Peter Gund at 83, on the Occasion of the Celebration of His Life August, 2023

According to an email I recently read, 99% of the generation born between 1930 and 1946,?worldwide,?are now dead.? And the rest of us seem to be dropping like flies!?

I spent my early years in bucolic Bucanan, Virginia, roaming farmland and forests; when my stepfather came back from the war, we moved to Babylon, Long Island NY, where my grandparents helped us buy a house in North Babylon.

After World War II ended, we grew up in an era of peace and prosperity and great optimism about the future – at least for some of us. Research and technology was expected to make everyone’s life easier and better.? No doubt that is one reason I became a scientist – I read popular nonfiction books about atomic energy, rocketry, and biographies of inventors; and enjoyed my science courses and chemistry club.? I remember my high school physics teacher not believing me when I told her matter and energy were interchangeable (Einstein’s equation).

I was a classic “nerd” in high school, picked on for being socially awkward, but I enjoyed band and orchestra (I played flute and piccolo), chess club, debate club, and other extracurricular activities.?? My father (who died of leukemia before I was born) was a serious poet and author in college, as was my mother at that time, and I had a penchant for rhymes and puns.? I had a column in the school newspaper called “Pete the Poet”, but the poetry was definitely not serious.? (“In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.? To finance this he put in hock, Queen Isabella’s biggest rock”).

I did make lasting friends in high school.? My best friend, Paul Chassy, was a good friend through the years, until he died last year.? My present wife, Lynn, I knew from drama club and other activities (I proposed to her in character onstage during senior play, and she refused me!) but she was romantically involved with her first husband during those years.? It took a high school reunion 45 years later for us to get reacquainted and, eventually, become a couple.

I was accepted at Columbia College in New York (Class of ’61), where my father had met my mother (she was at Columbia’s sister college, Barnard).? Paul Chassy was also accepted at Columbia, and we were roommates for a semester before he transferred to University of Colorado for health reasons (he had asthma).? Another good friend was Mark Franklyn, an engineering major, who became a well-known Professor at Washington University in St. Louis; we stayed in touch until he died in 2021.

I started Columbia assuming I could do lots of extracurricular activities, as in high school, as well as play bridge in the evenings and have deep discussions about God and the Meaning of Life with my roommates, who were upperclassmen. It turns out I couldn’t do that and do well in my classes, and it took me a semester to appreciate that. I did better my second semester, but still found time to socialize and enjoy New York City, especially the coffee houses and entertainment in Greenwich Village.? We were asked to write an assessment of our school experience after the first year, and I spent the entire critique arguing that it was unnatural for Columbia to be an all-male college in the ‘60’s; despite growing up with four sisters, I remained awkward around girls. Columbia eventually took my advice, going co-ed in 1983.

I was a chemistry major, and had a hard time with some courses, but managed to complete the major while continuing with some extracurricular activities, including the Columbia Marching Band and a small orchestra mounting Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.? I also ran the Columbia College Magazine Subscription Agency; I had a full tuition scholarship, and my grandfather helped pay my room and board, but the extra money I made was helpful.

In summer I did a number of jobs on Long Island, including counselor at a day camp, delivering sheets and towels to hotels and restaurants in the Hamptons and Montauk Point, and mucking out race horse stalls at Cain Hoy Stables.

When I was ready to graduate in 1961, I received offers as a chemical technician at a chemical company, and as a teaching fellow at Purdue University.? I accepted the latter.

Before starting there, however, my grandmother took me to her homeland, Germany, in a life-changing vacation.? I got to use some of my “Schule Deutch” (school German) conversing with relatives. The cities still showed the effects of losing World War Two, but prosperity was returning. We flew over and took a cruise ship home.

Purdue, in Lafayette, Indiana, was a bit of culture shock after New York City.? I didn’t much care for the mid-west, although Purdue did have a large auditorium for Broadway road shows.? I roomed in a large house with several roommates, which was an interesting experience.? I had my first serious girlfriend there. There was a lot of coursework, that Columbia had not prepared me well for, and I struggled.? I had trouble with “comprehensive exams”, and I had to stop with a Master’s Degree.? My Master’s thesis consisted of doing over some experiments where another student had falsely claimed he had synthesized “sila-benzene”; he had fabricated his laboratory results, claiming he had made the compound by pyrolysis, which was difficult for other experimentalists to duplicate.? He was finally caught, his PhD rescinded, and his publication retracted.

When I decided to go on studying, I received offers from University of Hawaii and University of Massachusetts at Amherst.? Although Hawaii sounded very attractive, my advisor suggested UMass was the better chemistry program, and I went there.? I did very well in courses, because Purdue courses had prepared me well.? I accepted a research position to make another potentially “aromatic” compound, cyclooctatrienyne.? I never made it, but I did make an interesting polycyclic compound on the way, and got my PhD.? I also learned FORTRAN programming, to let me compute properties of the compound I couldn’t make, and connected with my future wife, Tamara.? Tamara obtained her master’s degree, then took a job as chemist at American Cyanamid Agricultural Research Center in Princeton, NJ.? I stayed at UMASS over a year longer to earn my PhD degree.

In 1967 I passed my PhD thesis defense, married Tamara, moved to the Princeton, NJ area, and started work as a chemist at the Agricultural Research Center. I managed to make a bunch of potential antibacterial and anticoccidial compounds, and got interested in structure-activity relationships.? When American Cyanamid got access to a time-shared computer, I learned Basic programming language and wrote programs to help my research.

