 He was vice president of the Botanical Society of America in 1912 and 1914.From 1917 to 1919, he was acting professor of biological chemistry at the Washington University Medical School.Surprisingly, he is best remembered for an achievement in another discipline occurring in the late 1940s, his discovery of chlortetracycline (Aureomycin), the first of the tetracycline antibiotics, from a soil bacterium growing in allotment soil.