In remembrance of David Yaffe
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OBITUARY
Open Access
In remembrance of David Yaffe Margaret Buckingham1* and Eldad Tzahor2*
The muscle community is mourning the loss of David Yaffe, emeritus professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who died at the beginning of July. His * Correspondence: [email protected]; [email protected] 1 CNRS UMR3738, Department of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology, Pasteur Institute, Paris, France 2 Department of Molecular Cell Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
pioneering work on muscle cell biology played a major role in founding the modern field of myogenesis. David was born in 1929 in Tel Aviv. He was passionate about the nature of life and focussed his studies on biology and agriculture. However in 1948, he put aside his academic training to join the Palmach, the underground military organisation that fought for the establishment of an independent state of Israel. MB remembers how he regarded her with some suspicion as a representative of the enemy colonial power until he realised that her Scottish origins meant that her ancestors had also fought the English for their freedom! David was a firm believer in the principles of the founding fathers of Israel and lived all his life on a kibbutz, with his wife and family. In 1952 he started his M.Sc. studies in Biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and after graduating went on to do a Ph.D. with Michael Feldman in the Cell Biology department of the Weizmann Institute. In 1961, he began his career there as an independent researcher. Apart from a sabbatical year in Robert Schimke’s laboratory at Stanford, he spent his entire career in the Weizmann Institute - over six decades. Already at the onset of his research career, David realised the need for a system that would permit the study of developmental processes outside the embryo. He recognised the potential of skeletal muscle where muscle precursor cells, myoblasts, are able to differentiate and fuse together to form muscle fibers. The morphological distinction between mononucleated myoblasts and multinucleated fibers makes it possible to physically separate them, with the possibility of culturing the myoblasts. This culture system was being developed with chick muscle; David’s major contribution was to develop it using mammalian cells, first with primary cultures obtained from newborn rat muscle where he showed that proliferating myoblasts would grow as a monolayer in culture and that, when grown in a medium that was less rich in growth factors, these cells would differentiate into muscle fibers, thus demonstrating their intrinsic capacity to maintain muscle identity.
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