Remembering Julian Davies

I met Julian because he loved small molecules that were made in the soil, and so did I.

I joined his laboratory in 2010, where I joined him and his team – Vivian, Grace, Karen, Ivan, and a host of students and friends – to investigate bacteria from the soil (that is, usually soil from vineyards). He wanted to figure out their chemistry. When I arrived, he told me he was excited to have a chemist in the lab! I was nervous to tell him that I wasn’t much of a chemist.

Julian always wanted his own ‘-ome.’ There was the genome, revealed to us from advances in DNA sequencing, and there was the transcriptome, and the proteome, and so on. Julian came up with the Parvome. Parv- meant small, and -ome meant group. For Julian, Parvome was the wonderful world of small molecules. It was meant to replace “secondary metabolites” which he called a seriously misused and poorly understood term. “Secondary” metabolites meant that the molecules Julian loved were not as important as other “primary” metabolites, but Julian disagreed! He wrote that it “became obvious that the vastness of bioactive compounds produced by microbes was beyond perception” and that “so little is known about bacterial physiology in nature,” and he knew that the small molecules played a key role.

I’d never met a scientist like Julian before. He was energetic and engaged in the science, and he still worked at the bench. Of course, he was already almost 80 when I first met him. Thinking back on him, I suppose he was older than any other scientist I’d worked with, yet he only seemed to become more energetic and grew only more and more fascinated by the questions of microbes and molecules even as he got even older. Even when everyone else his age was well-past retirement, Julian was determined to show up. He wanted to see everyone and talk science. Specifically, in his later years, he was very interested in trees. He knew there were whole microbial worlds that existed near the roots of the trees, and he wanted to learn about their chemistry.

We miss you, Julian.

You can read more about Julian’s life here and here