Letter to the Editor: Distanced Inspiration from the Career of Stephen H. White
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Letter to the Editor: Distanced Inspiration from the Career of Stephen H. White Charles R. Sanders1 Received: 7 October 2020 / Accepted: 10 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Dear Editors, I am writing to add my voice to those making BLANCO-80 contributions to the Journal of Membrane Biology to celebrate the birthday of Professor Stephen H. White of the University of California-Irvine and his long career of discovery in membrane biophysics. Even before I had met Dr. White in person, work from his lab was critical in shaping my thinking about membranes, as summarized elsewhere (Sanders 2019). Moreover, through attendance of the long-running FASEB Summer Conference on Membrane Biophysics, the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting, and the new Gordon Conference on Membrane Protein Folding, I have seen him on at least a yearly basis for most of the past 25+ years. Nevertheless, unlike some other BLANCO-80 contributors, I never had the pleasure of working directly with Dr. White. It must therefore be acknowledged that the interpretation of certain aspects of his career accomplishments and profession demeanor presented herein reflect my personal impressions from a distance. Here, I highlight three aspects of his career that I find both inspiring and instructive. The work of the White lab is surpassingly thorough and patient. His Ph.D. studies in the 1960s and later postdoctoral and early independent work led to a series of papers on the properties of what are often referred to as “black lipid membranes” or “planar bilayers,” where a single lipid bilayer seals the pinhole separating two aqueous compartments. He published roughly a dozen papers on this topic, most as the lone author (c.f. White 1970, 1972, 1978, 1980; White et al. 1976)). This work helps underpin what is now an entire sub-field of electrophysiology based on measuring electrical current across planar bilayers that contain ion * Charles R. Sanders [email protected] 1
Department of Biochemistry, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences, Nashville, TN 37240‑7917, USA
channels, toxins, or other ion-conductive molecules. I also note with delight a 1972 paper authored by US Army Captain Dr. Stephen White, based on results from the lab he ran in the military during the two years prior to his postdoctoral stint (White and O’Brien 1972). It was shown in that paper that the plasma membrane of E. coli has a transmembrane potential of − 26 mV, which is one of the most interesting little-known facts that I can imagine. In the early 1980s, his lab shifted its focus to the energetics and dynamic structural aspects of solute–bilayer interactions. Papers from this era included no less than 5 on alkane–bilayer interactions (White 1980; White et al. 1981; Jacobs and White 1984a, b; King et al. 1985). This period of his career culminated in the classic Wiener and White paper on the dynamics structure of lipid bilayers (Wiener and White 1992). While his work is sometimes exhaustively thorough, Dr. Whit
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