IN MEMORIAM

Esmond Snell

Professor of Biochemistry, Emeritus

UC Berkeley

1914 – 2003

Esmond Emerson Snell, a leading biochemist and vitamin researcher who discovered several B vitamins, including folic acid, in the mid-1900s, died December 9, 2003, in Boulder, Colorado. Snell, who was 89, died of prostate cancer and congestive heart failure, according to his family, only six days after the death of Mary Terrill Snell, his wife of 62 years.

Snell was a nutritional biochemist whose work on vitamins and the chemistry of their actions was recognized internationally. His research was considered by many to be on a par with that of other scientists who received Nobel Prizes in the 1930s and 1940s for their discovery of vitamins A, C, K, B2 (riboflavin), and biotin. “He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize, and should have received one” for his work on the coenzyme form of vitamin B6, said Jack Kirsch, professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry.

Especially noteworthy was Snell’s development of microbiological assays employing lactic acid bacteria for the identification and isolation of factors essential for animal nutrition. Thanks to Snell and his colleagues, more than half of the known vitamins were discovered first through their action in bacteria. With various colleagues at the University of Texas (UT), he independently discovered and named folic acid, a B vitamin; the B vitamin pantothenic acid; and two of the three coenzyme forms of vitamin B6.

Born in Salt Lake City in 1914, Snell earned both his master’s (1936) and Ph.D. (1938) degrees in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His long academic career began at the University of Texas in 1939 and included professorships at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas.

Snell was invited to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956 to chair the Department of Biochemistry upon its merger with the Department of Agricultural Biochemistry, serving in that role for six years. Upon his retirement from Berkeley in 1976 (when he was awarded the Berkeley Citation), he returned to UT Austin as professor of microbiology and chemistry.

Snell is survived by two sons, Richard Snell of Cumming, Georgia, and Allan Snell of Boulder, Colorado; a daughter, Margaret Larkin, of Inverness, California; a sister, Vesta Francis, of American Fork, Utah; and six grandchildren. He was preceded in death by a sister and two brothers, as well as by his wife and his son Esmond Snell Jr., who was killed in action in Vietnam in 1968. Snell and his wife were buried at Sunset View Cemetery in El Cerrito, California, next to their son.

 

 

              Robert Sanders

              Office of Public Affairs