Donald L.D. Caspar Papers, 1960-2020
Collection context
Summary
- Extent:
- 41.5 Linear Feet 41 containers
- Language:
- English
- Preferred citation:
[Title of Item], [Date of Item], [Box and Folder number], Donald L.D. Caspar Papers, MSS 2022-005, Special Collections & Archives, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. https://purl.lib.fsu.edu/fa/MSS_2022-005
Background
- Scope and content:
Publications, course materials, correspondence, grant records, photographs, illustrations, video recordings, and sound recordings documenting the academic career of Donald Caspar.
- Biographical / historical:
Donald Louis Dvorak Caspar (1927-2021) was Professor of Biological Sciences at Florida State University from 1994-2021. He was recognized as an international expert in structural biology and the protein structures of viruses.
Caspar was born January 8, 1927 in Ithaca, New York. His father was a graduate student in chemistry at Cornell University. When he was ten years old, a family friend, the crystallographer Isidor Fankuchen, told him of the recent discovery that particles of the rod-shaped tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) had a semi-crystalline structure, suggesting that the virus comprised many identical units.
After completing a B.A. in physics at Cornell (1950), Caspar did his PhD on the structure of TMV at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut (1955). He then held postdoc positions at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK.
At Cambridge in 1956, He demonstrated that tomato bushy stunt virus had icosahedral symmetry, requiring 60 identical subunits. Biochemical data indicated that many virus particles had a lot more. Caspar resolved this paradox in the late 1950s, working with Aaron Klug at Birkbeck College in London. He introduced quasi-equivalence — the idea that equivalent protein subunits could vary slightly in conformation to tightly seal the viral shells.
In 1958, Caspar established the Laboratory for Structural Biology at the Children's Cancer Research Foundation at Boston Children's Hospital. The lab was moved to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1972. In 1994, Caspar moved to the Institute for Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where he spent the remainder of his career.
Caspar passed away on November 27, 2021, after a short illness.
Sources
Donald L.D. Caspar [curriculum vitae]. April 12, 1999. http://www.sb.fsu.edu/~caspar/cv.html
Donald L.D. Caspar [obituary]. https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/bourne-ma/donald-caspar-10463366
Makowski, Lee. (December 22, 2021). Donald Caspar (1927–2021). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03820-9
- Acquisition information:
- Transported from Kasha Laboratory to FSU Libraries on August 11, 2022. Deed of Gift executed July 21, 2022.
- Physical facet:
- total collection extent
- Rules or conventions:
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Access and use
- Restrictions:
Portions of this collection are in an offsite storage location. Please contact lib-specialcollections@fsu.edu with requests for access or for more information.
- Terms of access:
Copyright restrictions may apply to works in this collection. Re-use or copying beyond Fair Use may require permission from the rights-holder. Please contact lib-specialcollections@fsu.edu for more information.
- Preferred citation:
[Title of Item], [Date of Item], [Box and Folder number], Donald L.D. Caspar Papers, MSS 2022-005, Special Collections & Archives, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. https://purl.lib.fsu.edu/fa/MSS_2022-005
- Location of this collection:
-
116 Honors WayTallahasseeFL32306-2047USA
