Stunning end-around play... from football to biology

Renowned scientist Ralph Quatrano's academic career began with sports

The end-around play in football calls for a pass receiver to reverse his apparent course and go around the other way to take the ball and run. When successful, it's a thing of beauty. Unsuccessful, it's an obvious, miserable mistake.

Ralph S. Quatrano, Ph.D., the Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts and Sciences and new chair of the Department of Biology, pulled off a stunning end-around while a student at Colgate University, Hamilton, N.Y. He reversed his direction away from teaching and coaching and toward the arcane world of plant cell biology.

Ralph Quatrano, Ph.D., the Spencer T. Olin Professor and chair of the biology department in Arts and Sciences, discusses plant biology with doctoral student Phil Harries.

Quatrano's chronology reads like a drastic mutation of the old boy-meets-girl routine: High school star athlete meets girl, rubs elbows with football immortal Ernie Davis, attends Colgate University on athletic scholarship to play football and lacrosse, marries his high school sweetheart and goes on to international fame and glory as... a cell biologist.

"I was in college strictly to play sports and get a teaching degree so I could become a coach," said Quatrano in his barren Rebstock Hall office. He had just hit town a few days earlier from Chapel Hill, N.C., where his wife, Barbi, was closing on the sale of their Chapel Hill residence, and he was preparing to close on their new St. Louis home near the Central West End.

"At Colgate, I chose biology as a major because I figured that's what coaches teach, health and basic science," Quatrano said. "My junior year I got interested in a chemistry course, and then I had the rare opportunity -- at the time -- to work with a professor of plant physiology on a National Science Foundation-sponsored project. I became fascinated with how plants function."

Abrupt change

"Within two years I went from the mindset of teaching and coaching to pursuing a Ph.D. program in cell biology at Yale, a tremendous swing of the pendulum," he said.

Big, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, Quatrano still looks the part of the football lineman, and his bearing is all the more incongruous in light of his specialty, the microscopic world of cell development in plants and a special model system, the brown alga known as Fucus.

Sports was a natural for Quatrano, a first-generation Italian-American, whose father emigrated from Naples and became a well-known coaching and recreation figure in Elmira, N.Y. Quatrano excelled in all sports and was a close friend and teammate of Ernie Davis, who went onto fame as a running back in the early '60s at Syracuse University. Davis was named the Heisman Trophy winner in 1962, the first African-American to receive the award. Quatrano played high school football and basketball with him.

The Ernie Davis story, well-known to babyboomers and their parents, turned into tragedy when, shortly before he was to begin his professional career with the Cleveland Browns, he was diagnosed with leukemia. He died before his potential could be realized.

"That was my first confrontation with mortality, and it was a terrible blow," Quatrano said. "Ernie was the greatest natural athlete I've ever seen, and there is no doubt in my mnd that he would have been a classic role model for young kids, because he was a tremendous person as well."

Quatrano, whose second cousin, Phil Villapiano, was a stand-out linebacker for the Oakland Raiders, can easily fill a fun afternoon with vivid sports stories, but he can go on even longer about his overriding passions, teaching and research. His work has focused on patterns of embryo formation, and how the patterns lead cells to acquire traits or characteristics of the mature embryo during seed development. His basic models are Fucus and embryos of developing cereal seeds.

His expertise has resulted in a distinguished career at several outstanding universities and in industry, visiting appointments at world-renowned institutions, authorship of more than 120 scholarly articles, editorial positions with outstanding journals and worldwide renown in his field. And, on July 1, 1998, his prominence led him into the position of biology chair at Washington University. As 1999 begins, Quatrano is poised to help shape a department for the next century and embark on exciting plant science research with consortium members of the newly formed Donald Danforth Plant Science Center.

Teaching career

He left Oregon State in 1986 to join Du Pont Co. in Wilmington, Del., as research manager of molecular biology in the Central Research Department. He assumed the chair position in the Department of Biology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1992, leading the department until 1997, when he took a visiting position at the University of Naples in Italy and then spent a sabbatical in England at the University of Leeds and Cambridge University in 1998.

Quatrano and his wife were drawn to St. Louis by long-standing connections with Washington University, the charm of the community and University people, the students and faculty here and an "opportunity that was just too hard to resist," according to Quatrano.

Throughout his career, Quatrano had forged strong personal and professional relationships with biology department members Roger Beachy (now the new director of the Plant Science Center, freshly arrived from Scripps Research Institute), the late Joseph Varner, and current faculty members David Ho, David Kirk and Ursula Goodenough, to name a few.

Ralph Quatrano (at rear) enjoys his family, including his son, Steve, and two grandsons -- Ben, son of his daughter, Beth, and Allie, Steve's son.

"David Ho called me in late '97 and told me that there were new developments here that I'd find interesting," Quatrano recalled. "And then David filled me in on plans for the Plant Science Center, and everything sounded intriguing."

Quatrano knew that the chair position had been open, but was more inclined to do research in England. Moreover, he and Barbi were happy at North Carolina, where they have a place they enjoy in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Still, at Ho's urging, Quatrano looked into the situation.

'A big draw'

"When I went to the man who hired me at North Carolina and told him of the offer, he said, 'That's not an offer, that's an opportunity.' And that's what I have here: an opportunity to strengthen an already strong biology department and, as a faculty member here, to be part of a world-class center. That combination is really powerful."

Quatrano and his wife have three grown children and five grandchildren who live in the divergent points of Atlanta, Boston and San Francisco. Family is important to Quatrano, who calls himself a workaholic, with barely enough time these days to enjoy his less competitive pastimes of handball and racquetball.

"Barbi and I were delighted that by coming to St. Louis, we're now closer to all three children by air," he said, grinning.

As for departmental goals, Quatrano hopes to enhance undergraduate research experiences, already one of the department's strong suits, and to bring in faculty who can show students the importance of biology in all aspects of life.

"In the next century biology is going to be a central discipline in everyone's lives because of two words -- health and environment," he said. "I think it's very important for this department to have strong, broad offerings so that students across disciplines can have a thorough exposure to and understanding of biology."