Elmer L. Gaden
University of Virgnia

Elmer L. Gaden is widely known as the “father of biochemical engineering” for contributing to the improvement of antibiotics and other materials. A graduate of Columbia University , where he received three degrees in chemical engineering—a B.S. in 1944, an M.S. in 1947, and a Ph.D. in 1949—he wrote a groundbreaking dissertation that quantified the amount of oxygen necessary to fuel the fermentation process used to produce penicillin, the world’s first wonder drug

Gaden spent his entire career in academe, after a brief stint in research for a major pharmaceutical corporation. He was invited to return to his alma mater to establish a program in biochemical engineering. He remained at Columbia for 26 years as a teacher, researcher, and department chair, before becoming dean of the College of Engineering, Mathematics, and Business Administration at the University of Vermont in 1974. In 1979, he joined the engineering faculty at the University of Virginia as the Wills Johnson Professor of Chemical Engineering. A former member of U.Va.’s Center for Advanced Study, he served three years as chair of its Department of Chemical Engineering. In 1994 he retired from Virginia , where he is currently Wills Johnson Professor Emeritus.

Gaden’s interest in harnessing biological processes to produce chemicals led him to publish widely and to found the international research journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering, which he edited for 25 years. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, he received AIChE’s first Food, Pharmaceutical, and Bioengineering Award, as well as the Chemical Engineering Lectureship Award from the American Society of Engineering Education. A symposium in his honor was presented at the spring 1994 meeting of the American Chemical Society, where he also received the Marvin Johnson Award in recognition of his outstanding research contributions to biochemical technology. In 1986 Gaden received the Egleston Medal for distinguished engineering achievement from Columbia University . Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1987, and he was the recipient of the Founders Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 1988.

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Profile
"Elmer Gaden: Father of biochemical engineering,” reads the headline on the cover of the May 31, 1971 issue of Chemical & Engineering News.

Beneath the headline is a photograph of a young Gaden and his family. They stand in a seaside marsh near Islip, Long Island, watching for migrating birds. His wife holds the couple’s toddler-aged son in her arms. The boy is bundled against the chill in a patterned Nordic jacket and cap. The trio gazes at something just beyond the camera’s range. Gaden’s right hand is curled around a pair of binoculars, and his left arm is partially extended, as if he is preparing to point something out to his family in their own private outdoor classroom.

More than 30 years later, Elmer Gaden holds the old magazine and shakes his head. “The guy who wrote the article made that title up,” he says with a smile. “Believe me; I had nothing to do with it.”

Despite Gaden’s self-effacing remark, it is clear that, more than a decade after his retirement as Wills Johnson Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Virginia , the story still pleases him. In fact, he continues to receive international recognition as a pioneer in the use of biological processes to produce basic chemicals.

Gaden, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., began to study the sciences when he was admitted into the prestigious Brooklyn Technical High School in 1936. A military history buff and the only child of hardworking parents, he decided he was interested in chemical engineering because he enjoyed chemistry, initially as a hobby at home, and later in high school. “I received an unbelievable education there,” he says of Brooklyn Tech, noting that the eight semesters of shop he took continue to serve him well. “I’m still a master with a plane.”

 At the time of World War II, with three years of high school under his belt, Gaden enrolled in the U.S. Navy’s V-12 officer training program and was promptly sent uptown to Columbia University to obtain his bachelor’s degree. At the time, American colleges were churning out engineers and other specialists as quickly as they could, often on accelerated schedules. “It wasn’t a good time for the country, but it wasn’t a bad time to grow up,” he recalls. “There were plenty of opportunities for those willing to look for them. I learned very quickly to be self reliant.”

Gaden's hopes for a glorious naval career were dashed when he was ordered to serve, in the war’s waning days, on aircraft carriers in relatively safe areas of the Pacific. After his discharge, he returned to Brooklyn and enrolled at Columbia the very next day, three weeks after the start of the semester, but well before the post-war influx of veterans had begun. He earned his M.S. in chemical engineering in 1947.

