Contributions of Dorothy M. Skinner to the development of crustacean biology

Contributions of Dorothy M. Skinner to the Development of Crustacean Biology1

SYNOPSIS. Dorothy M. Skinner's interest in the study of crustaceans grew out of her experiences as a student and teaching assistant in the Experimental Invertebrate Zoology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA. Her early training in both biology and chemistry was instrumental in allowing her to pursue lines of research as diverse as control of molting and regeneration, structure of the crustacean integument, and characteristics of satellite DNAs throughout her career. Dorothy published a number of landmark papers in crustacean biology over the years, which served to inspire the work of numerous biologists. The breadth and depth of her contributions was made apparent in this symposium, in which eleven researchers presented their newest findings in the areas of satellite DNA, control of regeneration and molting, dynamics of muscle atrophy and reorganization, and structure and evolution of arthropod proteins.

INTRODUCTION

This symposium was the most recent in an occasional ASZ-SICB mini-series honoring crustaceans and crustacean biologists. The first in this series, the Symposium on Terrestrial Adaptations in Crustacea, organized by Dorothy Bliss and myself, was held in 1967. In 1983, Tom Jegla organized a symposium on Advances in Crustacean Endocrinology, honoring Dorothy Bliss and Lew Kleinholz. In 1990, Tom Wolcott and I organized The Compleat Crab, to commemorate the contributions of Dorothy Bliss. This symposium, The Compleat Crustacean Biologist, organized under the leadership of Don Mykles, was a celebration of the breadth and depth of Dorothy Skinner's influence on research and progress in our understanding of crustacean biology. The participants included both wellestablished and up-and-coming researchers, some of whom had the privilege of working directly with Dorothy, and all of whom found inspiration in her work.

CAREER PATH

Dorothy's professional time line is shown in Table 1. A notable portent for the future was her dual degree in biology and chemistry; she pursued both of these fields simultaneously throughout her career.

A major influence on Dorothy's interest in crustaceans was her experience in the Experimental Invertebrate Zoology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, in which she was a student in 1953 and a course assistant for the next two years, working with Lew Kleinholz and Ted Bullock. Dorothy began her graduate studies in John Welsh's lab at Harvard in 1954. During those years, Welsh mentored a large number of women students, including three famous Dorothys: Bliss, Travis, and Skinner. All worked on crustaceans and became influential both through their own contributions to crustacean physiology and through their academic children and inlaws. Other well-known women physiologists who were in Welsh's lab at this time included Betty Twarog, Nancy Milburn, Elizabeth Conant, and Maryanna Henkart.

Dorothy's animal of choice for her thesis research was Gecarcinus lateralis, the Bermuda land crab, which had been brought into the lab by Dorothy Bliss just before 1950. Upon completion of her dissertation in 1958, Dorothy was awarded two postdoctoral fellowships in biochemistry. In 1962, she went to New York University (NYU) School of Medicine as a faculty member in physiology and biophysics, where she spent the next four years. While at NYU, she met and married John Cook. In 1966, Dorothy left New York for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she spent the rest of her career. She started as a Fellow of the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies at the Biology Division, then she became a staff scientist, progressed to senior staff scientist, and eventually to group leader for Growth and Regeneration and for Genome Organization. For much of her 30year career in Oak Ridge she was also an adjunct professor at the University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and at East Tennessee State University Medical School.

LANDMARK PAPERS IN CRUSTACEAN RESEARCH

Table 2 lists those papers that I consider to be Dorothy's landmark contributions to crustacean research, all of which provided impetus to the work of the symposium participants.

In her first publication, Dorothy reported with Peter Karlson (Karlson and Skinner, 1960) their attempts to isolate crustacean molting hormone from the Y-organs of the green crab, Carcinus maenas. They found that the crab bodies contained ecdysteroids that were active in an insect bioassay, although the Y-organs themselves were not a storage site for ecdysteroids. Dorothy's dissertation research, published in 1962, produced a classic paper on the structure and metabolism of the integument of Gecarcinus lateralis during various stages of the intermolt cycle. In it, she related the findings of Pierre Drach (1939), who first described the stages of the intermolt cycle relative to the state of the exoskeleton, to particular cytological and metabolic features and processes of the integument, including staining characteristics, glycogen content, and oxygen consumption. Dorothy's analysis of changes in tissues during the intermolt cycle formed the basis for a large body of subsequent research by numerous crustacean physiologists and endocrinologists.