Background
June Lascelles was born in 1924 and grew up in Sydney.
June Lascelles was born in 1924 and grew up in Sydney.
She attended the University of Sydney and received a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry in 1944. She remained there as a research scholar and teaching fellow and later, a Linnaean Macleay fellow, receiving her Master of Science in 1947. She chose to move to the United Kingdom, joining the microbiology unit of the biochemistry lab at Oxford University under Donald Devereux Woods.
She is best known for pioneering work in microbial photosynthesis. She began her research career in microbiology, a field in which she remained for her entire life. Her initial research was focused on the metabolism of molecular hydrogen (H 2) in East. coli.
Lascelles excelled in her work.
So much so that in 1947 she was awarded the prestigious Royal Exhibition of 1851 Overseas Research Fellowship. She made several important contributions to the field of microbiology, especially in the metabolism and synthesis of enzymes in bacteria.
Lascelles and William R. Sistron were credited with applying the emerging technology of pre-molecular genetics to the biosynthesis of the photosynthetic pigments called bacteriochlorophyll. She was awarded her Doctorate.Phil in 1952, and continued her work at Oxford.
In 1956, Lascelles was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, and went to Stanford University for a year to work with C. B. van Niel at the Hopkins Marine Station at Pacific Grove, California.
Van Niel was legendary in his knowledge of microorganism biology, and this experience afforded Lascelles a great deal, especially the ability to study more exotic bacterial organisms. She worked at dispelling the previously-thought rule that anaerobes do not have cytochromes, and the provision of a soluble β-hydroxybutyrate dehydrogenase, which allowed Krebs" group to devise a now widely used assay for ketone bodies. In 1960, she was appointed University Lecturer in Microbiology at Oxford, a post she held until 1965.
In 1964, while on a year"s leave, Lascelles became a visiting Professor of Bacteriology at the University of California, Los Los Angeles
A role which was made permanent in 1965. These years were some of the most productive in her career, and her work provided the basis of understanding of tetrapyrrole synthesis in photosynthetic bacteria which holds tested and true even today.
In 1979 she became Professor Emerita of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the University of California. Lascelles retired in 1989, but continued to work daily until two years before her death at age 80 in 2004 due to complications from cancer.
Lascelles was a member of the Biochemical Society from 1947 to 2002 and served on the Biochemical Journal editorial board from 1959 to 1966.