Services Set for Chemist at UC San Diego

Memorial services will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday for Marelene DeLuca, a UC San Diego scientist and wife of the university’s former chancellor, William D. McElroy. DeLuca died Wednesday of cancer at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. She was 51.

A member of the UC San Diego chemistry department since 1972, DeLuca was best known for her work in bioluminescence, particularly for researching what makes fireflies glow.

A year ago, DeLuca, along with a team of other university scientists, received much attention for their announcement in Science magazine that they had transferred the gene that makes fireflies light into a tobacco plant.

“This is the first time anyone has taken a gene that codes for light production and transferred it into the genetic material of a complex multicellular organism,” one of her colleagues, Donald R. Helinski, said at the time.

“She was a devoted scientist and teacher who made major contributions to understanding the biochemical basis of how fireflies light. She was a dedicated and skilled individual who will be sorely missed by students and faculty alike,” said Edward Dennis, chairman of the UC San Diego Academic Senate and a colleague of DeLuca’s in the chemistry department.

McElroy, her husband of 20 years and also a pioneer in the field of bioluminescence, said of his wife: “It is a great loss to the scientific community, and personally devastating as far as I’m concerned. She was a wonderful lady, both in science and in having fun.”

A native of LaCrosse, Wis., DeLuca was a graduate of Hamline University in Minnesota, and earned her Ph.D. in 1962 from the University of Minnesota.

From 1963 to 1966, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, and from 1967 to 1970 she worked at the university as an assistant professor of biology. While at Johns Hopkins, DeLuca was the recipient of a National Institutes of Health Career Development award.

After arriving at UC San Diego, DeLuca served as a member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board. She was also a member of the American Chemical Society, Sigma Xi and the American Society of Biological Chemists.

She is also survived by a son, Eric, 19.

A memorial service for DeLuca, who will be cremated, is scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday in Garren Auditorium in the Basic Science Building at the School of Medicine. In lieu of flowers, McElroy requests that donations be made in her honor to the UC San Diego Foundation for a scholarship or lectureship fund in the chemistry department.