University Times

Professor emeritus Ronald Bentley of the Department of Biological Sciences died June 6, 2011, in Charleston, S.C. He was 89.

A native of Derby, England, Bentley earned a bachelor’s degree from Derby Technical College in 1943. He earned a PhD from the University of London Imperial College of Science and Technology in 1945, followed by a Diploma of the Imperial College in 1946.

He was an internationally recognized expert in stereochemistry — the study of spatial arrangements of the atoms in a molecule and how they affect the molecule’s properties — as it applies to biology. Among his many scholarly publications was the two-volume book, “Molecular Asymmetry in Biology,” published in 1969.

The professor’s early research, including his PhD thesis on the chemistry of penicillin, focused on the structure and possible synthesis of the drug. He also studied the carbohydrate metabolism of fungi.

Bentley’s research interests centered around the study of chemicals synthesized by plants or microorganisms, explained Jen Popp, who researched vitamin K — one form of which is synthesized by plants, another by bacteria — as a graduate student in his lab.

Bentley came to the United States in 1946 on a Commonwealth Fund fellowship to Columbia University. There, he met another scientist, Marian Blanchard, whom he married in 1948.

The two returned to London that year, where he was a member of the scientific staff at the National Institute for Medical Research until 1951.

He then returned to Columbia as a research associate before joining the Pitt faculty in 1953 as an assistant professor of biochemistry in what then was the Graduate School of Public Health’s Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition.

He was promoted to associate professor in 1956 and in 1960 became a full professor. In 1960, Bentley received a Public Health Service (PHS) special fellowship at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. He also was awarded a PHS fellowship and took a sabbatical from Pitt in 1963 to spend a year at the University of Lund Institute of Biochemistry in Sweden.

He earned a doctor of science degree at the University of London in 1965.

Bentley chaired Pitt’s biochemistry department 1972-76 and was assistant chair 1976-77 of the Department of Life Sciences.

He retired from the University in 1992 but continued to teach until 1996, according to faculty records.

Colleague Lewis Jacobson said he met Bentley when Jacobson joined the University’s biophysics department. They became departmental colleagues when the University combined the departments of biochemistry, biology and biophysics in 1977 to form what is now the Department of Biological Sciences.

“He was a believer in understated wit,” Jacobson said. “Definitely a British wit, the cliché image of a dry-humored Englishman.”

In addition to his expertise in science, Bentley was a historian of science with a very clear sense of the way scientific ideas developed over time, Jacobson said, noting that the trait is not ubiquitous among scientists.

When Bentley retired, he closed his lab, “but he did not stop science,” Jacobson said, noting that Bentley continued to write and publish scholarly works in the important but obscure and highly specialized field of stereochemistry.

Christine Berliner, an adviser in the Department of Biological Sciences, studied as an undergraduate under “Doc B.,” and later worked as an aide in his lab.

She remembered the professor as extremely focused in class. Later, she learned that in spite of his years of experience, he reserved the hour just before each class period for reviewing what he planned to discuss in class. “You did not bother him — that was his time to prepare,” she said. “He was thinking about what he wanted to tell the students.”

Bentley exhibited meticulous attention to detail, often starting class by pointing out even the smallest of errors in diagrams in the text, she said. So observant was he that he once penned a letter to the editors of the journal Biomedical Education to note that the depiction of an amino acid formula on a 1975 Iranian postage stamp could imply that amino acids (which can have two stereochemistries, L or D) were all of one type. “Is it possible that a whole generation of Iranian biochemists will be brought up in the belief that proteins contain exclusively D-amino acids?” he questioned.

“He had a classical education you don’t find anymore — both as a scientist and a man of arts and letters,” Berliner said. “He definitely was a Renaissance man.”

Bentley was proficient in glassblowing, fabricating glassware for use in his experiments. He took up pottery making as a hobby, installing a kiln at home and presenting the pots he made as gifts to friends and colleagues, she said.

Bentley also was an excellent cook, known for sharing his homemade fruitcake — soaked in rum and aged for months — as a holiday treat for those colleagues who appreciated the delicacy.

Berliner said Bentley disliked “fake” holidays such as Secretary’s Day, but enthusiastically would celebrate St. George’s Day (which coincidentally falls very close to the late April workplace observance) by cooking an elaborate multicourse meal to share with the department’s office staff. He would prepare homemade appetizers, soup, bread and a main dish, but the highlight that caused the staff to salivate in anticipation was his famous dessert — a trifle with ladyfingers, custard and whipped cream, all made from scratch.

Berliner said Bentley was kind and warm with students and colleagues. “He really cared,” she said, noting that he was particularly close to the graduate students he mentored.

Popp, who earned her doctorate in 1988 as Bentley’s last graduate student advisee, recalled thanking him in her dissertation foreword for being a gentleman and a scholar. “That is really true. He was very academically oriented, but also a real, genuine person and human being. And a teacher,” she said.

Popp and Bentley remained close over the years. Their families often spent holiday weekends together and the professor became a grandfather figure to her two daughters. “He always had some little experiment for them,” she said, recalling the cooking and chemistry projects that have sparked her 12-year-old’s desire to become a chemist.

“Being a teacher was really important to him,” she said, recalling his gift for explaining complicated ideas in understandable ways — to the extent that he used the example of werewolves eating people as a memorable metaphor for enzyme kinetics with his undergraduate students.

Bentley enjoyed the outdoors, taking an interest in birds and plants, Popp said, adding that he had a special interest in hunting and identifying mushrooms. “A lot of organisms he studied were fungi,” she said, attributing his love for nature to his interest in secondary metabolism — which comes from plants, fungi and bacteria.

Bentley was an avid hiker, camper and backpacker who traveled with his family to many destinations across the United Kingdom, Europe and North America. Their trips included backpacking in Otter Creek, W. Va.; visits to Crown Island, Ont.; the Tetons, and Yosemite.

Bentley is survived by two sons, Colin and Peter.

A memorial is set for 3 p.m. July 9 at the Radisson Hotel in Green Tree.

The family suggests memorial donations to the Alison Bentley-Kephart Award Fund, which benefits a first-year undergraduate student in the biological sciences at Pitt. Bentley and his wife established the memorial fund following the death of their daughter, Alison, in 1985. Marian Bentley, who also was a faculty member in biological sciences, died in 1989.

—Kimberly K. Barlow