Daniel E. Koshland Jr.: Most people would be satisfied with any one of these achievements, but he never rested on his laurels. He never rested, period.

The last time I saw Dan Koshland, he drove the two of us to North Berkeley for lunch at Chez Panisse. He was 87, and I admit to wincing at a few of his traffic moves before he finally docked in the Andronico’s lot across the street. (He enjoyed the fact that he wasn’t supposed to park there.) At the restaurant, where he was always greeted by name, he downed an onion pizza while describing the patents he’d filed for a process using bacteria to create methane gas to power home appliances and cars. For dessert, we each ate a Masumoto peach and blueberries. He complained about our “Summer of Love” cover story. (I’d sent him a pre-publication copy for review.) To him, Timothy Leary and company had done young people—students—in the 1960s a grave disservice by famously urging them to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.”

“When you are young, drugs versus studying or communes versus monogamy sound wonderful,” Dan said, “but when you are older you know they come at a price.”

“Well, you’re probably not going to like the cover,” I said. “It’s got a young hippie on it.”

He was quiet for a moment. “There were some good things that came out of that period, too,” he said. An impish smile snuck onto his face. “But you know when they called it the Summer of Love what they really meant was another four-letter word. They really meant the Summer of ...” and then the distinguished molecular biologist, winner of a National Medal of Science, the Lasker Award, and the Welch Award in Chemistry, said the word. Twice.

We left the restaurant and headed toward the car. There was no stoplight on Shattuck Avenue there, and I watched anxiously as he ambled ahead into the crosswalk. Dan’s walk, which calibrated his age-induced infirmities to his good-natured determination, required him to thrust his shoulder forward in a way that was almost jaunty. There was another quality to it, too. At 87, his forward motion was undaunted, a word that describes just about everything Daniel E. Koshland Jr. ever did.

That’s one reason that it’s hard to believe he’s gone. On July 23, Dan died. He lived his life as if he never would, despite being a hard-nosed scientist and realist.

Dan credited his father, the president and chairman of Levi Strauss, with encouraging him to pursue anything that interested him. As a scientist, Dan made breakthrough discoveries in his studies first of enzymes and later of bacterial behavior. In the 1980s, he reorganized the biological sciences at Berkeley, consolidating 11 departments into three divisions (a Herculean feat, for anyone familiar with academic politics), and positioning Berkeley for the international leadership in biology research that it now enjoys. In 1985, Dan became editor of Science magazine, growing it into a must-read journal and an influential voice in national science policy.

Recently he turned his attention to biochemical methods for generating alternative energy—the processes we’d discussed at lunch. “Energy is part of your life, it’s everything,” he said. “If you gotta change the way you get energy in 50 years, you gotta get going. We gotta get going.”

Most people would be satisfied with any one of these achievements, but Dan never rested on his laurels. He never rested, period. He had a strong point of view, tempered by a willingness to change based on new evidence or circumstances, and a broad capacity to see and tease out the potential in a student, an experiment, or a magazine. Among other things, these qualities made him an exceptional editor, and a wise and trusted mentor and friend.