Aristotel J. Pappelis
May 25, 1928 to May 1, 2010
In SIUC Botany from 1960 to 2003
Aristotle J. Pappelis was born May 25, 1928 in Cloquet, Minnesota to John and Katherine (Hodgis) Pappelis. He received his Bachelor's degree in Chemistry from Wisconsin State College in Superior Wisconsin in 1951 and in the same year (February 11) married Kathryn Zahariades in Mason City Iowa. After graduation he joined the U.S. Air Force and served as a training officer at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama (during the Korean War). In 1953 he was a ground observer during atomic weapons warfare training exercises with the Marines in at Camp Desert Rock in Nevada. He was honorably discharged in 1955 as a First Lieutenant.
He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from Iowa State University working in the area of plant physiology. Afterwards, he joined the staff at the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture in Miami Florida as research plant physiologists studying the market quality of tropical fruits and vegetables. For one year (1959-60) he taught plant pathology at Western Illinois University in Macomb.
In 1960 he accepted an Assistant Professor position in Botany at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His specialty areas were plant physiology, cell biology, apoptosis, and plant pathology. Later in his career, through collaborations with Dr. Sydney Fox, he became interested in the origin of life. He retired from SIUC in 2003 and later moved to Boca Raton Florida where he died in 2010.
Obituary from the Southern Illinoisan HERE
Publications after 2000
- Bahn, P. and A. Pappelis. 2001. HPLC evidence of nonrandomness in thermal proteins. In First Steps in the Origin of Life in the Universe. Julián Chela-Flores, Tobias Owen, and François Raulin, eds., Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Pp. 69-72.
- Bahn, P. and A. Pappelis. 2001. IR spectra of protein, thermal protein, and thermal glycoprotein. In First Steps in the Origin of Life in the Universe. Julián Chela-Flores, Tobias Owen, and François Raulin, eds., Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Pp.73-76.
- Pappelis, A., P. Bahn, R. Grubbs, J. Bozzola, and P. Cohen. 2001. From inanimate macromolecules to the animate protocell: In search of thermal protein phase-shifting. In First Steps in the Origin of Life in the Universe. Julián Chela-Flores, Tobias Owen, and François Raulin, eds., Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Pp. 65-68.
Photo Photo 1971 Photo ca. 1990 Photo 2001
February 1969