George A. Mross, Jr.
SAN DIEGO — George A. Mross, Jr., PhD., died peacefully in his sleep July 10, 2020, in Yuma, Arizona. George was born May 1, 1943, to Dr. George A. (Jud) Mross, M.D. and Mayfair Mersfelder Mross, in Santa Maria, California, and was raised in Bonita and Chula Vista.
He attended St. Rose of Lima School and then St. Augustine, Chula Vista, and Hilltop High Schools, graduating from Hilltop in 1961.
George was an avid scuba diver and was part of the earliest organized dive club in the South Bay Area, the Sea Spooks. George also learned to surf, and introduced his two younger brothers to surfing in 1959. They remained grateful to their big brother George their whole lives for starting them on the surfers’ path.
At the end of their senior year, George and his high school sweetheart, Carol Lee Bodie, revealed that they were pregnant. Their son, Vincent Bodie Mross, was born in 1961. Carol bravely and effectively raised Vince by herself. Vince, too, grew up to be a surfer.
In the fall of 1961, George enrolled at UC Berkeley, graduating with a B.A. in zoology in 1965. The next 6 years he was a graduate student in the Dept. of Biology at UC San Diego, working under Dr. Russell Doolittle. He was one of Dr. Doolittle’s primary collaborators in the development of the early tools for determining amino acid sequences in protein structures. Their early paper, “Mross GA, Doolittle RF (1967) Amino acid sequence studies on artiodactyl fibrinopeptides. II. Vicuna, elk, muntjak, pronghorn antelope and water buffalo. Arch Biochem Biophys 122: 674–684.”, helped lead to the field that later became “Bio-informatics”.
George was awarded the Ph.D. degree in Biology from UCSD in 1971. He next took a post-doctoral position in the Miller Lab at UC Berkeley, a prestigious advanced biology.
Seemingly on his way to a career as a research biologist, it was during the next couple of years that George began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness. By 1973, when his condition was diagnosed as severe schizophrenia, he was admitted to psychiatric care at the Langley Porter Institute at the UCSF Medical School. With proper medication he was able to live and work independently for short periods of time, but without supervision he would always eventually stop medication and become unemployable until his family was able to intervene and help him return to stability through medication.
During the later 1970’s and 1980’s, George lived and worked in biology labs in San Diego and Riverside Counties in California, as well as Boston, Massachusetts, and Basel, Switzerland. George’s sympathetic nature and his ability to communicate fluently in German, Spanish and English allowed him to make friends wherever he went, whether he was living in his own dwelling, living in a supervised board-and-care facility, or living on the street with no ability to earn a living. His family never abandoned him and provided what support they could through all of his ups and downs, of which there were many. In the late 1990’s, George’s mother was able to convince the county mental health system to place him in Public Conservatorship, a legal designation allowing involuntary medication of a mentally ill person. With the help of his doctors, and under the supervision of his mother, the conservatorship allowed George to stay compliant with his medication for the longest stable period of his life since the onset of the disease. The conservatorship also allowed George to acquire a position with the San Diego County Behavioral Health Services, where George remained productively employed for almost ten years from the time he was first placed in conservatorship in 1998 until after Mayfair’s passing in 2007.
In the years following his mother’s death, George again began to refuse treatment and left his job. Because the conservatorship had been cancelled by the courts while he was stable (against the advice of all of his doctors, friends and family), there was no way to intervene when he began refusing treatment.
For most of the 2010’s until his passing in 2020, he continued to refuse treatment. Several attempts were made by friends and family to help him obtain housing. One of the surprising aspects of George’s illness was that at times he could sound very rational and be very sympathetic to others. His basic good nature became evident at times, and when it did shine through, he was able to secure low-cost housing for himself for short periods. It would not last because landlords and neighbors could not tolerate his behavior when it changed.
He had a roof over his head and enough to eat during his last few years, but his life would have been much better if he had been allowed back into County Public Conservatorship. In July of 2020, when COVID illnesses and deaths were high and the Southwest was experiencing a severe heat wave, George decided to drive to Arizona. He was peacefully sleeping in his car at a truck stop in Yuma, when he was overcome by the heat and passed away.
His remains have been interred in the family plot in Holy Cross Cemetery in San Diego.
George was predeceased by his daughter Kristina Anka Mross of Germany, his parents Dr. George A. (Jud) and Mayfair Mross of Chula Vista, and his brother William D. (Bill) Mross of Boulevard (San Diego County). He was survived by Bill’s widow, Beverly Mross of Boulevard, who passed away in March of 2022.
George was also survived by his son Vincent Bodie Mross and Vince’s mother, Carol Lee Bodie of Chula Vista, by his lifelong friend Gary Brennan of Phoenix, Arizona, by his brother and sister-in-law, Michael Mross and Susan Bell, of Putney, Vermont, and by his five nieces and nephews.
In George’s memory, please remember that every mentally ill person is also someone’s son or daughter, brother or sister, father or mother, and there but for fortune any of us could go.