Prof. George Papenfuss
The South African-born phycologist, Prof. George Papenfuss spent most of his career as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Papenfuss was a student at the University of Cape Town before moving to the United States in 1926. He has worked as a door-to-door salesman, which greatly improved his communication in English, he later enrolled at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, for the agricultural program. Papenfuss began to specialize in phycology at this time and completed a doctoral thesis on the life history of the brown algae Ectocarpus, in 1933.
The same year he married fellow graduate student 'Emma Johnstone' and spent 1934-1935 studying marine algae at the universities of Lund and Uppsala in Sweden, with phycologist Harald Kylin and Nils Svedelius. In Sweden, he became especially interested in South African phycology and in 1935 returned to Cape Town, his home country to study brown algae life histories. Papenfuss soon began making collections of the unique algal flora of the Western Cape, regularly visiting Table Bay before its modern docks were built. He was the first to describe the gametophytes of Ecklonia maxima and Laminaria pallida. His frequent field trips on the coast of South Africa came to a halt in 1939, however, when he began to search for a permanent position. After a period back in Sweden, he accepted a post at the University of Hawaii, where he became Assistant Professor of Botany in 1940. Crossing the Atlantic at that time was impossibly dangerous, though, so Papenfuss traveled via the Trans-Siberian railway to Japan and crossed to Hawaii by sea. The Papenfusses' only son was born in Honolulu in 1941, but their happy time there was disturbed by the attack on Pearl Harbour.
Within time, an opportunity arose at the University of California in Berkeley that would allow Papenfuss to study South African algae again. He, therefore, moved once more to join Berkeley's Professor William Setchell and his excellent algal herbarium and library collections. Setchell died within a short time of Papenfuss's arrival, and the South African phycologist was offered a position on the faculty, where he saw out the rest of his days. A particularly consuming aspect of his work was an extensive survey of literature and type specimens of South African marine algae, undertaken with the intention of producing an illustrated flora and catalogue.
Papenfuss did not bring this work to completion during his lifetime but did publish catalogues of Antarctic and sub-antarctic benthic marine algae and of Red Sea benthic algae. Papenfuss supervised 17 graduate students at Berkeley, including noted phycologists Isabella Abbott and Paul Silva. He served as curator of algae at the University Herbarium from 1944-1960. He had, until his death, a positively uncanny memory for nomenclature and bibliographic data that most of us would never have bothered to remember in the first place, but were unendingly grateful that he had. His students received strong (classical) morphological training, lacking in the next generation of students not because there are no teachers but because the intricacies of cell biology have swallowed up and swamped curricula. Even after retirement, he laboured upon the publications. No one but his students who were close to him would have known of the hours of attention and days of devotion that he gave to phycology as a whole in this kind of dedicated, selfless fashion.
Papenfuss was president of the Phycological Society of America, the California Botanical Society, and the Western Society of Naturalists, and vice-president of the British Phycological Society at one point. He was instrumental in organizing the First Phycological Congress in 1982. He was recognized in his homeland by being appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa and of the South African Association of Botanists. The George F. Papenfuss Award is given annually by the International Phycological Society, of which he was a founder and president.
Data compiled by: Dr. Vaibhav A. Mantri, Principal Scientist & Divisional Chair, CSIR-CSMCRI, Bhavnagar, Gujarat, India.
Source Credit: "Prominent Phycologists of the 20th Century" by David J Garbary and Michael J. Wynne (Eds) & Alfred W. Ebeling, UCLA
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