William D. McElroy; Research Biologist, Controversial UC San Diego Chancellor

William D. McElroy, a pioneering research biologist who became UC San Diego’s fourth chancellor, died of respiratory failure in La Jolla on Wednesday. He was 82.

University of California President Richard C. Atkinson, who succeeded him as chancellor, said McElroy transformed the campus during its formative years, building on its early emphasis on research science and expanding into the arts, humanities and social sciences.

His eight-year tenure ended stormily in 1980 amid disputes with the faculty, who had tendered an unprecedented no confidence vote after McElroy failed to consult them on major decisions involving administrative restructuring.

The prominent scientist, who had headed the National Science Foundation and the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, spent the next several years teaching at UC San Diego and continuing his groundbreaking research in bioluminescence, or how living organisms, such as fireflies, turn chemical energy into light.

Born in Rogers, Texas, in 1917, McElroy was raised on a farm and attended a one-room schoolhouse. He excelled in football in high school and won $100 from a local Kiwanis Club, which he used to hitchhike to California and enroll at Pasadena City College on a football scholarship.

He went on to Stanford University to study medicine, but a course in genetics with Nobel laureate George Beadle persuaded him to pursue basic research instead. He earned a master’s from Reed College in Oregon in 1941 and a PhD from Princeton in 1943 in biology and biochemistry.

In 1946 he joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, where he discovered the enzyme that makes fireflies light up. He taught there for more than 20 years and chaired its biology department until 1969, when President Richard Nixon nominated him to head the National Science Foundation. He led that agency for three years.

After a contentious, two-year search by UC regents, he was named UC San Diego chancellor in 1972.

Under his leadership, the campus research budget tripled to more than $120 million a year, school officials said. He oversaw the construction of a campus landmark, the Geisel Library, as well as the Gildred Cancer Center and Mandeville Auditorium.

His troubles with the faculty began in the last two years of his tenure, when he tried to remove medical school department chairmen without consulting the faculty.

The final confrontation was precipitated by McElroy’s decision to strip administrative responsibility for faculty research from the vice chancellor for academic affairs. The faculty said he had violated UC’s policy of “shared governance” and voted to censure him. He announced his resignation in August 1979, two months after the faculty’s no confidence vote, and returned full time to teaching and research.

While chancellor, McElroy served as president of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, succeeding anthropologist Margaret Mead. He also was a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission, the President’s Science Advisory Committee, and the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science Award.

His interest in fireflies came about serendipitously when he was a graduate student more than five decades ago.

“I had a cigar in my mouth and here we saw something coming at the light from the cigar, and it was one of these charging click beetles. They kept coming right at me,” he said in a 1989 interview.

The insects had been virtually impossible to breed in captivity. As they whacked into his face, McElroy realized that they could be collected in jars and studied. For years, he and his colleagues recruited as many as 30,000 Baltimore children to catch fireflies for their research. Eventually, he and his wife, Marlene DeLuca, isolated the enzyme that produces the beetles’ light and concluded that the glow aided their mating process.

He and DeLuca, who taught chemistry at UC San Diego and died in 1987, collaborated on many investigations involving the click beetles, which resulted in more than 200 scientific articles over four decades.

In 1989, McElroy led a team of Johns Hopkins and UC San Diego scientists that discovered the part of a Jamaican beetle’s genetic structure that produces the illuminating enzyme. They transferred the genes into bacteria, producing bacteria that glowed in four different colors.

The discovery gave scientists a potentially powerful tool for marking genes and signaling when they are turned on or off. Such biological beacons could be used to study a gene that malfunctions in disease and to track the fate of specific cells in the body.

McElroy is survived by his third wife, Olga Robles McElroy, of San Diego; a sister, Lola Rector of Pismo Beach; and five children, Eric of San Marcos, Mary of Boston, Ann of Hickory, N.C., Thomas of Glen Arm, Md., and William of Woods Hole, Mass. Memorial services are pending.