The Dartmouth flag was lowered to half staff yesterday afternoon and will remain there today for Biology and Physiology Professor Emeritus Roy P. Forster. He died in his sleep at his home in Hanover Monday evening at the age of 87.
Forster was a member of the College faculty for almost 40 years, teaching and conducting research from 1938 to 1976. Affectionately known to his colleagues and students as "Renal Roy," Forster specialized in the biochemical and physiological processes of the kidney.
He joined the faculty as an instructor in zoology and became a full professor in 1948. When the zoology and botany departments merged to form the biology department in 1961, he became a professor of biology, and Ira Eastman Professor of Biology three years later.
Forster also had an appointment at the Medical School, where he was first a lecturer and then an adjunct professor in physiology.
Biology Professor Emeritus David Dennison said Forster greatly enjoyed working with and teaching students.
Although he taught very technical subjects in biology, Forster could make the subject come alive for students. "I remember his enthusiastic, spell-binding lecturing," he said.
Dennison, a junior colleague in the zoology department at the time, said Forster often took students with him to conduct research at the Mount Desert Island in Biological Laboratory in Salisbury Cove, Maine, where he spent his summers.
Forster's commitment to his summer laboratory was unusual at a time when most professors were not as heavily involved with research, Biology Professor Emeritus Melvin Spiegel said.
Spiegel said Forster was "one of the really outstanding people in the department."
Forster always maintained a very close relationship with undergraduates, but also had a very active research career, and was considered an outstanding expert in his field, he said.
Forster was always a very strong advocate for the College, Spiegel said. "It's a great loss for Dartmouth," he said.
Forster graduated with a B.A. degree from Marquette University, where he majored in chemistry and zoology, in 1932, and received his Ph.M. and Ph.D. degrees in zoophysiology-physiological chemistry from the University of Wisconsin several years later.
Forster earned two Guggenheim Fellowships -- one to England's Cambridge University in 1948 and another to Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy.
During his teaching career, Forster held positions as a visiting professor at George Washington University School Of Medicine and at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine, and delivered lectures at five different universities in England, Sweden and Wisconsin.
In addition, he edited several scientific journals and was the author of more than 100 scientific papers.
He was also director of the Regulatory Biology Program of the National Science Foundation, and was a consultant to the National Science Foundation, the national Academy of Sciences, the Veterans Administration and different branches of the National Institutes of Health.
The National Institutes of Health gave Forster a five-year grant to continue his research at the Medical School and the Mount Desert Island Laboratory after his retirement.
At the Mount Desert lab, he served at various times as director, vice president and trustee, and had a laboratory named after him in 1988.
Forster was predeceased by his wife Dorothy in 1991, and is survived by one daughter and her family. There will be no services, at his request.
Gifts in his memory may be sent to the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory.
