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BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
4
FEBRUARY
2017
Biophysicist in Profile
LUKAS TAMM
Lukas Tamm
Lukas Tamm
grew up in Basel, Switzerland, a
city located at the country’s border with France
and Germany, and with its own place in science
history. “Basel is where
Friedrich Miescher
first
discovered DNA, which he called nuclein, from
leucocytes in the mid-19
th
century,” Tamm shares.
Tamm’s father was an organic chemist working on
the synthesis of natural products such as antibi-
otics and glycosides that were used clinically for
heart conditions. He co-directed the Institute of
Organic Chemistry at the University of Basel and
was dean of sciences, and later became president of
the University, the oldest in Switzerland founded
in 1460. His mother was a nurse who helped
transform the home healthcare system in the city
of Basel, which previously had been a collection
of small church-related organizations but was con-
verted into a larger, citywide foundation.
Tamm had little exposure to science in high
school. “Switzerland had tracked high schools,
and I was in a track that offered a classical human-
istic education: eight years of Latin, five years of
ancient Greek, a few modern languages — English
and Italian were optional after French — math,
and some, but not much, science,” he says. “I did
not like Latin, but I liked Greek because those
authors wrote about exploring the world. I also
liked math and was fascinated by the riches of
biology.” Tamm was also a serious musician, and
upon graduating was torn between pursuing a
career in music or the sciences. “Although I played
at a pretty high level, my cello teacher advised me
against going into music because ‘it is so competi-
tive if you want to play on the world stage,’” he
says. “So, despite my underdeveloped science edu-
cation, I decided to go into the sciences because
I thought I might have a better shot at making a
difference in something that combined physics
and biology.”
He did not know at that time that biophysics as a
field existed, but was fascinated by the clarity and
laws of physics and by the beauty and diversity
of biology. Fortunately, Tamm began his under-
graduate studies at the University of Basel not
long after the opening of its Biocenter, modeled
after the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
in Cambridge, United Kingdom. “The first two
years were lots of hard-core physics, chemistry,
and math classes, and I had a lot of catching up
to do,” he says. “But, it was the third-year all-day
integrated core courses in modern biochemis-
try, biophysics, structural biology, genetics, cell
and developmental biology, microbiology, and
neurobiology, and that pioneer spirit of the early
Biocenter that sold me on a career in the biosci-
ences. I was simply fascinated with what could be
discovered in these wide-open and still emerging
fields. I knew then that this is what I wanted to do
for the rest of my life.”
Following his undergraduate studies, he complet-
ed a master’s thesis at Cornell University. He then
returned to the Biocenter for his PhD thesis work
with
Joachim Seelig
, who had just developed novel
solid-state NMR [nuclear magnetic resonance]
methods to look at protein-lipid interactions.
“There was a huge debate going on about whether
or not different boundary lipids existed around
integral membrane proteins,” he explains, “and we
characterized the structure and dynamics of those
lipids in contact with cytochrome oxidase and the
sarcoplasmic calcium pump.”
Tamm conducted his postdoctoral work at
Stanford University with
Harden McConnell
. His
research centered on the development of sup-
ported lipid bilayers as a new model system to
study membrane protein and cell-cell interactions.
“That’s when we also first discovered lipid do-
mains in lipid monolayers at the air-water inter-
face,” he says. “McConnell’s lab was truly inspir-
ing and McConnell’s thinking was always ahead of
its time. For example, he told me when I arrived,
that I should try to detect single molecules. The
ideas that he had about how to do this were not
really feasible, and I could not come up with
better ones, but this was in 1982, about a decade
before anyone actually succeeded in detecting
single molecules!”