren's office with an armful of O₂ electrode tracings from failed attempts to measure RuBP oxygenase activity and dumped them on Ogren's desk with the words, `It doesn't work'." That sentence contains only one true statementI was a student of Ed Tolbert. The remainder is pure fiction.

"About a year after the oxygenase paper was published... George Lorimer burst into Ogren's office." The Bowes et al. paper (Bowes et al., 1971) showing the formation of phosphoglycolate from ribulose bisphosphate by a preparation of carboxylase was published in November 1971. By November 1972, I had been a postdoctoral associate of Birgit Vennesland in Berlin for 8 months, 5,000 miles from Urbana, XX.

"... an armful of O₂ electrode tracings... " It is unfortunate that the Tolbert lab did not then possess an O₂ electrode with which to make such tracings. John Andrews and I followed the uptake of oxygen manometrically (Andrews et al., 1973). We confirmed the identity of the reaction products using [¹⁴C] ribulose bisphosphate and by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry of the trimethylsilyl derivatives of phosphogycolate and phosphoglycerate (Lorimer et al., 1973). John Andrews returned to Australia and, with Murray Badger, was the first to use an O₂ electrode to follow the oxygenase reaction (Bowes et al., 1971).

"It doesn't work." John Andrews and I had no difficulty whatsoever demonstrating the oxygenation of ribulose bisphosphate. By the time the Bowes et al. paper appeared in November 1971, we had more or less completed the work that was published 13 months later (Andrews et al., 1973; Lorimer et al., 1973). Several investigators did experience some difficulties demonstrating the oxygenase reaction in the year or two thereafter. In their zeal to exclude CO₂ from the oxygenase reaction mixture, they inadvertently removed the activating CO₂. When the activating effects of pre-incubating the enzyme with CO₂ and Mg (discovered in University of California [Berkeley] in 1963 [Pon et al., 1963], not in Urbana in 1975 [Lorimer and Andrews, 1973]) were realized, no further difficulties were encountered (Lorimer et al., 1976, 1977).

So I don't admit to ever saying, "It doesn't work," but I do admit to arguing (Lorimer and Andrews, 1973) repeatedly with innumerable, starry-eyed molecular geneticists, who dreamed, perhaps over café au lait in Paris, of genetically selecting an oxygenase-less Rubisco. Thirty years on, not to speak of 2 billion years of evolution, a less ardent geneticist might have grudgingly admitted that that particular Parisian fantasy has come to naught.