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BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
2
NOVEMBER
2015
BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY
Officers
President
Edward Egelman
President-Elect
Suzanne Scarlata
Past-President
Dorothy Beckett
Secretary
Frances Separovic
Treasurer
Paul Axelsen
Council
Olga Boudker
Ruth Heidelberger
Kalina Hristova
Juliette Lecomte
Amy Lee
Robert Nakamoto
Gabriela Popescu
Joseph D. Puglisi
Michael Pusch
Erin Sheets
Antoine van Oijen
Bonnie Wallace
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 © 2015 by
the Biophysical Society. Printed in
the United States of America.
All rights reserved.
Richard Lymn
,
creator of the muscle biology program at the National In-
stitutes of Health (NIH) that funds major research at hospitals and uni-
versities, grew up in Queens County, New York City. It was a largely blue
collar area, and Lymn was able to interact and work with skilled craftsmen,
including his father, who was a master plumber. “It was rewarding and a
pleasure to work with master craftsmen and ask them questions about how
devices worked and why repairs were done in a particular way,” Lymn says.
“This was very good training in analysis of cause and effect. I learned some
patience and new approaches when efforts did not proceed as expected.”
The unusual neighborhood attracted many great teachers to its schools.
Most had a lot of experience, and several held PhDs. Lymn remembers a
crucial point in his education at Marie Curie Junior High School, when
the Soviet Union launched
Sputnik 1
, the first artificial Earth satellite. “The
exploration of space became a great topic of conversation in school,” he
recalls. “Students also had lively discussions about the crystal structures of
myoglobin and hemoglobin and possible codes for genetic information. I
was better in science and math at that time than in literary composition and
responded with wonder at scientific advances.”
Science scholarships had become much more common by the late 1950s,
when Lymn was in junior high and high school. “Colleges were trying to
reach out to groups of people who had not been in their traditional co-
horts,” he says. “Schools like Yale, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth,
and Stanford expanded the field of choices when selecting entering fresh-
men. I began expecting more as I approached high school graduation.”
He had taken advanced courses in physics, chemistry, and math in high
school, and looked forward to pursuing a career in science. He was excited
to attend John Hopkins University when he received a scholarship from the
school. “I decided to pursue studies in biophysics because the most
interesting questions I could think of in science were related
to biology and biological function.”
Two of Lymn’s professors at Hopkins,
F
rancis “Spike” Carlson
and
William Harrington
, recommended programs that he should
look into for graduate school, and Lymn chose the biophysics
program at the University of Chicago. There, at the beginning of
his work in
Ed Taylor’s
laboratory, Lymn was trained by
Birdwell
Findlayson
, a board-certified urologist whose goal was study-
ing the kinetics of kidney stone formation. “He was acquiring a
PhD in biophysics while practicing as a surgeon and developing
some of the prototypic fast kinetics machinery that I ended up
using and improving,” Lymn says.
Lymn’s PhD thesis on motile systems came together well. “The findings
of the thesis appeared as three papers published in
Biochemistry
,” he says.
A fourth paper described the chemical-quench rapid flow machine he
invented to collect crucial new data. “The papers contained the data and
Biophysicist in Profile
RICHARD LYMN
"Myosin, Microtubules, and Motion"
symposium, organized by Lymn in 1999.