Seymour Hutner

Seymour Herbert Hutner (1911–2003) was a microbiologist specializing in the nutritional biochemistry of protists (protozoa and algae). Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1911, he obtained a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York (CCNY) in 1931 and a Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1937, where he worked with the Nobel laureate James B. Sumner.

In 1936 he published a paper showing that the photosynthetic flagellate Euglena had a nutritional requirement for a substance extracted from animal tissue. At that time this was considered to be improbable and the paper was rejected by several American journals before eventually being published in Europe. Years later it was discovered that the required factor was vitamin B12, or cyanocobalamin. He developed a nutritional assay method for vitamin B12 using Euglena that was used for many years in hospitals to test for B12 levels in blood, eventually being replaced by other methods

After graduating from Cornell, he joined an independent research laboratory, the Haskins Laboratories founded by the physicist Franklin Cooper and the entomologist and geneticist Caryl Haskins. Initially this was based in Massachusetts, near M.I.T., but then it moved to a building on East 43rd Street in New York City, where Hutner was joined by a newly arrived Italian scientist, Luigi Provasoli, who had spent time in the laboratory of Andre Lwoff in Paris. In New York, during the 1940s through the 1960s, Haskins Labs became known for studies of protistan nutrition and the development of culture media and culture assay methods. Hutner was one of the first to appreciate the importance of organic complexing agents in trace metal nutrition of cells . This had significant implications for the development of culture media and also in the understanding of microbial ecology. With his colleague Luigi Provasoli he showed that photosynthetic organisms could be ‘bleached’ by the antibiotic streptomycin – an early clue of the endosymbiotic hypothesis about the origin of chloroplasts from a prokaryotic ancestor.

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