John Brian “Joe” Neilands: September 11, 1921 – October 23, 2008
by Juanita, Torsten and Dianne Neilands
J.B. Neilands was born in Glen Valley, British Columbia to Thomas Abraham Neilands and Mary Rebecca Neilands (nee Harpur), immigrants from the Belfast area of Northern Ireland. He grew up on a modest family dairy farm and saw many depression-era hobos riding the trains that ran across the farm, something that left an indelible impression upon him of the follies of rampant capitalism and concentration of wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. He obtained an undergraduate degree at the University of Guelph in Ontario in 1944 where he had planned to become an agricultural representative to farmers, but an elective course in microbiology opened a new and fascinating world of micro-organisms to him. He served in World War II as a stoker, second class, aboard a submarine chaser based in Halifax and completed his master’s degree in 1946 at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He then obtained his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1949, completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Stockholm, Sweden and then took a position as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley in 1951. In 1958 he married Juanita L’Esperance and they hand-built a house together in Berkeley.
During his scientific career J.B. Neilands published numerous scientific papers in his area of research, microbial iron transport, and mentored many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, including Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis (though Neilands would be the first to say that he had little to do with Mullis’s discovery). In his career Neilands published a seminal textbook, “Outlines of Enzyme Chemistry” and co-authored a text on the dangers of defoliants and herbicides (“Harvest of Death”).
J. B. Neilands in his laboratory at UC Berkeley