Roland Anderson Coulson. From Vitamins in Wartime London to Pioneering Research on Alligators in Louisiana with Thomas Hernandez

I was at a symposium on energy metabolism two years ago. During a discussion I tried to remember early research on the relation between tissue blood flow and oxygen consumption. I could not remember the name of the people who worked on animals with a slow metabolic rate and who stressed that the rate of delivery of oxygen and metabolic substrates to the cell is just as important as the biochemical events within the cell. A couple of weeks ago something jogged my memory and I remembered who it was and the unusual but classic publication which described it.

ROLAND ARMSTRONG COULSON (1915-2004) and THOMAS HERNANDEZ (1914-2002) of Louisiana State University worked on the Mississippi Alligator for most of their scientific careers. In 1964 they published a book entitled Biochemistry of the Alligator. A Study of Metabolism in Slow Motion. That was brought up to date in 1983 by Alligator Metabolism, Studies on Chemical Reactions In Vivo which was published as a special edition of the journal Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology.

From Biochemistry of the Alligator

Coulson and Hernandez worked not only how alligators work but also compared their physiology with that of small and large mammals. They explored the differences and uncovered mechanisms that were seemingly different but which on closer analysis proved to be similar. In so doing, they explored biochemistry in its widest sense, i.e. physiology, trying to see if studies on enzymes in vitro could be with interpreted in terms of integration of function in the whole animal. Experimental evidence obtained was combined with armchair physiology to come up with new ideas. Although their thinking has been superseded to some extent by greater knowledge of the nature by which metabolic substrates are transported into cells, their work is still relevant to the fundamental question when comparing species of how and why metabolic rate does not increase linearly with increases in body size. It is also relevant to the control of metabolic rate within a species and to the changes that may occur at different stages of life and in different habitats.

Coulson and Hernandez started their work on the alligator in 1948. Their collaboration in the lab lasted for 35 years; their final paper together was published in 1989, 39 years after their first. Coulson continued to work on the alligator with others and the last paper I can find in PubMed was published in 2002; he was 87.

Coulson was Professor of Biochemistry and Hernandez Professor of Biochemistry and later of Pharmacology at Louisiana State University. But then you notice that Coulson had a wartime PhD from the University of London. How did that come about?

Coulson was born in Rolla, Kansas, near the Santa Fe Trail. He was born in a ‘sod house’ which I found was that very thing, a house built of sods into which normal doors and windows were included. During the great depression of the 1930s he worked on ranches and farms, and as a miner for gold and tungsten. He graduated in chemistry from the University of Wichita moving to Louisiana State University for a master’s degree and continuing into a research fellowship in zoology. A Google search shows what looks like a thesis (no further details) entitled ‘Electrophoretic studies on Antuitrin S’ (now known as Human Chorionic Gonadotrophin, HCG) suggesting he was working on the chemistry of the hormone for his masters degree. Then in 1941, before the USA declared war, he, with a number of other Americans, joined the British war effort. The accounts of this period in some of his obituaries have turned out not to be accurate and after an amount of digging, I discovered a largely forgotten branch of the Royal Air Force and of how and why Coulson arrived in Britain. In June 1941 the British Government launched a campaign in the USA for skilled American mechanics and technicians to join the RAF’s Civilian Technical Corps (CTC). They were needed, particularly, to service and maintain RAF equipment like radio and radar. More than 200 applied to join on the first day. Members  of the CTC were non-combatants and signed on for three years or for the duration of the war, whichever was shorter. They were subject to military-style discipline and had their own uniform based on that of the RAF. Headquarters were in Bournemouth and the Commandant was also a civilian, Donald Lee Gill of Brooklyn, New York, a leading light in the American Chamber of Commerce in Britain and in the American Red Cross.

Highland Princess

Coulson volunteered for the CTC and arrived in Glasgow on 3 November on board the Royal Mail Lines ship, Highland Princess, from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Passage to Britain was a dangerous activity and the press reported that 19 members of the CTC had been killed when their ship was sunk at about the time Coulson disembarked in Glasgow. Recruitment must also have included junior scientists in biological and chemical fields because Coulson was assigned to work in nutrition at the Lister Institute in London. I write ‘London’ because during the war the various departments of the Lister Institute were widely scattered and he may, or may not, not have been at the site in central London. I do know that some of the nutritionists at the Lister were moved to Cambridge but not whether this applied to all of them. When the USA entered the war, Americans serving in the CTC were permitted to delay their call-up into US forces until they had completed their three-year contract.

