Roy McIver Daniel

BSc (Hons) & PhD (Biochemistry) Leicester FRSNZ

A distinguished academic with the capacity, enthusiasm and energy to find new ways forward, Roy was curious, gregarious and generous of spirit, a loyal colleague, a true champion for his students and a delightful companion.  

Born 7 February 1943, his father, George Daniel, and mother, Margaret Giddings, met in Glasgow, where she lived. George was a Canadian soldier, enlisted in 1939, and he and Margaret married soon after meeting.  George was killed in action in Italy in 1945 and Margaret took the 2-year-old Roy to Canada to live, until he was nine years old. She there met engineer Larry Jones, married and settled from 1953 in Lewes, a small town in East Sussex, with sister Louise being born in 1954. Lewes and the South Downs would always be a special place for Roy, as he wrote, “Lewes is full of little lanes up and downhill, and at the edge of the Sussex Downs - perfect for a 10-year-old”. 

Roy’s education was the local school, where he met his lifelong mate Robert Goodyear, and following extensive 11+ exams, the County Grammar School.  Roy enjoyed playing rugby, joined the school Scout Troup, and went camping most summers.  When they were 16, he and Robert travelled, hitchhiking in Europe with £8 total, visited his father’s grave in Ortona, and spending half of their money on presents for mothers and sisters. In 1962, Roy enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Leicester, studying chemistry, biochemistry, geology, psychology and statistics.  Roy and Robert, or Roy with university friends Michael Halford or Peter Hartnall, would hitchhike in Europe for most of the following summers.  Roy’s doctoral studies, also at the University of Leicester, focused on studies of mitochondrial and bacterial electron transport.  Challenges that Roy faced in life were dealt with straightforwardly and with strength.  When his doctoral supervisor, Professor Eric R. Redfearn, was tragically killed in a car accident, Roy, in his third year, completed his Doctoral degree, mentored by Professor Hans L. Kornberg.

A postdoctoral position with Dr Cyril Appleby, Chief Scientist of the Division of Plant Industries in the 1960s and beyond, at CSIRO in Canberra, was Roy’s first experience of the Antipodes, which he enjoyed.  Taking up a position at the University of Glasgow in the Department of Cell Biology in 1971, he began teaching with a seriousness and capability that would always be present.  Roy wrote about this initial experience, “though giving just a few lectures a year, I did however write them out word for word, a habit I retained for the rest of my lecturing career.”  Then married to New Zealander Jeanette Shennan, Roy looked for positions in Australia or New Zealand, and was offered one at the fledgling School of Science at the University of Waikato in 1975. Roy welcomed its openness where a single staffroom ensured easy cross-communication between disciplines.  Acknowledging his luck to have had freedom as a young academic in a new university, he demonstrated a capacity to seize opportunities, an ability to assess a situation, draw critical conclusions and advocate for conditions that would allow scientists to flourish.   During the late 1970s, he began his first experience of supervising graduate research, which he found very satisfying. 

In 1979, he and microbiologist Hugh Morgan agreed to formally collaborate on the biochemistry and microbiology, respectively, of extreme thermophiles, as "The Thermophile Research Unit". External finance was raised through a range of international sources, in particular Shell Oil, because as Roy wrote, “All this occurred at a time when there was no Marsden fund, no Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, in fact very, very, few sources of external funds (and little internal research funds) at all”.  A new building was erected at the University of Waikato to house the growing team and the work generated widespread publicity.  At one point, the Thermophile Research Unit attracted 50% of the university’s external research income. 

Highlights for Roy of the late 1970s were the births of his daughters, Clare Margaret and Alexandra Mary.  From 1985, when his first marriage ended in divorce, he was deeply committed to a shared parenting and joint custody arrangement. 

In 1980, Roy and Hugh were given the opportunity to spend the summer season in the Antarctic, specifically to seek novel thermophilic organisms on Mount Erebus.  Roy wrote “This was an extraordinary and exciting experience, living in a tent at minus 40 degrees, at an altitude of 11,000 feet, in frequent extremely high winds, and near the top of an active volcano. I was an experienced camper and tramper, but given the altitude, temperature, winds, and isolation, this was the next level up! We came home with several soil samples which yielded extreme thermophiles, one of which eventually turned out to be the most commercially useful of all our extreme thermophiles, designated EA1 (Erebus Aerobe 1).”  Roy followed this with two more events sampling for thermophiles on Mount Erebus, with Andrew Hudson in 1985, and in January 1997 with biochemist Roberta Farrell.

Roberta had, from 1988, collaborated on two Sandoz-funded thermophilic research projects with Roy, Hugh and colleagues Peter Bergquist and David Saul.   Roberta emigrated to New Zealand in 1995, with children Phil and Andrew.  She and Roy were married in 1999, about which he wrote, “the children all got on well, I was very happy, and have been that way ever since”. 

In 1984, Roy was made Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and in the late 1980s, Dean of Science, the youngest holder of the office.  He established an independent Dean’s office, regretting the changes to university funding that stressed competition and made interdisciplinary work difficult.  Hugh described Roy’s attitude to meetings, “to put it mildly, he wasn’t a patient person when it came to long drawn out meetings.  As Dean of Science, there were required Board of Studies Meetings, held twice a year, each usually lasting from 2-3 hours. Roy had the record of one lasting only 15 minutes, a duration of which he was extremely proud”.

