Stadtman started his career as a research assistant in the Division of Plant Nutrition of the University of California. Subsequently he was an Atomic Energy Commission Fellow with Fritz Lipmann in the Massachusetts General Hospital, but after 1960 he worked at the National Heart Institute,
where he became chief of the Laboratory of Biochemistry. In addition, he spent sabbatical periods at the Max Planck Institute in Munich and the Pasteur Institute in Paris.[3]
In 1944 Earl Stadtman married Thressa Campbell, also a distinguished scientist, the discoverer of selenocysteine. They had no children during their marriage of more than sixty years.[5]
Stadtman's research covered a wide field. Early in his career he worked with Horace Barker on bacterial fatty-acid synthesis, with a series of four papers.[6] In the same period he collaborated with Fritz Lipmann on the function of coenzyme A.[7] Later his work took on a more enzymological character, with investigation of, for example, aldehyde dehydrogenase,[8] aspartate kinase,[9] work carried out during a period in the laboratory of Georges Cohen in France and, most notably, glutamine synthetase,[10] an enzyme that will always be associated with his name.
From the 1970s onwards Stadtman published many papers with P. Boon Chock on the capacity of cycles of interconvertible enzymes, based especially on his results with glutamine synthetase, to generate very high sensitivity to effectors.[11]
Stadtman was active as an editor of numerous prominent journals, including the Journal of Biological Chemistry, 1960–1965, Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics, 1960–1969; Annual Review of Biochemistry, 1972–2000; Biochemistry, 1969–1976; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1974–1981; Trends in Biochemical Sciences, 1975–1978.
He was (with Bernard Horecker) founding editor of Current Topics in Cellular Regulation, a major series in the subject, and continued in the role up to volume 23 (1984).
^Stadtman, E. R.; Barker, H. A. (1949). "Fatty acid synthesis by enzyme preparations of Clostridium kluyveri". J. Biol. Chem. 180 (3): 1085–1093, 1095–1115, 1117–1124, 1169–1186.
^Stadtman, E. R.; Novelli, G. D.; Lipmann, F. (1951). "Coenzyme A function in and acetyl transfer by the phosphotransacetylase system". J. Biol. Chem. 191 (1): 365–376.
^Stadtman, E. R.; Burton, R. M. (1955). "Aldehyde dehydrogenase from Clostridium kluyveri". Methods Enzymol. 1: 518–523. doi:10.1016/0076-6879(55)01089-6.
^Stadtman, E. R.; Cohen, G. N.; Robichon-Szulmajster, H. D.; Lebras, G. (1961). "Feed-back inhibition and repression of aspartokinase activity in Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae". J. Biol. Chem. 236 (7): 2033–2038.
^Woolfolk, C. A.; Shapiro, B.; Stadtman, E. R. (1966). "Regulation of glutamine synthetase. I. purification and properties of glutamine synthetase from Escherichia coli". Arch. Biochem. Biophys. 116 (1): 177–192. doi:10.1016/0003-9861(66)90026-9.
^The medal was awarded "for seminal contributions to understanding of the energy metabolism of anaerobic bacteria and for elucidation of major mechanisms whereby the rates of metabolic processes are finely matched to the requirements of the living cell."
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