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Ernst Knobil, In Memoriam: Roy Orval Greep, Endocrinology, Volume 139, Issue 9, 1 September 1998, Pages 4026–4028, https://doi.org/10.1210/endo.139.9.6219
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Roy Orval Greep, the 45th President of The Endocrine Society, died on December 5, 1997, in his 92nd year, thus ending a richly rewarding and remarkably accomplished life. His illustrious career was predestined by his early intellectual independence, his insatiable curiosity about the natural phenomena that surrounded him as a boy growing up on a Kansas farm, and by his voracious appetite for the acquisition of new knowledge. These germinal traits were abetted by deeply ingrained habits of hard work, patience, and perseverance that he attributed to his forefathers of pioneering Swedish stock.
Roy Greep began his academic career in a one-room schoolhouse in Longford, KS, population 198, advanced to the 2-yr high school recently established in that community, but dropped out 6 weeks later to, in his words, “pursue interests of more soul-satisfying nature: herding cattle, hunting coyotes, trapping and so forth.” Three years later, however, he was persuaded by the perspicacious principal of the high school and by the onerous and relatively unrewarding labors on the farm to return to the classroom. He was admitted to Kansas State Agriculture College in Manhattan, KS, but failed the qualifying examination administered some weeks later. By the time the results became known, however, Roy Greep had already distinguished himself as an outstanding student, was awarded a teaching assistantship, and the qualifying examination not withstanding, was clearly fit for higher education. In his senior year, he was invited to join a research project devoted to the isolation of sex hormones from the urine of cows. Such were not found, but this work forged a link with F. L. Hisaw, one of the founders of American endocrinology, who had similar negative findings. In 1930, this led to an invitation to join Hisaw’s high-powered laboratory at the University of Wisconsin as a graduate student. The research emphasis in Hisaw’s group was on the gonadal stimulating activity of pituitary extracts that eventuated in the identification of two factors, FSH and LH, a most controversial matter at the time.
