David was born in Kooskia, Idaho, May 12, 1920, the first in a family of five brothers. He attended Reed College in Portland (BA 1942) and Caltech (Ph.D. 1947), following which he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (at 27, one of the youngest so honored). His fellowship year was spent mainly at the Institute for Theorietical Physics in Copenhagen, but partly in Oxford during Linus Pauling's tenure there of the Eastman Professorship. He returned to Caltech as Senior Research Fellow (1948-1951) before going on to MIT. Provoked by the increasing pollution of the Eastern megalopolis and attracted by the opportunity of returning West, he moved to Corvallis in 1970 as Chairman of the Chemistry Department of Oregon State University. He retired there in 1984.

At Caltech, David immediately demonstrated a remarkable ability to work imaginatively, with seemingly automatic supreme organization and with great effect on any problem he was given, first in the context of wartime research and later in crystallography. His thesis (I. An Attempt to Prepare Antibodies to Histamine In Vitro, II. An Investigation of a Possible Method for Preparing Large Single Crystals of Aluminum Orthophosphate, III. A. An Investigation of the Space-Group and Lattice Constants of DL-Serine, B. An Investigation of the Crystal Structure of L-Threonine) records two investigations he made during the war, one for Carl Niemann and one for Pauling, but he worked on other war projects also. An article on the design and use of a special viscometer [D.P. Shoemaker, Earl Hoerger, R.M. Noyes and R.H. Blaker (1947). Anal. Chem. 19, 131] was one product of his work on Pauling and Corey's big study of the 'stability of double-base propellants'. Another was the electron-diffraction determinations he made of the structures of 16 molecules, which appeared in a compilation [P. W. Allen and L.E. Sutton (1949). Acta Cryst. 3, 46-72; VS is now astonished to find them attributed to B. Schomaker, as privately communicated by L. Pauling and V. Schomaker]. The threonine study was notable for other reasons also, but we want to dwell on how David in his visual estimation of the intensities systematically compared all the reflections seen on complete sets of multiple-film Weissenbergs for all three orthorhombic axes. He also gave estimates of the errors to be feared. These correspond to a standard deviation of about 8.5% in an intensity measurement or perhaps 4.3% for an |F|, hardly in agreement with the 11.2% R value reported [D. P. Shoemaker, J. Donohue, V. Schomaker and R. B. Corey (1950). J. Am. Chem. Soc. 72, 2328-2349] for the determination, which concluded with a single cycle of full-matrix refinement, with fixed scale factor and fixed equal isotropic B's for all the atoms, that required about 100 h of IBM 602 time. More Recently, full-matrix least-squares refinement of the structure with Hughes weights, isotropic freely adjusted H atoms and anisotropic C, N and O atoms has led after many cycles (and a few minutes of computer time) to R = 4.4%. It seems that David's visual intensity estimates for threonine, 49 years ago, were as good as he said they were, and that the authors SDSC simply failed to account for them because their computing methods and model were far from adequate.

Back in Pasadena after his year abroad, David helped complete the arduous work on threonine and solved the structure of DL-serine [D.P. Shoemaker, R. E. Barieau, J. Donohue and C.-S. Lu (1953). Acta Cryst. 6, 241-256], which had previously stumped the laboratory. He also began what became his main research career, on the structures of complex transition-metal phases, with the discovery of the -phase structure with 'his' (officially Pauling's) student B. Gunnar Bergman. With Clara and their associates at MIT, and later at Oregon State, he continued to work out and publish a long list of related structures. These transition-metal alloy structures with only tetrahedral interstices ('tetrahedrally close packed') later became important as possible storage materials for hydrogen, and a collaboration was established with the Crystallographic Laboratory of E. F. Bertaut in Grenoble. Structural principles, such as local approximate icosahedral symmetry and repetition of icosahedral orientation through linking of icosahedra, became of interest with the discovery of quasicrystals. Early in his MIT career, David also began notable productive work on the structures of zeolites, which included derivations-discoveries of the structures of the commercially most important zeolites (A and X/Y-Faujasite). He also found time to write (with Carl W. Garland, Jeffrey I. Steinfeld and later Joseph W. Nibler) a widely used laboratory text Experiments in Physical Chemistry, now in its sixth edition. For the book Crystallography in North America, published in 1983 by the American Crystallographic Association, David wrote an engaging account of his MIT days that we recommend to all for further details. One charming paragraph, however, needs quoting.

'The decisive occurrence in the formation of my research group [at MIT] and in getting the new program going was the arrival in 1953 of Clara Brink, Ph.D. Leiden 1950, who had worked in the Laboratories of A. E. van Arkel, J. M. Bijvoet, Dorothy Hodgkin (on vitamin B12), and Caroline MacGillavry. Jack Dunitz, after meeting Clara in Holland and learning of her plans to come to my laboratory, is reported to have said to mutual acquaintances: "I have just met Dave Shoemaker's future wife!" Well it took two years for Dave Shoemaker to get the picture, but Jack's perceptivity was vindicated when the wedding took place in 1955.'