Stephen F. Heinemann 1939–2014

Stephen F. Heinemann Starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a group of aspiring young scientists gathered at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. This group of trainees and junior faculty included Steve Heinemann, Rudolf Jaenisch, Inder Verma, Tony Hunter, the late Wylie Vale, and, soon thereafter, Ron Evans. In the years to come, this erstwhile group of young mavericks went on to define science not only at the Salk but, in some sense, for the entire world. In neuroscience, the defining force was Stephen F. Heinemann, who passed away on August 6, 2014, of kidney failure. For several years, Steve was elected the head of the Faculty at the Salk, and his beloved and yet straightforward, honest character served him well in bringing together diverse personalities, approaches, and interests. Steve was best known for his science. He and his colleagues changed the way we view neurotransmitter receptors in the brain, thus influencing the future study of learning, memory, and disease. He, more than anyone else, taught us the power of cloning these receptors, characterizing their properties, and determining how mutations influence their function. Prior to Steve’s work, we knew that excitatory neurotransmitters mediated these processes via synaptic transmission, but their receptors remained contentious, usually named for the ligand with the highest affinity. Steve and his colleagues, particularly Jim Patrick, and also Jim Boulter, Michael Hollmann, and others, changed all this—cloning various subunits of the neuronal receptors for both acetylcholine (nicotine) and glutamate, the two major excitatory transmitters. Steve and his group went on to sort out how the various subunits and their constituent amino acids accounted for many of the well-known properties of these neurotransmitter receptors. This toolbox allowed the field to study in depth the molecular underpinnings of normal processes such as learning and memory, as well as many neurological diseases. These maladies range from myasthenia gravis to traumatic brain injury to Huntington’s disease to Alzheimer’s disease. In recent years, it has become clear that aberrant function of these receptors also contributes to neuropsychiatric disorders. Moreover, his discovery of these receptors gave pharmaceutical companies new targets to explore in order to treat these diseases. Upon his death, the Salk Institute wrote, ‘‘Groundbreaking findings from his laboratory supported the idea that many diseases of the brain result from deficits in communication between nerve cells, and he waswidely considered one of the world’s most accomplished neuroscientists.’’ Born in 1939 to Robert B. Heinemann and Christel Fuchs, Steve lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts during his early years and attended Buckingham Browne & Nichols secondary school. This must have been a very exciting time in Cambridge. Rumor had it that Steve’s first chemistry set came from his uncle, Klaus Fuchs, a theoretical physicist who had worked on the Manhattan project under Hans Bethe during World War II but later confessed to being a communist spy. Steve met his wife of 54 years, Ann Reischauer Heinemann, in Cambridge, and her side of the family was no less brilliant and interesting than his. Ann’s father, Edwin Reischauer, a renowned Harvard professor of East Asian studies, served