Elmer Gaden, helped mass-produce penicillin

Elmer L. Gaden, a former Long Island resident who devised a method decades ago to mass-produce penicillin, has died, his family said this week.

Gaden, 88, formerly of Islip and Bay Shore, died of heart failure March 10 in Charlottesville, Va., his widow, Jennifer Gaden, said. He donated his body to science and a memorial service will be held Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church-Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Va., she said.

A Brooklyn native, Gaden got a degree in chemical engineering in 1944 from Columbia University under the U.S. Navy's V-12 program to train engineers. He served as a Navy communications officer in the Pacific during the remainder of World War II and then returned to Columbia to get his master's and doctorate in chemical engineering.

His dissertation quantified the amount of oxygen necessary to fuel the fermentation process used to make penicillin, allowing it and many other antibiotics to be produced in mass quantities, according to the American Association of Chemical Engineers.

He presented the work at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in 1950, and it was later published in the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry.

In 1999, that pioneering worked earned him the $500,000 Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize, which is awarded to researchers who do work of "critical importance, advance science and engineering, and ultimately improve the human condition."

In his spare time, Gaden liked tinkering in his basement workshop, working on model airplanes and visiting Civil War sites. A profile of him in 1971 in Chemical Engineer News described Gaden as "a bulky, blustery, good-humored man who seeks in his associates what he tries to exemplify in himself: competence and integrity."

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Gaden spent 25 years as a professor at Columbia while commuting to and from Bay Shore, and later Islip. He served as dean of Columbia's School of Engineering and left in 1974 to become dean of the college of engineering, mathematics and business administration at the University of Vermont. In 1979, he became a professor of engineering at the University of Virginia, retiring from there in 1994.

He is also survived by his sons David, of Charlottesville, and Paul, of Corpus Christi, Texas; his first wife, Dorothy West, and their daughter, Barbara Gaden, both of Richmond.

His death was brought to Newsday's attention by sanitation worker Charlie Manoogian, 57, of Holbrook, who had lived next door to Gaden in Islip, and was informally adopted by the Gaden family in 1970 when his own parents died.

"I got a letter from his wife saying he had passed," Manoogian said. "I went online and read about him and I had never known how many things he accomplished. To me, he was just the most straightforward, honest guy. He was the guy who took me in, took me to a few Columbia football games, helped me with my homework. I just never knew all this about him."