by Roberto
Second semester, senior year at Carnegie-Mellon. Newly minted Assistant Professor Bill Brown, with whom I was learning to do peptide mapping, ran into the lab with a huge smile and holding a deep blue book with a mesmerizing structure on its cover. "Look at what Stryer has done, this is just so beautiful!" Having just finished a post-doc at Yale, Bill had known Stryer and had first-hand knowledge of his teaching talent; the book reflected that talent. That was to be my first of many "two degrees of separation" encounters with Lubert Stryer, one of the most influential biochemists of our era. Stryer died last month at his home in Stanford, California, one day shy of 86. His life and accomplishments are beautifully summarized in an obituary by Nina Bai.
Fig.1. Stryer Biochemistry, First Edition (1975). Source
The blue book I saw that day, Lubert Stryer's "Biochemistry" first edition (1975), would go on to become my "go to" source of information for many years. Perusing its pages was eye candy. With over 600 figures, many of them multicolored and rendering molecules in three dimensions, it stood in stark contrast with the drab text I had been assigned two years earlier in my Intro to Biochemistry course. The more I read the Stryer's book, the more I wished I been born a few years later. Thousands of students, from 1975 to the present day have benefitted from Stryer's legacy as a teacher.
In the early 1980s at Stanford, I helped Jeremy Nathans synthesize oligonucleotides that would serve to clone the bovine rhodopsin gene. Again, two degrees of separation with Stryer. During my conversations with Jeremy, I learned Stryer had moved to Stanford in 1976 to chair the new Department of Structural Biology. Jeremy's incentive for cloning the rhodopsin gene had been greatly inspired by Stryer's landmark work on rhodopsin, and how its interactions with transducin led to great amplification of the signal, allowing for vision in extremely low light. Light, it was the thread that ran through Stryer's life.
When, in the 1990s, FRET (Förster resonance energy transfer) became a key tool for studying molecular dynamics, I had to try to understand what this was (Christoph does a great job at it his 2016 post). Again, I bumped into Stryer by two degrees of separation. His landmark paper, describing the first demonstration of FRET, had been communicated in PNAS in 1967 by my friend and colleague Arthur Kornberg. And in subsequent years, when my lab used Affimetrix chips, once again I found Stryer's influence, he had been instrumental in their development.
Fig. 2. Chestnut-mandibled toucan. Costa Ballena, Costa Rica. Photo Credit: Lubert Stryer. Source
After more than forty years as laboratory head, Stryer retired from Stanford in 2004, age 66. He retired, in part, "to make room for up-and-coming faculty members." A man after my own heart. Stryer continued his diverse interests in science and at the same time dove deeply into two other life-long passions: photography and travel. He wrote: "Retirement has given me the gift of time to intensively pursue two intertwined interests, photography and adventure travel. My fascination with photography began in my teens and developed in tandem with my research passion of many decades, the interplay of light and life." In reading his obituary, I became aware of just how wonderfully Stryer captured that interplay of light and life in his photography of wildlife. While I was never fortunate enough to meet him in person, I feel close enough that I can confidently say, his was indeed a life well-lived!
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