Networking

Science is an international and collaborative venture and hence Networking is an important part of the process. Here are some personal snippets.

Academic Family Tree

Thanks to the internet, scientists and other academics can now trace their Academic Family Tree which shows the links between Mentors and Students analogous to a biological Family Tree. This is a useful source for historians and sociologists interested in tracing the flow of ideas through universities and other institutions, as well as individual scientists in finding out "where they have come from". Within 4 generations of my mentors some famous names appear: Thomas H. Huxley, Ernest Rutherford, J J Thompson, Niels Bohr, Erwin Shrodinger, Linus Pauling, Melvin Calvin amongst them. Very different from my blood relatives! My own research has led to collaborations around the world, with co-authors on papers whose origins (birth or 1st higher education institute) are from England (74), USA (34), Hungary (9), Germany (9), China (7), Russia (5), Japan (4), Australia (4), India (3), Italy (3), Greece (2), Poland (2), Canada (2), Korea (2), Austria (1), Sweden (1), Croatia (1), Spain (1), Turkey (1), Morocco (1), Portugal (1), Mexico (1), Scotland (1), Ireland (1) and Wales (1).

Click on Tree below for live updated link

Noble Prize Winner connections

Cecil F. Powell 1950 Physics " Development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and discoveries regarding mesons"

Cecil Powell was Head of Department of the Physics Department where I obtained my first job as a lecture theatre technician in 1967. Tasks included setting up practical demonstrations and cleaning the blackboards after Cecil Powell and other professors had finished their lectures.

Martin Rodbell 1994 Physiology/Medicine "Discovery of G-proteins and their role in signal transduction in cells"

Martin Rodbell visited the Trentham Lab in Bristol University in about 1972, where we discussed how we up-scaled his enzymic method to make the nucleotide analog, ANP-PNP.

Andrew F. Huxley 1963 Physiology/Medicine "Discovery of the basis for propagation of nerve impulses"

Andrew Huxley (photo above) was my PhD external examiner in 1974. We crossed paths most years between 1974 and 2002 at conferences on Muscle Contraction. He wrote several letters to me in 2001 giving advice of improving light collection efficiencies of microscope objectives (see below).

Paul D. Boyer 1997 Chemistry "Discovery of the mechanism of ATP synthase"

I collaborated with Paul Boyer in 1973-4 on studying oxygen exchange during ATP hydrolysis by myosin which led to a paper in PNAS. I visited his UCLA laboratory in 1975.

Irwin A. Rose 2004 Chemistry "Discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation"

I visited his lab at the Fox Chase Cancer Research Institute, Philadelphia in 1976 to discuss isotopic exchange during phosphoryl transfer reactions

Rodney R. Porter 1972 Physiology/Medicine "Determination of the chemical structure of an antibody"

Rodney Porter was Head of the Biochemistry Department at University of Oxford in the 1970's and interviewed me for the position of Demonstrator in 1978.

Roger Y. Tsien 2008 Chemistry "Development of Green Fluorescent Protein"

I had a productive email exchange in 2002 on the direction of the electronic dipole in Green Fluorescent Protein in which he put me in contact with Steven Boxer. I heard him talk with co-prize winners Osamu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie at the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco in 2008.

William E. Moerner 2014 Chemistry "Optical detection of single molecules"

I met with him in Prof Steven Boxer's lab at Stanford in 2004 to discuss reversible dark states of Yellow Fluorescent Protein.

Martin Karplus 2013 Chemistry "Development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems "

I met with him at the 2005 Gordon Research Conference on Contractile Proteins, New London, New Hampshire

Steven Chu 1997 Physics "Cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light"

I met him at a Single Molecule Biophysics meeting in Cambridge in 2007

Michael Rosbash 2017 Physiology/Medicine " Discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm"

Michael Rosbash was a keynote speaker at the 2019 UCSC Post-doc symposium and I had a brief conversation at the coffee break regarding Kai proteins which show interesting oscillatory kinetics.

Carol W. Greider 2009 Physiology/Medicine " Discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase "

Carol Greider took a sabbatical period at UCSC in 2019 and joined the faculty in 2020 . She also joined our Stone Group meetings where we discussed telomerase structure and function.

A. F. Huxley

Sir Andrew Huxley (1917-2012) was a leading figure in the area of muscular contraction, having switched his research focus from nerve conduction (Hodgkin-Huxley theory) in the early 1950's. At many muscle research conferences, he was invited to give the closing address where he adeptly summarized key findings that emerged from the talks and posters presented just days or hours earlier. As the contributions from molecular genetics increased in the 1990's, he was increasing challenged and sometimes appointed additional discussants to cover this area. But all was to change in the late 90's, early 2000's when optical microscopy made a resurgence through techniques such as optical trapping and single-molecule fluorescence detection. Microscopy was a lifelong interest of Sir Andrew and these new approaches rekindled his critical but supportive analysis, as attested in some personal correspondence in 2001 (see pdf below which includes a 17 year-old faded Fax printout rescued by Photoshop) that was triggered by our publication: Conibear, P. B. & Bagshaw, C. R. (2000) Comparison of optical geometries for combined flash photolysis and total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy. J. Microscopy, 200, 217-228.

AFH letters.pdf

Alternative Muscle Club

The Alternative Muscle Club was the brain-child of Maxine Clarke (1954-2012) who organized the first meeting in Oxford in 1980, when she was a graduate student. The idea behind the meeting was to gather students and post-doctoral researchers in the area of muscle contraction in the absence of their supervisors, so they could openly discuss their work and ask "dumb" questions. She invited several slightly more senior academics - researchers who had just obtained tenure - to chair the sessions. I was invited to give the opening lecture. Apart the honor to be regarded as a student-at-heart, the preparation of this talk paved the way for my writing a short textbook on Muscle Contraction. I was invited back to give the opening talk at the 1990 AMC in York and the 2003 AMC in Leeds.

Maxine became an Editor of Nature in 1984, and was the Publishing Executive Editor at the time of her untimely death. Her Networking skills were evident in her Nature Blogs and Journal Club and she ensured that the topics of muscle and motility were justly represented in the pages of Nature. The AMC continues in the UK, while an off-shoot was established in the USA in 2013. Current meetings differ greatly from the first Oxford meeting, which was run on a next-to-zero budget (Maxine and her helpers made sandwiches for the attendees at the break), but the sentiment of the AMC remains: to allow junior researchers to present their work in a friendly and open environment.

Letter from 1984

T-shirt insignia from Leeds AMC 2003

Current events (2018)

The above snippets are history, but I continue to be engaged with Nature publishing thanks to collaborations at UC Santa Cruz. My interest in total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy has led to a recent consultation with a Silicon Valley start-up company (and the 11th AMC T-shirt is now my Yoga shirt).