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CANADIAN PIONEERS: John Martin Unrau

Dr. John Unrau was one of Canada’s outstanding early geneticists. He was a man of great drive and practical common sense, and his initiative was instrumental in launching the Genetics Society of Canada in 1958. His soliciting of support from the National Research Council, to which he was appointed in 1959, was decisive in establishing the Canadian Journal of Genetics and Cytology (now Genome). Through his work as director, vice-president, and president, the Society benefited greatly from his leadership during the 3 years between its founding and his death. John was born 24 January 1916 in Karaguy, Orenburgski Territory, Russia, and he and his family survived famine before emigrating to Saskatchewan in 1926. His early education was in a one-room school in the Mayfair School District. He completed high school by correspondence during years when his labour was required on the farm. He entered the University of Saskatchewan in 1938, and obtained a B.S.A. degree in 1942. As was not unusual during those hard times, the cost of his lodgings was subsidized by sacks of vegetables that accompanied him to Saskatoon on the Greyhound bus. He combined theoretical interests with an urge to produce practical results — a tendency seen throughout his career — in his work on sunflower breeding. This work led to an M.Sc. thesis, Inbreeding and Hybridization in Relation to Sunflower Improvement (1945) (Unrau and White 1944, Sci. Agric. 24: 516–525; Unrau 1947, Sci. Agric. 27: 414–427), and the development of the hybrid ‘Advance’, still widely grown at the time of his death. At Washington State College he continued his sunflower work and began developing systems for analyzing the wheat genome by using chromosome substitution lines to characterize the genetic contribution of individual chromosomes. This was difficult, as the wheat genome consists of the fusion of three grass genomes, and techniques were limited to cytological observations of chromosome behaviour in meiosis and its correlation with alterations in disease resistance, yield, and other phenotypic characters. His Ph.D. (1949) studies involved crossing common wheat and Sears’s chromosome-deficient series, by which he was able to associate specific genes with specific chromosomes (Unrau 1950, Sci. Agric. 30: 66–89). In 1949 he joined the Department of Plant Science at the University of Alberta, and became department head in 1951. There he embarked on studies which revealed that whole chromosome substitution lines could be used to examine expression and control of quantitative characters (Kuspira and Unrau 1957, Can. J. Plant Sci. 37: 300–326; Kuspira and Unrau 1958, Can. J. Plant Sci. 38: 199–205). During this period he also developed a method of determining with precision the genetic differences and linkage associations of the genes of individual chromosomes (Unrau 1958, Can. J. Plant Sci. 38: 415–418). The development of reciprocal substitution lines, using two varieties with contrasting characters, facilitated precise genetic study of character differences. While on sabbatical at Cambridge in 1957–1958, he was involved in determining that Aegilops speltoides could be the donor of the B genome of polyploid wheat, in collaboration with Ralph Riley and Victor Chapman (Riley et al. 1958, J. Hered. 49: 90–98). During this period he also developed a rust-resistant soft white spring wheat, licensed as ‘Kenhi’ in 1958. He served on the Committee on Radiation Biology that reported to the Genetics Society in 1961 (Walker et al., Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., Chalk River, Ontario). One suggestion in the report, particularly relevant at the time of surface testing of nuclear bombs, was to link records of radiation exposures with subsequent death records, an idea fruitfully applied at Chalk River, Ontario, by H.B. Newcombe and associates. He had little time for people not deeply involved in their work, but attracted many collaborators. Of his 25 published papers, 20 were co-authored (see Supplementary data for list of publications2). Perhaps his greatest contribution to genetic advance came in his supervision of graduate students, which led to ten M.Sc.’s, three Ph.D.’s, and one D.Sc. (see Supplementary data for list of degrees granted). At the time of his death he was supervising five Ph.D. projects and had accepted a position as professor of molecular biology at McMaster University. At 45, he died just as the implications of Watson and Crick’s structural explications of DNA were being explored. Had he lived, his future research would have placed him at the pinnacle of genetic achievement in Canada. He was married, and had three sons and one daughter. His son Paul obtained a Ph.D. in genetics with Robin Holliday, who proposed the original model of homologous recombination in 1964, and worked on DNA damage and repair as well as ethnicity and risk assessment. John would have been pleased that his grandson Peter Unrau, despite obtaining a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from MIT, is working on RNA and in vitro evolution at Simon Fraser University. Born into a Mennonite family, John was involved with that church throughout his life, and served on the board of the Canadian Mennonite Bible College. Together with his wife he founded the First Mennonite Church, Edmonton, and often spoke at its services. It seems he had little difficulty reconciling his religious beliefs with his scientific knowledge.