RON VALE
Professor, Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology
University of California, San Francisco
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Founder, President, Chairman of the Board, iBiologyYUXIAO WANGIn 1983, Ron Vale was three years into an MD/PhD program at Stanford University, and he already had four publications under his belt. During his first two years, spent in medical school, Vale worked with neuroscientist Eric Shooter. “These were not very influential papers, but they taught me how to start to ask a question, to start and complete the experiments, and how to write a scientific paper,” says the University of California, San Francisco professor. “Having these papers . . . basically gave me a guarantee of a PhD degree, even though I had officially just begun the PhD part of the program,” Vale says. “Now, I really wanted to do something that was bigger, riskier, and exciting.”
Vale became intrigued by microscopy movies generated by his lab neighbors James Spudich and visiting professor Michael Sheetz showing myosin-coated beads moving along the actin cables of purified skeletal muscles. Myosin is an adenosine triphosphate (ATP)–powered motor protein whose motion along actin filaments generates muscle contractions. The two were trying to reconstitute, in vitro, the basic motility that occurs within muscle fibers. Vale, Sheetz, and Spudich wondered whether myosin movement also might account for the dynamic movement of organelles such as mitochondria and transport vesicles along the long giant axon of squid. “I was inspired by the strong visual impression made by Sheetz’s and Spudich’s movies and could imagine a similar mechanism working in axons,” he says.
Vale was studying how nerve growth factor interacts ...
