BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
2
SEPTEMBER
2016
BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY
Officers
President
Suzanne Scarlata
President-Elect
Lukas Tamm
Past-President
Edward Egelman
Secretary
Frances Separovic
Treasurer
Paul Axelsen
Council
Olga Boudker
Jane Clarke
Bertrand Garcia-Moreno
Ruth Heidelberger
Kalina Hristova
Robert Nakamoto
Arthur Palmer
Gabriela Popescu
Joseph D. Puglisi
Michael Pusch
Erin Sheets
Joanna Swain
Biophysical Journal
Leslie Loew
Editor-in-Chief
Society Office
Ro Kampman
Executive Officer
Newsletter
Catie Curry
Beth Staehle
Ray Wolfe
Production
Laura Phelan
Profile
Ellen Weiss
Public Affairs
Beth Staehle
Publisher's Forum
The
Biophysical Society Newsletter
(ISSN 0006-3495) is published
twelve times per year, January-
December, by the Biophysical
Society, 11400 Rockville Pike, Suite
800, Rockville, Maryland 20852.
Distributed to USA members
and other countries at no cost.
Canadian GST No. 898477062.
Postmaster: Send address changes
to Biophysical Society, 11400
Rockville Pike, Suite 800, Rockville,
MD 20852. Copyright © 2016 by
the Biophysical Society. Printed in
the United States of America.
All rights reserved.
Randy Wadkins
, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University
of Mississippi, grew up in Iuka, Mississippi, a small town in the northeast
corner of the state, where Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee meet. His
father owned a grocery store and his mother was an elementary school
teacher. He became fascinated with science through watching Star Trek
reruns as a child in the 1970s. “I had no idea a career in science was even a
possibility,” Wadkins shares. “I did well in math and science when I was in
high school, and like a lot of kids, I started college in the pre-med program.
It wasn’t until I took organic chemistry that I realized how much I liked it
and switched to the chemistry program. My pre-med advisor thought I had
lost my mind. Then I took physical chemistry and it became clear what I
wanted to do with my life.”
Wadkins received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1986 from
the University of Mississippi. As a graduate student at the school the fol-
lowing year, he had a defining moment at the Biophysical Society Annual
Meeting. “My very first meeting was in 1987 in New Orleans. I was a first-
year grad student, a kid from Mississippi. I was doing a combination of
experiments on drugs binding to DNA, which involved quantum chemical
calculations of DNA bases stacking with drugs,” he remembers. “I had a
poster with my results at the BPS meeting that year. The late
Bernard Pull-
man
, the world’s expert at the time on quantum biochemistry, came to my
poster—specifically to see MY POSTER—and asked questions about what
I was doing. I talked to him for half an hour, and as he was leaving he said,
‘Nice work.’ That’s when I said to myself, ‘I can do this. I can have a career
in biophysics.’ And I did.”
He earned his PhD in chemistry in 1990, and then
took a postdoc position in
Tom Jovin’s
lab at the Max
Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry where he
worked for a year. It was here that he became enamored
with biophysics. “I made a weird discovery. That era
was when DNA synthesis first became possible, and we
could work with individual strands for the first time,
and not just double strands like calf thymus DNA that
has been around for decades,” he says. “I found that
single-stranded DNA could be a high-affinity target for
antitumor drugs. That led to a 25-year obsession with
unusual DNA conformations.”
Paul Roepe
, Georgetown University, met Wadkins in the
early 1990s at a Biophysical Society meeting. “We had adjacent posters.
We struck up a great conversation on the biophysics of drug diffusion,” he
shares. “He is a scientist that takes nothing for granted and nothing at face
value. Meaning that for Randy, hypotheses are of course very useful and
enlightening, but they are just hypotheses; the data, and rigorous critical
evaluation of the data, are really all that matter.”
Randy Wadkins
Biophysicist in Profile
RANDY WADKINS
Wadkins in a DeLorean from the
Back to
the Future
movie, at a Motion Picture
Association of America reception on
Capitol Hill.