We bought a house in East Windsor, Tamara’s brother and wife bought a house two doors down, and Tamara graciously allowed my grandmother to move in with us.

Soon after, Tamara joined the Princeton Chemistry Department as a PhD candidate.? Shortly after that, my boss decided I was spending too much time on computers and reading the literature and not enough time making compounds, so they asked me to leave.? Fortunately Princeton Chemistry and Biology Department had just been awarded a grant for a state-of-the-art computer graphics system, and I followed Tamara to Princeton University. ?I was able to spend three exciting years there, working on computer-assisted organic synthesis, and modeling structures and properties of drug molecules and proteins, thanks to a National Institutes of Health Special Research Fellowship.? Tamara also was successful, synthesizing diamantane (a portion of the diamond structure) by acid rearrangement of hydrocarbons, and figuring out the mechanism with the help of our computer graphics programs.

In 1973 we went to Europe for a conference, and ended up giving lectures at cities in Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Germany, and France.? On our return I became the first molecular modeler hired by Merck Research Laboratories, and after obtaining her PhD, Tamara joined New Jersey Institute of Technology as a Professor of Chemistry.?

At Merck, we created one of the first computational chemistry programs that chemists could use themselves, and demonstrated that it could be helpful in designing and optimizing real-world drugs.? Our paper in the journal Science, in 1980, on the Merck Molecular Modeling System, resulted in a lot of computer graphics hardware being sold to pharmaceutical research groups, and helped establish Computational Chemist as a job description.? Over the years my group expanded, becoming a department of several dozen scientists with graphics workstations and a supercomputer. ?Other published papers of mine that had some impact included postulating “Y-aromaticity” to explain the exceptional stability of guanidinium ion; enumerating how many rings can fit around a carbon atom; and use of pharmacophoric patterns to identify prospective drugs.

In 1979 our lives changed drastically, as our daughter Suzanne came into our lives.? Tamara’s mother and brother came to live with us after her father died, and we spent the summers at a house we bought in Belmar at the Jersey Shore. Later we moved to an old house on a lovely property in Princeton – partly for better schools for Suzanne.? Both Tamara and I had long commutes, so Suzanne had nannies – first Tamara’s mother, and after she died, Zivka from Serbia, Renata from Croatia, and one or two others. ?Suzanne eventually grew up, married Ryan, and we have loved our visits through the years with them and their wonderful daughters, Juliette and Audrey.

I took early retirement from Merck in 1993, during a management reorganization, and joined a software company, Molecular Simulations.? Unfortunately for the family, I had to live in Boston and commute home on weekends, plus travel extensively to customers.? A few years later I worked as a senior consultant for MDL Information Systems, another software company, in Parsippany NJ.?

I then had an opportunity to join Pharmacopeia, a pharmaceutical start-up in Princeton based on combinatorial chemistry technology.? I was driving into work there when the planes flew into the World Trade Center buildings in New York City, not so far away.? When Pharmacopeia bought Molecular Simulations and another software company and renamed them Accelrys, I was put in charge of marketing and support of the software, and spent a lot of time traveling to support customers in Europe and Japan.

Then Accelrys management reorganized, and I was out of a job; but after a job search I managed to join IBM Health and Life Sciences initiative in a product support position. ?IBM was doing interesting research in molecular biology and other areas, and was trying to push those technologies into products and services for the pharmaceutical industry.? They made some progress, but at the end of the day it was not a lucrative enough area for IBM, and it was time for me to retire again.

While I was being a road warrior Tamara and I had grown apart, and I finally left and took an apartment in Lawrenceville NJ.? I had reconnected with a classmate at a high school reunion, Lynn Sammel, whose husband had recently died.? Paul Chassy drove both of us to the reunion, and we talked about the memoir my mother wrote.? I gave Lynn a copy, and she emailed me later to say how much she had enjoyed it.? We kept up a correspondence, and eventually I had occasion to visit her while I was in Washington, DC.? Later she invited me down for a performance her grief group was attending.? Soon I was driving down to Germantown, MD most weekends, and eventually moved in with her.? Once my divorce was granted, we married.

The last 17 or so years have been a blessing and a new life for both of us.? I would not have thrived as I have so long, without Lynn’s care and love.? We have many friends and activities at our home in Fort Myers, Florida, but have summered in Frederick, MD for years to be close to Lynn’s daughter Wendy and grandson Adam.? Lynn’s son Bob has also been a welcome presence in our lives, as have my sisters Elizabeth, Jill, Laurie and Nora, and their extended families. ?Lynn and I have travelled extensively, taken many cruises, and enjoyed our life together.? I have also enjoyed being a member of the Board of Directors of our high-rise condominium and helping guide the Association through trying times, including the damage from Hurricane Ian.

Since I developed pulmonary fibrosis, possibly from my years as a bench chemist, Lynn has been a caring and loving companion, despite her own health problems. While we were up in Maryland this summer, Wendy has also been loving and supportive, as I can do less and less on my own.

As I look back on my long life, I realize how blessed I have been.? With relatively good health for most of my 83 years, I have enjoyed the company and love of family, old and new friends, and valued colleagues.? I believe I have contributed to improving people’s health, contributed to developing new technologies, published papers that continue to be cited, and have seen much of the world.? Although money was tight at many times in my life, I was able to earn a good living and have a comfortable retirement.

I really appreciate Laurie, Elizabeth, Suzanne and Wendy for arranging this get-together, and everyone who participated today.?

I thank everyone who has touched my life, and I wish peace and contentment for everyone in this troubled world.