George Irving Bell, a pioneer in the applications of physics and modeling to problems in immunology and cell biology, died on 28 May 2000 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, from complications of leukemia after routine surgery.
Born on 4 August 1926 in Evanston, Illinois, Bell received his BS in physics from Harvard University in 1947 and his PhD in theoretical physics in 1951 from Cornell University. At Cornell, he worked under the supervision of Hans Bethe on the capture and loss of electrons by fission fragments.
In 1951, he joined the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where he spent the remainder of his scientific career as a staff member (1951–70), associate division leader (1970–76), group leader (1974–90), alternate or acting division director (1976–80), division director (1980–89), and senior fellow until his retirement.
Initially, as a member of the division’s neutronics group, Bell applied neutron transport methods to nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. He also helped with the planning and analysis of experiments on nuclear explosions; discovered the Bell–Plesset instability that occurs in imploding systems as a result of material granularity; and published, with Samuel Glasstone, the definitive text in nuclear reactor physics and safety, Nuclear Reactor Theory (R. E. Krieger, Huntington, N.Y., 1979).
During the 1960s, he was one of a small number of physicists who began to do theoretical work in biology. He first focused on cell biology and developed quantitative models of cell growth and division. This research rapidly led to an interest in immunology that would continue for more than a decade. Bell developed the first set of mathematical and computer simulation models of the then-new idea of clonal selection for which Frank Macfarlane Burnet received the Nobel Prize. Bell’s work involved generating detailed models of the interaction of ligands with cell surface receptors and introducing a quantitative description of receptor cross-linking, an important process not only in immunology but in all of cell biology. This and subsequent work would create the modern field of theoretical immunology.
Early in his career, Bell recognized that the rapid developments in molecular biology would change the face of biology and medicine, creating unprecedented demands for information storage, handling, and analysis. With Bell’s support and encouragement of genetic sequence analysis, Walter Goad at Los Alamos developed the first DNA sequence database. This database evolved into GenBank, the national genetic sequence database now run by the National Library of Medicine.
In the early 1970s, Bell hired Charles DeLisi to work in immunology at LANL. They published a series of papers together. DeLisi later moved to the National Institutes of Health and then to the US Department of Energy to head the Office of Health and Environmental Research; Bell had encouraged DeLisi to apply for that position. It was in that capacity, and inspired by Bell, that DeLisi formally launched the Human Genome Project, for which Bell was an early advocate. Bell served as acting director of the Los Alamos Genome Center when the center was first launched.
In 1974, Bell founded the theoretical biology and biophysics group at LANL, and led it until he retired in 1990. He first focused the group on theoretical immunology. In 1979, he formulated an influential set of physical-chemical models that described the repulsive and attractive forces between cells and how rapidly applied forces would break the chemical bonds holding cells together.
Through his work, leadership, scientific vision, and inspiration of others, Bell profoundly influenced the direction of modern biology. The atmosphere he created both as a colleague and as an administrator was important in bolstering good science in the theoretical division.
Bell was an avid mountaineer and outdoorsman. In the 1950s, he went on four expeditions to the Peruvian Andes, where he and his team made the first ascents of Yerupajá and Salcantay, two of Peru’s most difficult peaks. He joined an ill-fated expedition in 1953 that attempted to scale the then-unclimbed K2, the second highest mountain in the world. During this attempt, Bell slipped and fell, pulling his partner—with whom he was linked by a rope—along with him. Their rope entangled with that of another pair of climbers below them. All four climbers fell down the mountain, entangling the rope of the remaining climbers, one of whom miraculously tied off his rope and held the others in what has perhaps become the most famous belay in mountaineering. Despite his experience on K2, Bell remained an enthusiastic mountaineer.
