Dick Haugland, founder of Molecular Probes, has passed away

[Kilgore, Jason A.]

*****
To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to:
http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy
Post images on http://www.imgur.com and include the link in your posting.
*****

Dr. Richard "Dick" Haugland, chemist, founder of Molecular Probes Inc. (now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific) and modern pioneer of fluorescent dye technologies, has passed away in Thailand after fighting brain cancer.

His early work in dyes involved proof of FRET, and he letter taught chemistry for a few years at Hamline University.  He and his wife, Rosaria Haugland, founded Molecular Probes in 1975, in Minnesota, then moved the company briefly to Texas before settling in the Eugene, Oregon area in the 1980's.  Under their guidance, the company became a leader in fluorescent dyes for microscopy, DNA analysis, proteomics, and other applications, including such dyes as Texas Red and the Alexa Fluor dyes and many live-cell organelle stains, such as MitoTracker dyes.  He sold the company to Invitrogen in 2003 and then used the earnings to continue his philanthropic interests in the arts, children's health, and various educational and foster programs for children in Thailand and other areas of southeast Asia, including opening the Starfish Country Home School Foundation for educating impoverished or at-risk Thai children.

An announcement of his death from the newspaper in Eugene, Oregon:  http://registerguard.com/rg/news/local/34873124-75/richard-haugland-eugene-biotech-firm-founder-and-philanthropist-dies-at-74-in-thailand.html.csp 

A page about his life, from Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Haugland 

Dick Haugland speaking in a video about the Starfish Country Home School program:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVvD2ifmEmg 

Jason

[Martin Wessendorf-2]

***** To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy Post images on http://www.imgur.com and include the link in your posting. ***** Dear Jason and all--

I'm very sorry to hear the news. 

Dick was extremely helpful to me back in the days when the literature was harder to search and when the memory of a well-read person could be a huge asset to  those around them.  I called him one day back in the late 1980s asking if he knew anything about a compound for which I only knew the IUPAC name.  (I'd searched and found virtually nothing under that name.)  He thought for a moment and then said, "I wonder if that could be...." and rattled off the common name for the compound.  He was right, and that insight allowed me to find hundreds of citations that I otherwise would've missed.  I heard later from another person that he had his files organized by name of compound, which allowed him to quickly find specific information about almost anything. 

The founding of Molecular Probes came at the time when fluorescence methods (and fluorescence microscopic methods in particular) we're really coming into their own, and Molecular Probes was--and as I think most of us would agree, remains--the go-to site for finding a good reagent.  Back in the day, Molecular Probes had the reputation for supplying reagents with greater purity than had previously been available from other suppliers, where you might be lucky if the named compound was the single greatest contaminant in the bottle. It's hard to imagine where we'd be scientifically today without Dick Haugland. 

Martin Wessendorf

On 10/7/2016 5:30 PM, Kilgore, Jason A. wrote:

*****
To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to:
http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy
Post images on http://www.imgur.com and include the link in your posting.
*****

Dr. Richard "Dick" Haugland, chemist, founder of Molecular Probes Inc. (now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific) and modern pioneer of fluorescent dye technologies, has passed away in Thailand after fighting brain cancer.

His early work in dyes involved proof of FRET, and he letter taught chemistry for a few years at Hamline University.  He and his wife, Rosaria Haugland, founded Molecular Probes in 1975, in Minnesota, then moved the company briefly to Texas before settling in the Eugene, Oregon area in the 1980's.  Under their guidance, the company became a leader in fluorescent dyes for microscopy, DNA analysis, proteomics, and other applications, including such dyes as Texas Red and the Alexa Fluor dyes and many live-cell organelle stains, such as MitoTracker dyes.  He sold the company to Invitrogen in 2003 and then used the earnings to continue his philanthropic interests in the arts, children's health, and various educational and foster programs for children in Thailand and other areas of southeast Asia, including opening the Starfish Country Home School Foundation for educating impoverished or at-risk Thai children.

