From Paul Brehm

I received this invitation a few minutes ago and I am eager to share my fond recollections of Yutaka from my days at UCLA. I first met Yutaka in the early 1970s when he was on sabbatical with Roger Eckert. At that time Paramecium was the mainstay of the lab as Roger had not yet transitioned to Aplysia. As I was to learn later as a postdoc with Roger, Paramecium was a complicated preparation with many different channel types and very difficult to record from. It took a lot of practice. Hans Machemer and Yutaka were the A-team. At the time I was a student studying bioluminescence and upon graduation I applied to Roger for a postdoc. At the time he didn’t have any openings and I went into the Army. Upon my return Roger gave me a chance and instructed me to take Yutaka’s electrophysiology setup. Yutaka had just left the lab in 1975. He also warned me that Yutaka would be back at any moment and I would have to relinquish the setup to him. Yutaka never returned.

I shared the room with Kathy Dunlap who was also very proficient at Paramecium. She had a project to be envied. Deciliate Paramecium, which eliminated the action potential, and then watch the excitability return upon regrowth of the cilia. I, on the other hand, had no project and was instructed by Roger to not change anything on the setup because Yutaka would be coming back. Now imagine a setup that was composed of unlabelled homemade electronics, all together in a scramble. Yutaka had made all of the electronics along with Aki Ono in Hagi’s lab. After a month of staring at these boxes I started removing them one by one and built my own very simple setup. I practiced recordings for a couple of months when Roger strolled into the room and asked about my project. I said “Roger, I don’t have a project”. Of course that was causal to the “Good Grief!” response and a few minutes later Roger returned with an idea. Record from the mutant pawn, which lacks calcium channels, and test the idea that forward swim speed is calcium dependent. I thought to myself, where does this guy come up with all of these cool ideas?

After completing that project I turned to another cool idea which was two electrode voltage clamp of paramecium. I was under the impression I was the first to do this, but that turned out to be wrong. It was also during this time I found a note from Yutaka to Roger that had been written just before his departure. It was a list of ideas and projects. At the top of Yutaka’s list was deciliation. Next was using pawn to test for roles of calcium in forward swimming. Farther down the list was voltage clamp of Paramecium with some photos of voltage clamped calcium current that Yutaka had generated and not published. Yutaka had mapped the future course of projects for the Eckert lab and moreover, generated the unpublished data projecting the expected exciting results. I wrote to Yutaka shortly before his death telling him how much I admired and appreciated his ground breaking work on Paramecium and told him I found his list of projects. I also told him that I know he was the first to voltage clamp Paramecium. He replied with the same humility and grace that was characteristic of him by congratulating me on my work….which as far as I can tell was just an extension of his.

2020-05-21