Gaden’s plans to find employment changed when he was offered a DuPont fellowship. “Up to that time, I had no more thought of getting a doctor’s degree than of whistling through my ear,” he says in the 1971 article from Chemical & Engineering News, citing the rushed nature of his undergraduate education and the difficulty of the qualifying exams. Despite initial misgivings, he remained at Columbia and completed his doctoral coursework the following year.

Large-scale production of penicillin, which had proved a boon in the treatment of battlefield injuries during the war, helped to inspire Gaden’s doctoral dissertation topic. The world’s first “wonder drug,” penicillin had been discovered in 1928 by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming, who noticed that the Penicillium notatum mold released a substance that inhibited bacterial growth. Once studies revealed that it would be useful as a drug, the race was on to find ways to grow large quantities of the mold very quickly. Chemical engineers were beginning to use microbial fermentation to produce penicillin in large vats. With encouragement from Professor Richard Wilhelm of Princeton University, a Columbia alumnus and a consultant to Merck & Company pharmaceuticals, Gaden studied the processes behind their techniques. “What I did, and I’m almost embarrassed to say, was to apply the concepts of mass transfer as they then existed in chemical engineering to the system of yeast cells growing in a liquid,” he said in the Chemical & Engineering News article. “Yeast requires oxygen from air in order to oxidize the sugar, but oxygen first dissolves in the ‘medium,’ then makes its way by diffusion or mass transfer to the yeast cell where sugar and oxygen are metabolized to produce the energy and multiply.”

Gaden’s paper, which he wrote by hand on his subway ride to and from the Columbia campus, explained to chemical engineers the fundamentals of the scientific process behind penicillin production. It also helped them determine how to quantify the amount of oxygen they would need for fermentation so they could produce the drug more efficiently. Gaden’s paper made a big splash when he presented it at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in 1950. It was later published in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, along with a companion piece by Wilhelm and other Merck researchers that focused on problems associated with scaling up drug production.                            

Doctorate in hand, Gaden spent a year as a researcher at Pfizer, Inc. before he was invited to return to Columbia University to establish a program in biochemical engineering, as many other schools were beginning to do. He remained at his alma mater for the next 26 years, teaching not only chemical engineering and bioengineering, but also history, including a popular course in military history. He twice chaired the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry. Between 1974 and 1979, Gaden served as dean of the College of Engineering, Mathematics, and Business Administration at the University of Vermont . He joined the University of Virginia engineering faculty in 1979 as the Wills Johnson Professor, chaired the Department of Chemical Engineering for three years, and remained at U.Va. until his retirement in 1994.

Gaden is known as a demanding, yet fair, teacher who expected much from the thousands of students whose lives he touched. “Our primary purpose…is to educate what I call socially useful young people,” he has said. “I know I can get things out of them because they know I’m working harder than they are. Generally you can’t fake that.”

A natural born tinkerer, Gaden believes in the importance of laboratory courses. He continued to teach some of Virginia ’s chemical engineering labs after his retirement, although he recognized that many undergraduates perceive labs as something to be endured, rather than enjoyed. “I would constantly ask students ‘What’s going on here?’ to help them understand the relevance of the lab in which they were engaged. That sort of hands-on activity always made sense to me. I love to make things work.”

Gaden’s interest in harnessing biological processes to produce chemicals led him to publish widely, and to found the international research journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering, which he edited for 25 years. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, he received AIChE’s first Food, Pharmaceutical, and Bioengineering Award and its Founders Award in 1988. He also received the Chemical Engineering Lectureship Award from the American Society of Engineering Education. A symposium in his honor was presented at the spring 1994 meeting of the American Chemical Society, where he also received the Marvin Johnson Award in recognition of his outstanding research contributions to biochemical technology.

These days, Gaden remains passionate about discoveries that result when biology and chemistry intersect, including alcohol-based fuels and foods created by fermentation processes. But the man who enjoys birding with Jenny, his wife of more than 42 years, and whose home in the Charlottesville countryside is surrounded by woods teeming with wildlife, believes technology isn’t always the answer. “All this talk about securing more liquid fuels really irks me,” he says. “We’re already capable of making extremely fuel-efficient cars, but we’re not doing nearly enough to push conservation.”