At the Lister laboratories Coulson worked with Philipp Ellinger (1887-1952) who had escaped Nazi Germany in 1933 and who worked on the B vitamins. Ellinger’s obituary in Nature shows his main interest at this time was nicotinic acid, now better known as niacin or Vitamin B3, only then having recently been isolated as the agent that prevents pellagra:

…he interested himself in the metabolism of nicotinamide in man and animals, and studied very thoroughly, during the next few years, the elimination of nicotinamide methochloride in normal and nicotinamide-deficient persons. The results of these researches revealed that the intestinal bacterial flora can form a very significant extra-dietary source of nicotinamide.

Ellinger and Coulson jointly, or Coulson alone, published seven major papers from the Lister between 1944 and 1946, including three in Nature. He continued to work on nicotinamide when he returned to Louisiana State University’s medical school and until he began work on the alligator and, occasionally, other reptiles with Hernandez.

In one of his papers with Ellinger, the background to the work was explained:

This work forms part of an investigation on nicotinamide deficiency carried out on behalf of the Air Ministry. We wish to thank Air Marshal Sir H. E. Whittingham, K.B.E., K.H.P., Director-General of the Medical Services of the Royal Air Force, for facilities provided, and Flight Lieutenant G. A. Smart for collecting samples from airmen. Our thanks are also due to L.A.C.W. [Leading Aircraft Woman] A. E. Wrigglesworth for technical assistance and to members of the Scientific and Technical Staff of the Lister Institute who volunteered as experimental subjects.

     …One of the authors (R.A.C.) is a member of the Civilian Technical Corps of the Air Ministry attached to the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine for an investigation of nicotinamide deficiency.

The work on nicotinamide formed the basis of his PhD thesis awarded by the University of London. By working for the CTC Coulson completed a PhD in a little more than half the time needed in the USA. He completed his three years’ service and crossed the Atlantic on board SS Nieuw Amsterdam, fitted out not as the luxury liner but as a troopship, which left Gourock in the Clyde on 19 October 1944. He arrived in Boston on 25 October, en route, it was noted, to Canada and, presumably, the CTC transit centre there. 

This photograph from the Imperial War Museum shows the uniform
of the CTC being worn by William Henry Manning of Del Rio, Texas,
He was being presented with the British Empire Medal by Sir
Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, on 19 May 1944.
On the left is Donald Lee Gill of Brooklyn, Commandant of the
Civilian Technical Corps. Image: IWM (CH13143)

In 1946 it was announced that those who had served in the RAF’s Civilian Technical Corps were being awarded the Defence Medal.

While Coulson and Hernandez seemed ahead of the game in stressing the integrative approach to physiology and biochemistry. They must have made the medical school at Louisiana State University a very different place to that is most universities.

Coulson was invited to London in 1983 to speak at a joint Zoological Society of London/British Herpetological Symposium held to mark the retirement of Angus Bellairs. I remember not being able to attend because I was already booked for another event. I regret not being able to have been present all the more now since It may have been my only opportunity to have heard and met Coulson.

A symposium, The Biology of the Crocodilia, was held at the annual meeting of the American Society of Zoologists held in New Orleans in 1987. An appreciation of Coulson’s achievements was given by Herbert Clay Dessauer (1921-2013), Coulson’s former student and also a professor of biochemistry in the same department—and a pioneer in molecular systematics of anole lizards. Dessauer (who also provided a list of Coulson’s publications up to 1989) concluded: 

Research has been central to Coulson's career, but he has many other interests and skills. He has been a champion of academic excellence at the Louisiana State University Medical Center: the organizer and first dean of its Graduate School, and a valued counsel to University administrators. He is somewhat of an eccentric, a wonderful story teller, and a warehouse of information on virtually any subject. He is a professor in the best sense of the title: a stimulating teacher, a "silver-tongued" lecturer, and a productive, innovative and imaginative scientist.

From Dessauer 1989

Coulson RA, Hernandez T. 1964. Biochemistry of the Alligator. A Study of Metabolism in Slow Motion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Coulson RA, Hernandez T. 1983. Alligator Metabolism, Studies on Chemical Reactions In Vivo. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology B 74, 1-182. doi: 10.1016/0305-0491(83)90418-2

Dessauer HC. 1989. Roland Armstrong Coulson. American Zoologist 29, 823-829.