͵͵

In Memoriam

In memoriam: Clark Bublitz

ASBMB Today Staff
Sept. 26, 2022

Clark Bublitz, a metabolic enzymologist and a member of the ͵͵ and ͵͵ Biology since 1963, died Feb. 23. He was 94.

Clark Bublitz

Born Dec. 8, 1927, in Merrill, Wisconsin, he was the son of Clark and Florence Bublitz. He attended the Pillsbury Military Academy in Owatonna, Minnesota, then joined the Army near the end of World War II and was stationed in Rome.

After the war, Bublitz earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Chicago, and then he spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Plank Institute in Germany where he worked with Feodor Lynen, who later shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

Bublitz joined the faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine as an assistant professor. While at Hopkins, he met Deborah Keirstead, then a medical student. They were married in 1958. Bublitz spent a year at St. Louis University in Missouri before moving to the University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver, where he remained until his retirement.

Bublitz studied enzymes involved in metabolism in the rat liver, beginning in the 1950s with enzymes that . He later focused on L-gulonate, a six-carbon metabolite that is an between glucose and the pentose phosphate pathway. In the 1960s, collaborating frequently with Albert Lehninger, he studied the conversion of gulonate into ascorbic acid, or vitamin C.

Bublitz was an enthusiastic hiker, tennis player and Green Bay Packers fan. He is survived by his wife, Deborah; five children, Nancy Dyer, Susan Schooleman, Philip Bublitz, Caroline Emsermann and Elizabeth Bublitz, and their spouses; and eight grandchildren.

Enjoy reading ASBMB Today?

Become a member to receive the print edition four times a year and the digital edition weekly.

Learn more
ASBMB Today Staff

This article was written by a member or members of the ASBMB Today staff.

Related articles

In memoriam: Charles Kasper
Poornima Sankar
In memoriam: Isao Yamazaki
ASBMB Today Staff
In memoriam: Tsuneo Omura
F. Peter Guengerich, Bettie Sue Masters & Ken-Ichirou Morohashi

Get the latest from ASBMB Today

Enter your email address, and we’ll send you a weekly email with recent articles, interviews and more.

Latest in People

People highlights or most popular articles

Guiding grocery carts to shape healthy habits
Award

Guiding grocery carts to shape healthy habits

Nov. 21, 2024

Robert “Nate” Helsley will receive the Walter A. Shaw Young Investigator in Lipid Research Award at the 2025 ASBMB Annual Meeting, April 12–15 in Chicago.

Leading the charge for gender equity
Award

Leading the charge for gender equity

Nov. 19, 2024

Nicole Woitowich will receive the ASBMB Emerging Leadership Award at the 2025 ASBMB Annual meeting, April 12–15 in Chicago.

Honors for de la Fuente, Mittag and De La Cruz
Member News

Honors for de la Fuente, Mittag and De La Cruz

Nov. 18, 2024

César de la Fuente receives the American Society of Microbiology’s Award for Early Career Basic Research. Tanja Mittag and Enrique M. De La Cruz are named fellows by the Biophysical Society.

In memoriam: Horst Schulz
In Memoriam

In memoriam: Horst Schulz

Nov. 18, 2024

He was a professor emeritus at City College of New York and at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan whose work concentrated on increasing our understanding of mitochondrial fatty acid metabolism and an ASBMB member since 1971.

Computational and biophysical approaches to disordered proteins
Award

Computational and biophysical approaches to disordered proteins

Nov. 14, 2024

Rohit Pappu will receive the 2025 DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences at the ASBMB Annual Meeting, April 12-15 in Chicago.

Join the pioneers of ferroptosis at cell death conference
In-person Conference

Join the pioneers of ferroptosis at cell death conference

Nov. 13, 2024

Meet Brent Stockwell, Xuejun Jiang and Jin Ye — the co-chairs of the ASBMB’s 2025 meeting on metabolic cross talk and biochemical homeostasis research.