Alan Marshall: A Scientist and a Gentleman

From Red Wagons to Stanford

Alan George Marshall was born in Northwest Ohio in 1944, the only child of Herbert Marshall and Cecile Marshall (later Cecile Rosser), a farmer and a school nurse. Even as a lad he helped out on the farm by ferrying crops from the field to the packing shed in his little red wagon.

He was 7 when the family moved to San Diego, Calif., where his dad took an engineering job. Because young Alan skipped second grade and his growth spurt was late in coming, he was smaller than most of his classmates and an easy target for bullies. But as the boy began to distinguish himself – in seventh grade, he was the proud winner of the junior high school spelling bee and set a school record for the standing broad jump the following year – he gained confidence and recognition. His interests were broad: Though his greatest love was science, he also played the clarinet and was on the track and cross country teams. He learned that focusing too much on one thing can work against you: He beat out his closest rival to be named outstanding male scholar of his graduating class because he’d earned better grades in gym. When Marshall left for Illinois’ Northwestern University in 1961 for a six-year medical program, scholarship money paved the way.

It did not take long for Marshall to realize that he chose medicine for the wrong reasons.

“I still like medicine, but I hated medical school,” he recalled. “It was all memorization.”

He switched to chemistry and never looked back. Lesson learned: to achieve success and happiness, you must love what you do.

While in college Marshall took another critical step toward securing future success and happiness when he set his sights on English and political science major Marilyn Gard. The two met in November 1964 and were engaged by Christmas.

“He had a wonderful sense of humor,” said Marilyn Marshall. “And of course I thought he was very handsome.”

The newlyweds moved to California the following year, where Marilyn finished her undergraduate degree at Stanford University and Alan worked toward his Ph.D there. Marshall continued to cultivate other interests, both scientific and otherwise, reading broadly about a wide range of topics. In an echo of his choice to quit medical school, he dropped his initial thesis topic, in which he used Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to study how drugs bind to receptors. The topic failed to inspire him, so he cut his losses and switched to calculating shapes of ICR spectra. His unconventional decision to do two thesis topics – one in NMR, one in ICR – would have huge implications for both his future and the future of analytical chemistry. He will be forever grateful that his thesis advisor, John Baldeschwieler, allowed Marshall to follow his curiosity.

“I spent a lot of time working on topics other than the assignment he gave me,” Marshall recalled.

Another event that would greatly shape the young scientist’s career was his friendship with Mel Comisarow, a Stanford postdoc. Both men shared an interest in science and electronics, and paired up to build color TVs with Heathkits. When Marshall moved his family to Vancouver to launch his teaching career at the University of British Columbia in 1969, he encouraged Comisarow to join him. Two years later, he did.

It was during long campus strolls and late nights at the lab that the duo hatched and developed an idea that other chemists would have dismissed as either impossible or inconsequential: combining Fourier Transform with Ion Cyclotron Resonance.

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