As a youngster, Roy Doi never considered a career in science. His father, an immigrant from Japan, was an agricultural laborer. During World War II, the Doi family was interned for 31/2 years in camps at Tule Lake, Calif., and Heart Mountain, Wyo.

The science bug would bite Doi years later, after he was drafted by the U.S. Army during the Korean War. His assignment? A military research unit in — of all places — Japan.

Five decades later, Doi's assignment is stateside, where he serves as a distinguished professor in the Section of Molecular and Cellular Biology. For his efforts, Doi earlier this spring was elected to the National Academy of Sciences for his work in molecular biology and biotechnology.

"It's quite an unexpected honor," he said in a recent interview. "It's due to all my students and postdocs who have contributed to my research, and to the support of my colleagues at UC Davis."

One former student who contributed to Doi's research was Ken Burtis, now interim dean of the College of Biological Sciences at UC Davis. Burtis was an undergraduate in Doi's lab from 1975 to 1976, and then worked for Doi as a senior research associate until leaving for graduate school at Stanford University in 1979.

"He was very influential in my development as a scientist, and in fact I think he was responsible for my getting into Stanford," Burtis said.

Today, Doi studies how micro-organisms digest cellulose — the tough, fibrous material that makes up plant cell walls — into sugars that can be fermented to make ethanol, which is being promoted as a replacement for gasoline. Ethanol can be made from crops such as sugar cane, switch grass and corn starch, but if cellulose degradation were cheap and efficient enough it could be made from tougher material such as corn stalks, rice straw and wood chips.

"If you could improve the efficiency of cellulose degradation 20- to 40-fold, you could make ethanol made from biomass competitive with oil," Doi said. Also, by engineering microorganisms to feed on cellulose instead of sugars, many products such as antibiotics and amino acids could be produced more cheaply, because you could use cheap, renewable biomass to feed the process, he said.

Such complex schemes and dreams are a long way from Doi's childhood amidthe dusty, wind-blown yards of internment camps in California and Wyoming, memories he will never forget. Indeed, Doi has edited volumes of recollections and helped organize reunions of the "Heart Mountain Class of '49," whose members left the camps in 1945 as teenagers.

When Doi left, his original destination was medical school. He received a bachelor's degree in physiology from UC Berkeley, then was drafted into the Army. While stationed at the military research unit in Japan, he grew fascinated with research on Japanese encephalitis, a virus carried by mosquitoes.

"I asked the colonel how do you become a scientist, and he told me, 'You have to go to grad school,'" Doi said.

After leaving the Army, Doi returned to Cal and earned a second bachelor's degree in bacteriology in 1957. At the suggestion of his laboratory class professor, Clint Ballou, Doi then enrolled in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, receiving his doctorate in 1960. He worked at the University of Illinois and at Syracuse University in New York before joining the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UC Davis in 1965.

In the first part of his career, Doi studied genetic regulation in bacteria. In the mid-1980s, he was appointed to lead a campus committee on biotechnology, and became interested in more applied fields of biochemistry and molecular biology. Since then, he has worked extensively on the cellulose-digesting enzymes made by a Clostridium cellulovorans, a bacterium found in wood chip piles.

"It's remarkable to make such important contributions in two different areas," said Michael Dahmus, professor and chair of the Section of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Dahmus described Doi as an "active campus citizen" who takes a broad view of education and research. As master advisor to the biochemistry and molecular biology major, Doi is ultimately responsible for overseeing almost 1,000 undergraduate students, as well as teaching classes of as many as 400 students.

Doi also has worked on mentoring new faculty, investigating how other campuses support new assistant professors and how those practices can be implemented locally, Dahmus said.

Doi is the fifth professor in the Section of Molecular and Cellular Biology to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The others are Professor Clark Lagarias, and professors emeritus Melvin Green, Eric Conn and Paul Stumpf. A total of 29 current and retired UC Davis professors are members of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering or the Institute of Medicine. The academy was established in 1863 to advise the federal government on science and technology.