Peter Mazur Memorial
 This web site was initially conceived and created by FW (Fritz) Kleinhans in 2017. The ID'ing and labeling of all the pictures was done by Kleinhans. Estefania Paredes and Kleinhans cleaned out Peter's office after his death and they found the black and white pictures, notebooks, and other material from Peter's office. Kleinhans selected and scanned material from Peter's college notebooks and his Space Science Board work on Mars. Most of the color pictures came from Kleinhans' collection, but some were contributed by others as noted.
Obituary in Knoxville News Sentinel
Obituary in Cryobiology
(Cryobiology. 2016 Apr;72(2):83-5.)
Curriculum Vitae
(as slightly modified and updated by FWK)
Lab Photos from the Good Old Days
(Estefania Paredes and FWK found these while cleaning out Peter's Office)
Recent Photos
(from the files of FWK and friends)
(Some old, early, lab notebooks were found in Peter's office. I [FWK] surmised that Peter attached some sentimental value to them. These are some excerpts.)
Harvard Senior Biology Lab Notebook (Oct - Dec, 1948)
Peter's office contained several laboratory notebooks from his years at Harvard and Princeton; no doubt saved as mementos. Here is Expt. II dating to Oct, Nov, Dec 1948. This was Peter's undergraduate senior year at Harvard. This scanning business is very labor intensive. If you want more, buy a plane ticket and bring your laptop with scanner :)
Harvard PhD Biology Lab Notebook (Dec 1952)
This is Expt. 9 from Peter's PhD notebook. It dates to Dec 1952 and he graduated in 1953. It is an 'early' cryobiology experiment! Peter once told me that cryopreservation was just a routine method for preserving the cells which he was studying for his PhD and Post Doc. But as good fortune would have it, he became more interested in the cryopreservation procedure than the cells nominally being studied. And the rest is history :)
Publications
(Peter had about 175 peer reviewed publications; see CV above. I've (FWK) picked out a few that highlight some of his major successes below:
| Two Factor Hypothesis Review (Science, 1970) |
| Successful Cryopreservation of Mouse Embryos (Science, 1972) |
Space Science Board Work on Mars (1978)
(Peter often talked of his work with the Space Science Board (circa 1978) which he obviously enjoyed. This booklet says he was Chairman of the 'Committee on Planetary Biology and Chemical Evolution'. The highlighting in blue is by Peter.) |
| Successful Cryopreservation of Drosophila Embryos (Science, 1992) |
Development and Validation of Ultra-Rapid Laser Warming to Avoid Ice Crystal Formation (Cryobiology, 2014)
Cryopreservation requires that both the cooling and the re-warming of cells be successfully executed. In his last several years, Peter became interested in damage during warming which has typically received less attention in the cryo community. The damage appears to be the result of ice crystal formation, either by de-vitrification of vitrified samples and/or by the growth of microscopic ice crystals. By warming faster, these damage mechanisms can be avoided. Plunging small LN2 frozen ul droplets directly into warm buffer achieves warming rates of ~ 100,000 C/min. Peter wanted to go faster and conceived of the idea of using a laser pulse to accomplish this. This we accomplished and validated using the well characterized mouse embryo model system. With these embryos we achieved warming rates approaching 1 x 10^7 C/min; 100 x faster than previously possible. This work was published in 2014. In addition to demonstrating the technology, we showed that cryoprotectant concentrations and cell loading of permeable cryoprotectants can be significantly reduced while maintaining good survival. It is our hope that this new methodology will lead to the successful cryopreservation of some previously intractable organisms. Several labs have implemented this methodology and are obtaining promising results. E.g. Successful cryopreservation of zebrafish embryos: "Gold nanorod induced warming of embryos from the cryogenic state enhances viability", Khosla, Wang, Hagedorn, Qin, and Bishof, ACS Nano 11, 7869-7878 (2017)
Stay tuned!
Peter preferred to work on fundamental cryobiology problems with broad application, rather than trying to figure out how to cryopreserve a specific organism.
In his 'rapid warming' work of the last several years, I think he happily returned to his roots :) |
Videos
CRYO2013 Presentation in Washington D.C. (YouTube; ~25min)
History of Laser Warming 2020 by Kleinhans, featuring Peter's lab & his role (YouTube; ~30min)
Other Items of Interest
Corporate Fellow (1985-1998), ORNL-Martin Marietta Energy Systems, Inc (Letter and The Oak Ridger news article)
(Peter was proud to be appointed a Corporate Fellow of Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL). ORNL was then run by Martin Marietta Energy Systems, Inc under contract to the US DOE so technically, he was a Martin Marietta Corporate Fellow.)
Peter was a member of the Cosmo Club and enjoyed staying there when he visited Washington DC. I had the good fortune to join him as a guest on one of our DC trips. Peter was, in many ways, a humble man and found the smallest and cheapest room entirely satisfactory to his needs. He was not, however, above bending some of the club rules. We were admonished for pulling out papers and discussing 'business' in the bar/lounge area!
Mid-South news article (December, 1972)
A Message from the Curator, 8 May 2024
Gathering material for a Mazur Memorial web site was a labor of love. I (Kleinhans) first started doing cryobiology in about 1987 and met Peter in 1987 or 1988. By 1994 or so I was spending 6 weeks a summer in his lab and then in the Fall of 1997, I took a sabbatical semester with him at ORNL. Starting in 2004, I spent the four spring semesters at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) with Peter. After I retired from IUPUI in 2007, I spent 1 to 2 months a year at UTK (typically during the winter months to get away from the Indiana cold weather). I confess that Peter was more dedicated to cryobiology than I. For the past few years, I have devoted more and more time to astronomy and less and less to cryobiology.
FW (Fritz) Kleinhans, Assoc Prof Emeritus of Physics, IU Indianapolis (formerly known as IUPUI).
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