An announcement of his death from the newspaper in Eugene, Oregon:  http://registerguard.com/rg/news/local/34873124-75/richard-haugland-eugene-biotech-firm-founder-and-philanthropist-dies-at-74-in-thailand.html.csp 

A page about his life, from Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Haugland 

Dick Haugland speaking in a video about the Starfish Country Home School program:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVvD2ifmEmg 

Jason

[George McNamara]

***** To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy Post images on http://www.imgur.com and include the link in your posting. *****

I recommend everyone who uses fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), consider referencing this paper. Forster (a physicist) came up with the equation and experimental proof consistent with 1/R^6 being a major player in energy transfer (spectral overlap integral and orientation also matter ... see also Perrin and Dexter), Richard Haugland and Lubert Stryer showed its use in biochemistry and biology:

Stryer L, Haugland RP 1967. Energy transfer: a spectroscopic ruler. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 58: 719-726. PMID: 5233469 PMCID: PMC335693

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC335693/pdf/pnas00678-0323.pdf

//

Roger Tsien recently passed as well. His greatest biggest contributions was not in expanding the palette of fluorescent protein colors, or even shipping FP plasmids around the world (thanks to being an HHMI faculty member who could thus afford to dedicate a full time technician to this), but in

* mentoring many researchers.

* synergy of Fura-2 and AM ester to enable Ca++ ion imaging at scale. there are a lot of Image-1/Fl, MetaFluor and similar research Ca++ imaging systems and publications thanks to Fura-2/AM (and Sutter Instruments, microscope companies, camera companies and other vendors) and a lot of drug discovery and development was done with FLIPR instruments. The original Fura-2/AM paper is:

Grynkiewicz G, Poenie M, Tsien RY 1985. A new generation of Ca2+ indicators with greatly improved fluorescence properties. J Biol 260: 3440-3450. PMID: 3838314

http://www.jbc.org/content/260/6/3440.long

Sincerely,

George

p.s. Roger's first AM ester loading method (for those cells that have esterases, which is most mammalian cells  ... in 2016, can  easily install one by gene engineering if needed), is:

Tsien RY 1981. A non-disruptive technique for loading calcium buffers and indicators into cells. Nature 290: 527-528. PMID: 7219539

While revolutionary compared to microinjection, the outstanding dynamic range of Fura-2 excitation ratio imaging, makes for synergy.

On 10/8/2016 10:22 AM, Martin Wessendorf wrote:

***** To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy Post images on http://www.imgur.com and include the link in your posting. ***** Dear Jason and all--

I'm very sorry to hear the news. 

Dick was extremely helpful to me back in the days when the literature was harder to search and when the memory of a well-read person could be a huge asset to  those around them.  I called him one day back in the late 1980s asking if he knew anything about a compound for which I only knew the IUPAC name.  (I'd searched and found virtually nothing under that name.)  He thought for a moment and then said, "I wonder if that could be...." and rattled off the common name for the compound.  He was right, and that insight allowed me to find hundreds of citations that I otherwise would've missed.  I heard later from another person that he had his files organized by name of compound, which allowed him to quickly find specific information about almost anything. 

The founding of Molecular Probes came at the time when fluorescence methods (and fluorescence microscopic methods in particular) we're really coming into their own, and Molecular Probes was--and as I think most of us would agree, remains--the go-to site for finding a good reagent.  Back in the day, Molecular Probes had the reputation for supplying reagents with greater purity than had previously been available from other suppliers, where you might be lucky if the named compound was the single greatest contaminant in the bottle. It's hard to imagine where we'd be scientifically today without Dick Haugland. 

Martin Wessendorf

On 10/7/2016 5:30 PM, Kilgore, Jason A. wrote:

*****
To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to:
http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy
Post images on http://www.imgur.com and include the link in your posting.
*****

Dr. Richard "Dick" Haugland, chemist, founder of Molecular Probes Inc. (now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific) and modern pioneer of fluorescent dye technologies, has passed away in Thailand after fighting brain cancer.

