UW biochemistry prof Milton P. Gordon dies

SEATTLE – Milton P. Gordon, who documented the cleansing effects of trees on the environment and became a pioneer of genetic engineering in plants, is dead at age 75.

Gordon, a University of Washington professor and associate editor of the journal Biochemistry for more than three decades, died July 5 at his home of the effects of multiple systems atrophy, a degenerative neurological disease known as Shy-Drager syndrome, his wife, Elaine “Sunnie” Gordon, said.

The 26th annual Crown Gall Conference at Indiana University, an academic gathering devoted to studies of plant bacteria that cause crown gall, hairy root and related disorders, was devoted to his memory this month.

The son of Eastern European immigrants, Gordon was born and grew up in St. Paul, Minn., earned degrees in chemistry and mathematics at the University of Minnesota and a doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Illinois, and joined the University of Washington faculty as a biochemistry professor in 1959.

Gordon was one of the first scientists to publish significant research on phyto-remediation, the ability of trees and other plants to absorb and neutralize ground-based contaminants.

He and a Washington colleague, microbiology professor Eugene W. Nester, later showed that agrobacterium tumefaciens, a simple bacterium, could be used to introduce a growth hormone gene into plant cells, a technique used by other scientists to make plants more nutritious and insect resistant.

Gordon was unmoved by critics who saw the results of genetic alteration as “frankenfood.”

“Genetic engineering is the basis for a new agricultural revolution,” he told his wife of 50 years for a minibiography she assembled. “It’s a partial answer to world hunger.”

He retired from the university as professor emeritus in 2003.

Other survivors include children David Gordon of Seattle, Karen Slapik of Austin, Texas, and Peter Gordon of Cambridge, Mass.; sister Gladys Strait of Morristown, N.J.; and three grandchildren.