Bill Dreyer, in 1973, analyzes two scanning electron micrographs: of a normal blood cell and of polymeric spheres coated with antibodies that will react only with specific substances on the blood cell’s surface. Dreyer was trying to develop molecules that would attack certain types of cancer cells, work that grew out of his research on normal cells’ surface recognition codes.

William Dreyer
1928 – 2004

Dr. William J. Dreyer, professor of biology since 1963, died April 23 after a long illness. He was 75.

A native of Kalamazoo, Michigan, Dreyer earned his bachelor’s degree at Reed College and his doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Washington in 1956. After his graduation he worked for six years as a research biochemist at the National Heart Institute and National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Disease before joining the faculty at Caltech, where he remained the rest of his life.

Dreyer was perhaps best known for his suggestion in the 1960s that genes could be “reshuffled” to provide addi-tional information for the formation of proteins. At first a controversial idea, the theory later came into prom-inence after it was experimentally demonstrated by others, including Leroy Hood, who at one time was Dreyer’s student.

At a Society for Biomolec-ular Screening conference held in 2003, Hood credited Dreyer for mentoring his early career, teaching him the art of conceptual thinking, and providing him with “a wonderful introduction to the exhilaration of rapidly paced molecular immunology.” Hood added that Dreyer always emphasized two prin-ciples: “Always practice biology at the leading edge,” and “If you really want to change biology, develop a new technology for pushing back the frontiers of biological knowledge.”

Dreyer also investigated fundamental questions related to how embryos develop, and he made significant contributions to the field of biological instrumentation.

He was the author of nu-merous journal articles and also held a number of patents —including one for an im-munological reagant and radioimmunoassay, and two for polyacrylate beads that he developed with two colleagues.

Dreyer had been an avid pilot since 1960 and often flew to Baja California, various archaeological sites in the western United States, and to remote regions in British Columbia. He once said that his taste for flying his Cessna P210 at altitudes of 15,000 feet—high for a small privately owned prop plane but low for commercial aircraft—was “an allegory for my tastes in scientific re-search. I like to work where research isn’t too competitive and crowded—to move beyond the current mob scene, even if the place where I end up is lonely.”

Dreyer is remembered by his many former students as having taught them to look at data with a fresh eye, rather than through the filter of current scientific dogma, and for having infected them with his love of science.

He is survived by his wife and colleague, Dr. Janet Roman, and three daughters.