His early work in dyes involved proof of FRET, and he letter taught chemistry for a few years at Hamline University.  He and his wife, Rosaria Haugland, founded Molecular Probes in 1975, in Minnesota, then moved the company briefly to Texas before settling in the Eugene, Oregon area in the 1980's.  Under their guidance, the company became a leader in fluorescent dyes for microscopy, DNA analysis, proteomics, and other applications, including such dyes as Texas Red and the Alexa Fluor dyes and many live-cell organelle stains, such as MitoTracker dyes.  He sold the company to Invitrogen in 2003 and then used the earnings to continue his philanthropic interests in the arts, children's health, and various educational and foster programs for children in Thailand and other areas of southeast Asia, including opening the Starfish Country Home School Foundation for educating impoverished or at-risk Thai children.

An announcement of his death from the newspaper in Eugene, Oregon:  http://registerguard.com/rg/news/local/34873124-75/richard-haugland-eugene-biotech-firm-founder-and-philanthropist-dies-at-74-in-thailand.html.csp 

A page about his life, from Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Haugland 

Dick Haugland speaking in a video about the Starfish Country Home School program:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVvD2ifmEmg 

Jason

[Barbara Foster]

***** To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy Post images on http://www.imgur.com and include the link in your posting. ***** Dear Jason,

Many thanks for posting this.  I met Dick while working as a microspectrophometry specialist at Zeiss in 1984.  I remember, with great clarity, those early Molecular Probes "handbooks".. which were only 12 pages long! Molecular Probes has always been not only a prolific supplier of fluorophores and related probes, but also been an incredible source of data and information for the industry.  In those early days, we frequently only discussed excitation and emission peaks.  Molecular Probes put out the full spectra and helped us to explain to our customers and associates the impact of changing pH, temperature, competitive species, etc.  ... all begun from Dick's fertile and generous mind.

The passing of an industry legend.  He will be remembered fondly

Barbara Foster, President & Chief Consultant
Microscopy/Microscopy Education  ... "Education, not Training"
7101 Royal Glen Trail, Suite A  - McKinney, TX 75070 - P: 972-924-5310
www.MicroscopyEducation.com

Microscopy/Microscopy Education is a division of The Microscopy & Imaging Place, Inc.




At 05:59 AM 10/8/2016, you wrote:

*****
To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to:
http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy
Post images on http://www.imgur.com and include the link in your posting.
*****

Dr. Richard "Dick" Haugland, chemist, founder of Molecular Probes Inc. (now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific) and modern pioneer of fluorescent dye technologies, has passed away in Thailand after fighting brain cancer.

His early work in dyes involved proof of FRET, and he letter taught chemistry for a few years at Hamline University.  He and his wife, Rosaria Haugland, founded Molecular Probes in 1975, in Minnesota, then moved the company briefly to Texas before settling in the Eugene, Oregon area in the 1980's.  Under their guidance, the company became a leader in fluorescent dyes for microscopy, DNA analysis, proteomics, and other applications, including such dyes as Texas Red and the Alexa Fluor dyes and many live-cell organelle stains, such as MitoTracker dyes.  He sold the company to Invitrogen in 2003 and then used the earnings to continue his philanthropic interests in the arts, children's health, and various educational and foster programs for children in Thailand and other areas of southeast Asia, including opening the Starfish Country Home School Foundation for educating impoverished or at-risk Thai children.

An announcement of his death from the newspaper in Eugene, Oregon:  http://registerguard.com/rg/news/local/34873124-75/richard-haugland-eugene-biotech-firm-founder-and-philanthropist-dies-at-74-in-thailand.html.csp

A page about his life, from Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Haugland

Dick Haugland speaking in a video about the Starfish Country Home School program:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVvD2ifmEmg

Jason