© STEFAN FUERTBAUERWhen Harald Janovjak filed his first patent describing the cell growth–regulating receptors he had engineered to be activated by light, he stumbled upon his great-grandfather’s 1920 patent for a device that projected color onto movie screens. Janovjak comes from an impressive line of engineers stretching back four generations. But he says he was pleasantly surprised to find that nearly a century later, “we’re still tinkering with light-based things.”
As a child growing up in Switzerland, Janovjak was always building things with his father. “We would inherit bicycles from my uncles or my older cousins, and we would take them apart and modify them.” The acumen he developed for disassembling things, tweaking them, and putting them back together has served him well as a synthetic physiologist.
Janovjak embarked on a career in science as a third-year undergraduate at the University of Basel, after a survey course in biophysics introduced him to microscopist Daniel Müller. In his lab, Müller had pioneered an imaging technique using atomic force microscopy “to visualize single membrane proteins in their native membranes,” says Janovjak. He was hooked, and recalls begging Müller for a spot on his team.
Janovjak’s drive as ...
