Tom J. Mabry

Tom J. Mabry passed away November 29, 2015, in Austin. Tommie Joe Mabry was born June 6, 1932, in Hunt County, in Northeast Texas near Commerce to Thomas Lee and Grace Creamer Mabry. His siblings included Dorothy Jean, M. W., and Annie J. His father, Thomas Lee, was a farmer.

After graduating from high school as valedictorian Tom attended East Texas State University and earned a B.S. and M.S. degree in Chemistry in 1953. Two photos from the 1952 East Texas State Yearbook, The Locust, are included here. He was then commissioned into the US Air Force where he served as a research chemist for two years. During this time on October 10, 1954 he married his first wife Myra Butler of Commerce Texas. They were divorced in 1971.

Tom received a Ph.D. degree in Organic Chemistry from Rice University in 1960 and received a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Zurich. While there, he solved the structure of the red pigment in such plants as the red beet, cacti and Bougainvillea, naming the new class of unique pigments "betalains". In 1962 he became head of a new "Plant Chemistry " program in the Department of Botany, The University of Texas at Austin.

In 1966 Tom organized the Phytochemical Society of North America, serving as its first president and was honored with a lifelong membership in 1996. Tom and Helga Humm Fischer were married April 3, 1971. Helga is shown at left.

As Chairman of UT-Austin's Department of Botany from 1980-1986 Tom led the program when it reached the number one national ranking, and was responsible for establishing several important endowed faculty positions. In 1986, Tom's interest in biotechnology led to his appointment as a Jack C. Wrather Centennial Endowed Fellow at UT-Austin's IC2 Institute.

Tom received numerous professional awards both nationally and internationally. He received the UT-Austin Graduate School's Outstanding Doctoral Teaching Award in 1991 and retired as Professor Emeritus in 2006 after 42 years of teaching undergraduate and graduate students and supervising to completion more than 70 Ph.D. and M.S. students, whose research led to more than 700 publications including 15 books.

Tom was survived by his wife Helga Johanna Humm Mabry; daughter Michele Mabry Cooley and her husband Tillman Webb Cooley III, their twin sons William Sumner and Thomas Mabry, of Pflugerville; son Patrick Thomas Mabry, of Luxemburg and Patrick's daughter Cassandra "Cassie" Carolina, of Munich, Germany; as well as his mother-in-law Elisabeth Humm, of Lichtenau, Germany.

Tom will be deeply missed by family, friends and colleagues. Memorial services will be held at a later time. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to: The University of Texas at Austin for the "Professor Tom J. Mabry Endowed Excellence Fund in Phytochemistry and Plant Biology."

On the occasion of Tom Mabry’s 75th birthday an issue of Natural Product Communications, An International Journal for Communication and Reviews Covering Aspects of Natural Products Research, was dedicated to Tom. Below is the introduction to an article in that issue written by Tom’s last graduate studen, Dr. Lalita Calabria. She and Tom are pictured at right.

“This issue of Natural Product Communications ( Volume 2. Issue 10, Pages 959-1064, 2007) is dedicated to the 75th birthday of Tom J. Mabry, Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. For this paper, I outline Dr Mabry’s outstanding achievements in the field of natural products chemistry, and I add Dr. Mabry as second author in appreciation of his many comments and contributions.

As his last Ph.D. student, it is my special honor to describe the personal and professional impact Dr. Mabry has made on my life, a sentiment that is shared by many, if not all of his students, post-doctoral fellows and colleagues over the last 40 years as a Professor at UT-Austin. To prepare this report of his accomplishments, I pursued many of his publications (nearly 700!), including 15 books and several dozen chapters, as well as some of his students’ dissertations and theses. In addition to reviewing these written works, I also summarize Dr. Mabry’s accounts of several of his major projects, beginning with his Ph.D. studies on the coenzymatic activity of Vitamin C and his post- doctoral investigations marking the discovery of a new class of plant pigments found initially in beets, the betalains, which proved significant for the plant sciences and thus for his career at UT-Austin. In addition, I interviewed a few of his more than 70 MS and Ph.D. students and about ten of his hundreds of post doctoral fellows, as well as several of his faculty colleagues.

Although Dr. Mabry modestly credits his career success to “the luck of pursuing the right projects with the right people at the right time”, when I began to review his many accomplishments, awards and memberships, it was clear that most of his success came from his own intense efforts. Dr. Mabry was instrumental in organizing the Phytochemical Society of North America in 1966 and early in his career, Prof. T.W. Goodwin, a distinguished biochemist in England, praised Mabry as the “Father of Modern Phytochemistry in the United States”. Mabry has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship for a year at the University of Freiburg, Germany, the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award for research with Prof. Dietmar Behnke at the University of Heidelberg, Germany; the American Chemical Society Award for the “Application of Chemistry to Food and Agriculture”; the “Pergamon Phytochemistry Prize”; the UT-Austin Graduate School’s “Outstanding Doctoral Teaching Award”; and the American Society of Pharmacognosy’s “Research Achievement Award”. It would take much more than this paper to describe all of Dr. Mabry’s many contributions to natural products chemistry, thus, I will provide just a few examples of the scope and breadth of his work while highlighting his extraordinary abilities as a teacher and scientist.

The complete article is here: http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/stuart/dr.mabrycareer.pdf