| Abstract: | The untimely death of Marlene DeLuca in 1987 has deprived the scientific community of an outstanding expert on bioluminescence. Earlier in that year she was honoured as thethirty-ninth recipient of the Otto Mitchell Smith Lectureship Award at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma. On 20 March 1987 Dr DeLuca presented a scientific lecture entitled ‘Firefly Luciferase-Mechanism of Action, Cloning, and Expression of the Active Enzyme’ and a popular lecture at the banquet that evening entitled ‘Light and Life’. She was selected for her excellence in research, her oral presentation ability, and her personableness. Marlene was the first woman so honoured. To honour Dr Otto M. Smith the Alpha Delta Chapter of Phi Lambda Upsilon, a national chemistry honorary organization, inaugurated The Otto Mitchell Smith Lectureship in 1948 at Oklahoma State University. Former awardees include Nobel Laureates H. C. Brown, Stanford Moore, and Arthur Kornberg and the following prominent biochemists/molecular biologists: Robert A. Alberty, University of Wisconsin; Daniel E. Koshland, Brookhaven National Laboratory; Sol Spiegelman, University of Illinois; Carl Djerassi, Stanford University; and John T. Edsall, Harvard University. The lectureship honours Dr O. M. Smith, who was Director of the Research Foundation, professor, and Head of the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. As a tribute to Dr DeLuca's outstanding contibution to bioluminescence we reproduce here the edited text of her Otto Mitchell Smith Lectureship and a selected bibliography of her work on firefly bioluminescence. |
