Koepfli, Joseph Blake

Biography

Joseph Blake Koepfli was born February 5, 1904, in Los Angeles. His father, Joseph Otto Koepfli (b. 1866), was a prominent businessman and lawyer in Los Angeles. The family was of Swiss extraction on the father's side, and Norwegian on the mother's, and consequently they spent much time traveling in Europe in the years between Joseph's birth and World War I. Joseph and his sister Hortense were privately educated. Eventually Joseph was sent to the Harvard School in Los Angeles. He then attended Stanford University, where he majored in chemistry (BA 1924, MA 1925). In 1925 he enrolled at Oxford and subsequently received his PhD in chemistry there in 1928.

Koepfli returned to the US to take up a fellowship at Caltech for the year 1928-1929. As an organic chemist, his interests were mainly in natural products such as alkaloids, which were physiologically active. Beginning in January 1930, Koepfli began working under John J. Able at Johns Hopkins University. Able was renowned for his isolation of, first, adrenalin, and later, insulin. Koepfli's work with him centered on the posterior pituitary, and he was appointed instructor in pharmacology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. By 1932, Koepfli had returned to Caltech to accept a position as research associate because, according to his own memoir, he did not like teaching. He worked principally in plant hormones and collaborated with Dr. Seeley W. Mudd on cancer research. He also patented, with Linus Pauling and Dan Campbell, a blood substitute called oxypoly gelatin.

With the beginning of World War II, Koepfli was requested to work on antimalarial drugs. After the war (1948) he was invited by the Department of State to serve for a year as a foreign service reserve officer and scientific attaché in London. Upon returning to Caltech he was again called to government service in the State Department as a science advisor. He continued to keep ties with Washington in various advisory capacities, including connections with NATO, the first President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) under Eisenhower, and UNESCO.

Joseph Koepfli retired from Caltech in 1971.