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Elio Schechter Tribute

59:09 recording · AUTO · 5 speakers

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Brief overview

TWIM's hosts remember Elio Schechter, then examine archaeal enzymes that kill bacteria by destroying peptidoglycan.

  1. Schechter's career spanned microbiology's whole modern arcFrom rudimentary media made from a dead horse in Ecuador to chairing Tufts, leading ASM, textbooks, a mushroom book, a blog and a podcast at 97.
  2. He held science writing to a standardSmall Things Considered posts were capped at a thousand words, could not be turgid, and came back with constructive edits his contributors still remember.
  3. Archaea carry enzymes that dissolve bacterial wallsWaldo and Dan Waldo target peptidoglycan, a structure archaea lack, and their unexplained specificity is what makes them interesting as antibacterials.
Executive Summary AI
  • Vincent Racaniello opens the August 21st, 2025 episode by announcing that their colleague Elio Schechter died last Thursday, August 14th, at 97, after co-hosting TWIM from episode 10 until episode 263 in April 2022.4:51
  • Michael Schmidt retells memoir stories: Schechter's mother smuggled a personal salami to him in the Ecuadorian Navy when the ship's food spoiled, and his first brush with microbiology was culturing fungus between sailors' toes, later making media from a dead horse in Ecuador.10:18
  • Michelle Swanson recalls his 35 years at Tufts, 23 of them as chair running the department as an egalitarian democracy, and joining him, Fred Neidhart and John Ingram to revise the textbook Microbe for Undergraduates, first published in 2006.17:01
  • Petra Levin explains that the 1958 Schechter and Ola Mola paper was the first in-depth quantitative study of bacterial physiology, showing DNA, RNA and protein rising exponentially with growth rate, and seeding later work on magic spot and multi-fork replication.19:07
  • Mark Martin presents "Archaea-Produced Peptidoglycan Hydrolyses That Kill Bacteria" from PLOS Biology of August 14th, in which a search of 3,700 archaeal and 50,000 bacterial genomes found PGHs in 5% of archaea, 32% with secretion signals, including Waldo and Dan Waldo from Halogranum, which kill Haloalkalibacterium and lose all effect when the catalytic domain is broken.30:39
Key Quote
“So it just shows you what a scholar and educator and a wonderful colleague he was.”
— Michelle Swanson18:32
Key Quote
“And it was wonderful to be able to just have that one-on-one with him.”
— Petra Levin22:40
Key Quote
“He, I promise you, forgot more microbiology than I will ever know.”
— Michael Schmidt28:58