While he enjoyed the challenges of the role as Dean, he found science ‘much more fun’. In 1991, during a short sabbatical at University of Glasgow, Roy, working with Michael Russell, addressed the topic of origin of life.

In 1996, Roy was awarded one of the four inaugural James Cook Fellowships.  This began an era of two major research areas, which enthused him for the next twenty years.  Both aimed at something Roy had long wanted to examine: the environmental limits of enzyme activity.  From his early experiences with thermophiles, he wrote “observing the remarkable number of scientists who found it hard to get their head around the idea of enzymes stable up to 80°C and above; it went against everything they’d been taught as students, I determined to examine some of the many other things we “knew” about enzymes; hydration, lower and upper temperature limits; and finally, for the textbooks, how temperature really affects enzymes and how this is related to Topt (the optimum working temperature of the enzyme concerned)”.  The James Cook Fellowship allowed Roy to consider the fundamental research problem, the molecular basis of enzyme catalysis, with a goal “to obtain a fuller understanding of the molecular basis of enzyme activity, in particular the inter-relationship between catalytic activity, molecular dynamics and environmental conditions”. 

Much of the work was illuminated by studies of enzyme dynamics with physicist John L Finney of University College London.  Their research collaboration, which developed into a firm friendship, began after a chance meeting at a workshop in Switzerland, to which both had been invited to participate but did not know why. To Roy’s question concerning dynamics of enzyme activity,  John, responded that this could be explored using neutron scattering. During the next 20+ years of their collegial collaboration (including Jeremy Smith and other members of his group, also involving PhD students and postdoctoral fellows), they addressed many issues in the field, using several Neutron Beam facilities and mostly at the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble.  Their work shows that low activity of both dry and cold enzymes arose from diffusional limitations rather than dynamic limitations, demonstrated by using gas phase substrates and appropriately fluid cryosolvents, respectively. In principle, with the limited number of enzymes tested, enzymatic activity appears independent of hydration and at temperatures as low as possible to measure activity, experimentally at -100°C.   Conclusions from their research warrant further investigation.  In late 2003, Roy, John and Marshall Stoneham organised and hosted a discussion at The Royal Society (London) on, “The molecular basis of life: is life possible without water?”

Another area of research, of which Roy was especially pleased, was the collaboration with colleagues and dear friends Michael J Danson and Robert Eisenthal of the University of Bath.  Michael had done a sabbatical with Roy in 1992, and their collaboration was as enzymologists, and cemented in friendship.  The 20+ years of their successful further collaboration with Robert elucidated the temperature dependence of enzyme activity.  They developed a radical alternative model for the effect of temperature on enzymes, Temperature Equilibrium, and a new property of enzymes which they called Teq. The Teq model proposes an intermediate stage in reactions, in which the enzyme is catalytically inactive but not yet denatured. The way enzymes respond to temperature is fundamental to many areas of biology but the Teq model also has major implications for biotechnology and provides an explanation of why attempts to engineer enzymes for enhanced activity at high temperatures had, at that point, been unsuccessful. Prior to Teq, the ‘textbook’ model for the effect of temperature on enzyme activity was that increasing temperature increases activity while at the same time causing activity to be lost through the enzyme's denaturation. Denaturation takes time and activity was predicted to continue to increase as temperature increases, at least for the short time until denaturation occurs. However, empirical results showed that activity stops much more quickly than expected. Their work explained this in a 2010 Trends in Biochemical Sciences paper, “A new understanding of how temperature affects the catalytic activity of enzymes”, dedicated to Robert, who died in 2007.

Roy was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1999.  He was humbled, and pleased, in 2018, to have an organism named for him, Caldicellulosiruptor danielli, a microcrystalline cellulose degrader, isolated from Waimangu, and characterised by colleague Robert M Kelly and his team at North Carolina State University.
 
Roy retired from the University of Waikato in 2013, along with his wife Roberta, and was awarded the title of Emeritus Professor.  In 2014, he was honoured with the Kudos Lifetime Achievement Award.  He and Roberta had great joy with their seven grandchildren, and travels including the Great Walks of Aotearoa New Zealand; to Churchill, Manitoba to view polar bears and sledging; walking the Inca Trail in Peru; extended visits in Rapa Nui, South Africa, Europe, North and South America; and of course, walking on his beloved South Downs.
 
Roy described his career as “absolute magic” and said simply, “life is full of surprises: in science they are really inspiring surprises.” Nonetheless, in his autobiography, he wrote, “I enjoyed my job as a scientist, and guiding postgraduate students, and even as a science administrator. However, best of all was the privilege of being a husband and parent.” 

I thank Emeritus Professors Michael J Danson, John Finney, Hugh Morgan and Noeline Alcorn for contributions to this Tribute.  Thanking Noeline also for gifting me notes from her extensive interview in 2010 with Roy whilst writing Ko te Tangata: A History of the University of Waikato – The First Fifty Years, published 2014, by Steele Roberts Aotearoa Publishers.  Noeline’s strongest impression from this interview was that Roy enjoyed his work in all its facets – his most commonly used word was ‘fun’. 

I thank Dr Michelle Peterson for her comments, assistance and significant support.  This tribute was also aided by Roy’s own notes and autobiography, written in 2019.
 
Written by Emeritus Professor Roberta Lee Farrell CNZM FRSNZ FIAWS